Eurythmy Performance

Eurythmy is a truly visible language or even a truly visible song. It must be clear that the movement of the individual human limb, which is gestural, is not somehow arbitrarily added to a poem or musical content out of feeling, but that everything you see here in terms of human movements arises from the content of spiritual life with such inner necessity as language itself. And just as one cannot produce any arbitrary sound in order to express something of the soul, so one cannot form any arbitrary gesture in order to express something of the soul eurythmically. Eurythmy has arisen, albeit in a conscious way, from the human organism in exactly the same way as human speech and human singing arise from a part of this human organism, from the larynx and its neighboring organs. And the development of eurythmy is based on an intimate, sensory-supersensory knowledge of the possibilities of movement and expression of the human organism. We know that language originates from a kind of babbling, from more or less unformed sounds and sound formations. In everyday life, we always carry with us, I would say, a kind of “gestural babbling.” People who are reasonably animated, who are not fish-like in their feelings and emotions, but who have lively blood, always feel compelled to accompany what they say, what they express, with some kind of gesture. But these gestures, which then also become mimicry in a certain artistic transformation, are to what is striven for in eurythmy as a truly visible language or visible singing in the same relationship as the babbling of a child is to developed speech.