What is Eurythmy?

The word eurythmy comes from the Greek and means beautiful or harmonious movement. It is an expressive art form, also called visible song and visible speech. It is truly the new art form for today. An art form for transformation and healing in every sense of the word, eurythmy is still in its infancy. The expression of the invisible aspects of audible and visible arts really has as its horizon the human being's ability to perceive it, and to transform the physical body into an instrument able to move in tune with life force and soul. Its aim is to be the poem, the song, the mood, so that it becomes present in our midst. Eurythmy is an artistic movement discipline that uses body, soul and spirit. It does this through a practice of gestures that correspond to sounds of speech and musical tones. These gestures are woven together into choreography. Eurythmy works with the principle that speech and tone are part of the movement-patterns necessary for life.

Eurythmy as visible Song

drawing of the gesture 'M' by Rudolf Steiner

drawing of the gesture for 'B' by Rudolf Steiner

drawing of the gesture 'eh' by Rudolf Steiner

When performing eurythmy to music (also called tone eurythmy), the three major elements of music, melody, harmony and rhythm, are all expressed.
The melody is conveyed through expressing its rise and fall and using the arm gestures of the actual tones.
Harmony is expressed through movements of dissonance and consonance, and  the mood qualities of major and minor.
Rhythm is chiefly conveyed through livelier and more contoured movements for quick notes, slower, dreamier movements for longer notes; in addition, longer tones move into the back space, quicker tones into the front space.
Breaths or pauses are expressed through a larger or smaller movement in space, giving new impulse to what follows. Beat is conveyed through greater emphasis of downbeats, or those beats upon which stress is normally placed.
The choreography of a piece usually expresses elements such as the major or minor key, the shape of the melody line, the interplay between 
voices or instruments and the relative dominance of one or another voice or instrument. ​

Eurythmy as visible Speech

Eurythmy is often performed to spoken texts such as poetry, stories or plays. Speech eurythmy includes such elements as the sounds of speech, rhythms, poetic meters, grammar and mood. In speech eurythmy, all the sounds of language have characteristic gestural qualities. It is the audible or phonetic sounds themselves, not the letters of the written language, that are expressed in speech eurythmy.

Eurythmy aims to bring the artists' expressive movement and both the performers' and audience's feeling experience into harmony with the content of the composition, be it musical or poetic. Eurythmy is sometimes called "visible music" or "visible speech",
expressions that originate with its founder, Rudolf Steiner, who described eurythmy as an "art
of the soul". Eurythmy is performed to classical music, texts, poetry or stories. ​

Gestures

The arm gestures of eurythmy relate to the sounds of speech, to the tones and rhythms of music and to soul experiences, such as joy or sadness. ​