Favorite Dance Quotes

"While I dance I cannot judge, I cannot hate, I cannot separate myself from life. I can only be joyful and whole. That is why I dance." -

Hans Bos

 

"...The moment one knows how, one begins to die a little. Living is a form of not being sure, of not knowing what next or how.....One leaps in the dark!" -    

Agnes Demille, Dance Choreographer

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time this expression is unique. And if you block it it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it." -Martha Graham

"O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?" -William Butler Yeats

"Dancing's not work. You can't call it work. A day I don't dance is a day I don't live."
From *Serpent of the Nile*, Wendy Buonaventura. Saqi Books, London, 1989. p196. (per jlewis .sig file)

 

 

 

 

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
---Lord Byron, *Childe Harold's Pilgrimage*, Canto III, Stanza 22

The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.... Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no more translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
---Havelock Ellis, *The Dance of Life*, Chap. 2
 

Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee
Jest, and youthful Jollity,
Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles,
Nods and Becks and wreathe`d Smiles....
Sport, that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides,
Come, and trip it, as you go,
On the light fantastic toe.
---John Milton, *L'Allegro*, line 25

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?
---Friedrich Nietzsche, *The Twilight of the Idols*, Things the Germans Lack, 7

When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that.
---William Shakespeare, *The Winter's Tale*, Sc. 3, line 140

This page last updated September 9, 1996 by Stefan mailto:dduncan@efn.org.
 

---

“The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.” Agnes de Mille 

“The dancer’s body is simply the luminous manifestation of her soul…This is the truly creative dancer, natural but not imitative, speaking in movement out of herself and out of something greater than all selves. “      Isadora Duncan (1878-1927)

  “Life is like a ghaziyah, it dances briefly for each of us." Egyptian Proverb 

“The entire world is a musical instrument; the pole of the world celestial is intersected where this heavenly chord is divided by the spiritual sun. Earthly music is an echo of this cosmic harmony; it is a relic of heaven.”   Author Unknown

 “Where a dancer stands, that spot is holy ground.”      Martha Graham

 

 

 

 

 

“These frail quavering melodies resound like the whispering of solitude, like the voices of the wilderness that speak to the soul lost in contemplation of space; they stir strange nostalgia, dredge up infinite memories and conjure forth previous lives that come straying back in random array.” Théophile Gautier

INVOCATION:

Creature of fire, let me unite with you that i may have passion and power.

Creature of water, let me unite with you that i may have fluid motion.

Creature of air, let me unite with you that i may have wisdom and intuition. 

Creature of earth, let me unite with you that i may have stability and steadfastness. from "Mother Wit"-Diane Mariechild

 

“Dance is one of man's oldest and most basic means of expression. Through the body, man senses and perceives the tensions and the rhythms of the universe around him, and then using the body as an instrument, he expresses his feeling responses to the universe.  From the fabric of his perceptions and feelings he creates his dance.  Through his dance he relates to his fellow man and to his world. " (Ed. note -substitute  feminine pronouns rather than generic male ones if preferred!) &bs "Creating through Dance" -Alma Hawkins

       

"Beside the fire, as the wood burns  

A laughing dancer in the veils of light

Whose dance transforms the darkness to gold""

                   abu abd allah ben ali-l-khisal 

                        Rumi Poem

Dance when you're broken open; Dance, when you've torn the bandage off

Dance in the middle of fighting

Dance in your blood

Dance when you're perfectly free.

Struck, the dancer hears a tambourine inside her

Like a wave crests into foam at the very top begins.

Maybe you don't hear that tambourine or the tree leaves clapping time

Close the ears on your head ,  listen mostly to lies and cynical jokes.;

There are other things to see, and hear: Music. A brilliant city inside your soul.

(Rumi is revered throughout Turkey and the Middle East as a great spiritual poet. He is the fou

  “... and that the patterns you weave upon the night have such swift passion, such essential heat, that all the painter sees, the poet can write, are but pale shadows of your dancing feet...”& -Humbert Wolfe

  "Dance changes biology into a metaphor of the spiritual body in much the way that poetry changes ordinary words into forms that allow meaning that words normally cannot convey. The most curious thing about any human gesture is its power of insinuation, born of the ability of the body to overcome its inherent materiality. That is precisely what Meredith Monk does for an audience when she turns the theatre into a reflection of our most inward selves. The new union of the arts in the theatre achieves the smae things that poetry achieves. They transfor the ordinary into the extraordinary. Through the sensual and metaphoric transformation of a reality composed of shadows they are able, at leaster momentarily, to allude to the fire.
Dance is that fire.
Jamake Highwater from "Dance: Rituals of Experience"

”In many of the debates about the "meaning" aspect of dance, we are confronted by the question of by what means dance "communicates". What is immediately apparent is that dance is characterized by what one may call a multi-channel expression. Like , language, its basic instrument is the human body. The human body moving in time and space utilizes channels we may designate as kinesthetic. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that this kinestetic activity generates kinesthetic responses in the viewer although they generally are more restrained and less conscious than those of the performer. The phenomenon of toe tapping or the expresssion "caught up in the dance," as well as that of audiences falling into trance in response to watching dancers exhibiting trance behavior, testify to the empathy between performer and audience and to the existence of some kind of kinesthetic message being transmitted. Dance alone of the arts relies on the kinesthetic aspect of expression for much of its impact.”

”Dance is a powerful, frequently adopted symbol of the way people feel about themselves.”
Dance makes its unique contribution to society and culture by virtue of its form and expressions; at the same time it is intimately bound up with the elements of religion, kinship and social organization, politics, and economics. The fact that dance is inseparable from its means of expression-the human body making patterns in time and space- means that it cannot be divorced from its social and cultural context.”
Anya Peterson Royce in "The Anthropology of Dance". 

If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution!
Emma Goldman

We  should consider every day lost on which we have
not danced at least once.    Friedrich Nietzsche

May our dance always be a bridge to understanding.
May our dance always be a celebration of diversity.
May our dance always be an instrument for peace.
Laurel Victoria Gray    Sept. 2001

May our dance be a conduit for its healing energies.
May our dance always be an expression of its inherent joy & love for all
humankind. -Morocco (NYC)

 "You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you
nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no
paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums,
no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that
fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for
unsteady souls." -Merce Cunningham

 "To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more
beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on
earth and it is yours for the taking." -Agnes De Mille

"Culture is not just an ornament; it is the expression of a nation's character."  -Somerset Maugham

" The high mission of any art is by its illusions, to foreshadow a higher universe reality,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          to crystallize the emotions of time into the  thoughts of eternity.     The Urantia book

"The fragrance remains in the hand that gives the rose.   Heda Bejar

 

"To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak."     Hopi Saying