Eurythmy Performance

The poet feels the whole human being by expressing himself linguistically. And again and again I must recall the beautiful poetic words: “When the soul speaks, / alas, it is no longer the soul that speaks.” This applies to language that focuses primarily on the prose content of language. The language that lives in the plastic and coloristic qualities that sound can give to sound, that the treatment of sound can give, the language that lives in the musical elements of language, of which it can be said: when the soul speaks through it, the soul tries to say what it cannot say through language that has already become prosaic, language that has become inartistic. But this is precisely what can be brought out of language and song through eurythmy, since the most expressive human limbs are set in motion, unlike in dance, which sets the less expressive human limbs – the legs and feet – in motion. Eurythmy is not a dance, because it does not primarily set these limbs in motion, although it must do so, but it has no kinship with dance. But in relation to what was indicated earlier, the specific shaping of the arms and hands—the most expressive limbs of the human organism—is the corresponding visible language.