Eurythmy Performance

It must also be understood that recitation and declamation in eurythmy must be somewhat different from what is usually done in this day and age. In a certain sense, our time loves the extremely unartistic, and today it is no longer understandable why, for example, Goethe himself rehearsed his iambs with his actors with a baton in his hand like a conductor, paying much more attention to the treatment of language than to the emphasis of the content. Goethe was an artist through and through, whereas today, in an unartistic age, the art of recitation and declamation is usually seen in the expression of the prose content of a poem. In fact, unartistic sensibilities go so far as to consider the recitation and declamation of a poem to be all the more beautiful the less artistic and prosaic it is.