Eurythmy Performance

The visible language and visible singing that result from this can be easily understood if one observes how, on the one hand, the declamatory, the recitative, which sounds at the same time as the eurythmy, is accompanied by this eurythmy, but also how the musical motif is accompanied by eurythmic movements. One is inclined to regard this as dance from the outset. However, eurythmy is not dance; it is singing in movement, real singing, except that the singing does not come about through sound, but through movement. So that only those who are able to understand eurythmy as singing in motion, rather than as dance, can truly understand our eurythmy. And in a similar way, that which is expressed through language, through sound, accompanies the eurythmic movement. This leads to the following: when human beings express themselves through language, through the language of sound – and this can be seen particularly clearly in the languages of higher civilizations – what emerges through language is that the spiritual element, which is objectively separate from human beings, lives more and more in language. In more advanced languages, we perceive it as something unpleasant, and rightly so, when the subjective element plays into language in the form of emphasis, prose punctuation, and the like. We perceive it as almost unseemly when too much subjectivity is expressed in language. Language should spiritualize the soul, thereby detaching it more or less from the human being. In return, however, we can bring back into human movement that which is expressed in stylized language, for example.