49. Eurythmy Performance

Many misunderstandings will certainly arise. On the one hand, you will have accompanied this eurythmy with music, which then means a different form of expression for this silent language. But you will also get to see – or mainly hear – the poetic recitation and declamation that recitation and declamation that cannot be done in the way it is becoming popular today in an unartistic time, which is why our eurythmic art must be accompanied by a new form of recitation and declamation. There is only so much real art in the poetic element if the prosaic, literal element is not taken into account. Today, however, people want to emphasize the literal element in recitation. Instead, they take into account the underlying musical , rhythmic, and metrical, the melodious or the spiritual, that which, through the listening to the poetic word, conjures up the image before our inner eye. And so the recitation must also be carried out in such a way that the main emphasis is not placed on the particularly important word or a logical sentence structure, [that] the outward form with which one speaks today, which is actually is not emphasized, but rather that recitation is seen as a companion to eurythmy, taking into account the actual artistic element in poetry. So it is not the literal meaning that is emphasized here; rather, the main emphasis is on the formal element in the poetic art.