Dance Quotes - Page 26

• I believe education in music, theater, dance, and the visual arts... is part of a well-rounded education and can provide so much joy, now and in the future.

  Rudy Giuliani

  Art, Believe, Joy

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• A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish. After all, I choreographed for myself. I never choreographed what I could not do. I changed steps in Medea and other ballets to accommodate the change. But I knew. And it haunted me. I only wanted to dance.

  Martha Graham

  Two, Ballet, Wish

  Martha Graham (1991). “Blood memory”, Doubleday

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• A dancer must listen to his body and pay homage to it. Behind the movement lies this terrible, driving passion, this necessity. I won't settle for anything less.

  Martha Graham

  Lying, Passion, Movement

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• First we have to believe, and then we believe.

  Martha Graham

  Believe, Firsts, Belief

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• If I can't dance, I don't care if my dances are ever done again!

  Martha Graham

  Done, Care, Ifs

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• My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.

  Martha Graham

  Dancing, Movement, Affirmation

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• To me, this acquirement of nervous, physical, and emotional concentration is the one element possessed to the highest degree by the truly great dancers of the world. Its acquirement is the result of discipline, of energy in the deep sense. That is why there are so few great dancers.

  Martha Graham

  Emotional, Discipline, Energy

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• I imagine a future where many of us will call ourselves dancers and collaborate to make an art which concerns itself with primary areas of life... for me, peace is a communal work process, a collective vision. The dance itself tries to exemplify a few of these methods in a truly grounded and practical way so that the people can say: yes, there are prospects of survival.

  Anna Halprin

  Art, People, Survival

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• Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten.

  Anna Halprin

  Nature, Long, Dancing

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• Knowledge passes from dance teacher into the student through the process of mane, which is often translated as imitation, but learning to dance is more a process of total identification than of simple copying. We repeat the movements of our teachers until we can duplicate them exactly, until, in a sense, we have absorbed the teacher's mastery into ourselves. Artistic technique must be fully integrated into the cells of our bodies if we are to use it to express what is in our hearts, and this takes many years of practice.

  Mineko Iwasaki

  Teacher, Heart, Simple

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• I love the whole world of dance, because dancing is really the emotions through bodily movement. And however you feel, you just bring out the inner feeling through your mood...people don't think about the importance of it.

  Michael Jackson

  Thinking, People, Dancing

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• My goal in life is to give to the world what I was lucky to receive: the ecstasy of divine union through my music and my dance.

  Michael Jackson

  Giving, Goal, Lucky

  Twitter post from Dec 19, 2017

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• On the brilliance of James Brown's dancing − and the frustrations of bad camera-work on dancers:cers: I think James Brown is a genius you know when he's with the Famous Flames, unbelievable. I used to watch him on television and I used to get angry at the camera-man because whenever he would really start to dance they would be on a close-up so I couldn't see his feet. I'd shout "Show him! Show him!", so I could watch and learn.

  Michael Jackson

  Frustration, Men, Thinking

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• Dance, like music, is the expression of the human spirit. Dance is 'visual music'.

  S. Janaki

  Expression, Spirit, Music Is

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• We are part of each other and part of something bigger than our own egos. An artist should... bring into the world some vision. Dancers should ask, "What is their work in the service of?"

  Bill T. Jones

  Artist, Ego, Vision

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• It is one thing to do your dance on a beach and quite another to collaborate intimately with the sand.

  Deborah Jowitt

  Beach, Sand, Things To Do

  Deborah Jowitt (1985). “The Dance in Mind: Profiles and Reviews 1976-83”, Boston : D.R. Godine

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• I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn't catch on right away - but I had some good mentors in New York who encouraged me.

  Gene Kelly

  New York, Good Man, Style

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• When Ginger Rogers danced with Astaire, it was the only time in the movies when you looked at the man, not the woman.

  Gene Kelly

  Motivational, Men, Roger

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• Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.

  Lincoln Kirstein

  Determination, Artist, Animal

  Lincoln Kirstein (1970). “Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks”, p.10, Courier Corporation

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• Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing.

  Lincoln Kirstein

  Vocabulary, Color, Dancing

  Lincoln Kirstein (1970). “Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks”, p.5, Courier Corporation

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• A dance performance is rather like going out into a battlefield. You have to hold the attention of as many as five to 10,000 people a lot of whom do not follow your language.

  Yamini Krishnamurthy

  People, Ballet, Going Out

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• Scientists are complaining that the new dinosaur movie shows dinosaurs with lemurs, who didn't evolve for another million years. They're afraid the movie will give kids a mistaken impression. What about the fact that the dinosaurs are singing and dancing?

  Jay Leno

  Kids, Years, Giving

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• When doctrines divide and "isms" turn human against human, without speech, without silence, let us demonstrate. Let these demonstrations manifest everywhere. Not what we think or say but what we do shall avail - on with the dance.

  Samuel L. Lewis

  Thinking, Silence, Doctrine

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• When one lifts a ballerina, it is not her weight but her nature that causes the problem.

  Maris Liepa

  Ballet, Weight, Causes

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• Dancers aren't pompous; they're too tired.

  Jose Limon

  Tired, Dancing, Pompous

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