Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every dance is and gives ecstasy.
In dance, even the weakest can do wonders.
Wherever there are four walls, consciousness of direction is far keener.
Whatever the nature of dance, it needs no onlooker, not even a single witness.
The dance is the mother of the arts, The dance breaks down the distinction of body & soul.
A person can be danced. In all continents the dancers carry little children on their shoulders.
A choral dance: an attempt to impose upon a chance gathering of a few dozen guests a communal feeling.
The dance lives in all mankind as a necessary motor-rhythmic expression of excess energy and the joy of living.
Rhythmic motion has become the carrier and creator of almost every ecstatic mood of any significance in human life.
The English dance unites the guests of an evening by the spell of rhythmical movement into a chance casual community.
Sexuality ... is at the same time the most personal of realms and also the realm most carefully constrained by social order.
The oldest form of the Choral Dance is the circle. Even the chimpanzees dance in a circle, and people of every continent still do it.
Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential.
Although the circle dance is known throughout the entire world, the front dance is limited to the cultures of which the rectangular hut is a part.
The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.
It removes the limitations of his body, extinguishes his consciousness, and pours the divine spirit into him. The whirl dance is the purest form of dance devotion.
To the large extent that music can organize our perceptions of our own bodies and emotions, it can tell us things about history that are not accessible through any other medium.
The only information we have about the early history of the dance comes to us from the rock paintings created by primitive man tens of thousands of years ago in what is now France.
The peoples influenced by the animal dance have a variety of movements and dance with enthusiasm; those who do not know the animal dance have few movements and show little zest for dancing.
The dance in which the men form one row, the women another, and dance with and opposite each other in a form of love play, is widely diffused and may be confidentally assigned to a Protoneolithic culture level.
The superhuman power which exhiliration and hypnosis bring to a dancer is shown especially clearly in his almost inconceivable staying powers in a state of high tension. "In the dance even the weakest can do wonders."
Tonality itself - with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax - is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire.
Only the tango has continued to enjoy undiminished favor for more than twenty years in spite of polishing and refinement. To be sure, it is no pure Negro dance and owes its best qualities to the unusual dance talents of the Spaniards.
If you ask an Auin Bushman what realty happens at the puberty ceremonials, he will tell you, "We dance." In the initiation customs of all peoples the dances play an especially important part. The dance is the center of wedding festivities.
The adult who puts his arm around his companion in the ballroom, and the child in the roadway, skipping in a round dance - they forget themselve, they dissolve the weight of earthly contact and the rigidity of daily existence. The soul slips into a twilight stage.
In the earliest cultures any tie between the dancers is slight. In a higher level the choral dancers almost always touch one another and thus force themselves into the same stride and the same movement. The closer the contact, the stronger is the social character of the choral.
In Europe we have the "loss of self" motif clearly illustrated in the whirl dances of the Russians sects of the Molokani in Armenia....All the countries that bordered the Meditteranean in ancient times, and the less remote sections of Asia as well, appear to have had whirl dances.
The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth [Symphony of Beethoven] is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.
Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence.
The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music....The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devestating.