Important Quotes From The Alchemist

The Quotes

Humans are measured not through their words but their deeds.
The abstraction of deeds is dance itself.

~ Chinvat – the Ninth Bridge
Winner − Special Jury Award, Hungarian Pan Art Festival
(from the promotional flyer)

In life as in dance:
Grace glides on blistered feet.

~ Alice Abrams

Beside the fire, as the wood burns black, a laughing dancer in veils of light, whose dance transforms the darkness to gold.

~ Adu Abd Allan ben Abi-l-Khisal ben Abi-l-Khisal

He who cannot dance will say: The drum is bad.

~ African Proverb

Kristy Nilsson - Tarentelle, Atlanta Ballet Centre Theatre

If you can talk, you can sing.
If you can walk, you can dance.

~ African Proverb

The
mother of the dance is the melody because she gives you everything, tells you everything you need to know, like a mother. The father of the dance is the rhythm and he is the strong one, the leader, the authority − as a father should be!

~ Tayyar Akdeniz

Dance is for everybody.
I believe that the dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people.

~ Alvin Ailey

There is such a difference when you're dancing to music you really love, when there is this meeting of music and dancer that fuses into one.
Those are the experiences we live for.

~ Aisha Ali

They follow me and I never know what I'm going to do.
I lead them through a variety of dance experiences, and at these times, I'm no longer myself. I'm like a go-between.
When I hear certain pieces of music, I project myself into the place and time where I saw a particular dancer. Then I become that performer.

~ Aisha Ali

A dancer should learn from all the arts. Go to museums and look at the paintings.
See how they balance things. Everything you do in the arts enriches you.

~ Alicia Alonso

This new form of dialogue that is bringing us to the art to which I have dedicated my life, is rooted in the deepest and most beautiful part of being human.
{Que esta nueva forma de diálogo nos siga acercando a un arte al que he consagrado mi vida, y que está enraizado en lo más profundo y bello del ser humano.}

~ Alicia Alonso

When you are ecstatic and in love, you feel buoyant, you feel life, you feel like you're dancing in the sky.

~ Margo Anand

It’s true of all great artists that the more you see, the more you want to see.

~ Peter Anastos, choreographer

Everything in the universe has rhythm.
Everything dances.

~ Maya Angelou

Dance is a life, everyday. don't miss it.
You're in bodies, you can move... Where is your joy?

~ Mary Anthony

Dance is a sort of silent rhetoric.

~ Canon Thoinot Arbeau

The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art, art of the muscle sense. The awareness of tension and relaxation within his own body, the sense of balance that distinguishes the proud stability of the vertical from the risky adventures of thrusting and falling – these are the tools of the dancer.

~ Rudolf Arnheim

The choreographer cannot deliberately make a ballet to appeal to an audience, he has to start from personal inspirations. He has to trust the ballet, to let it stand on its own strengths or fall on its weaknesses.
If it reaches the audience, then he is lucky that round!

~ Gerald Arpino

Dancing allows me to explore myself in so many ways, to learn about my limitations and strengths, my ability to cope with adversity and to go farther than I thought I could.
You find out what you're made of.

~ Andrew Asnes

Dancing is a sweat job.

~ Fred Astaire

Do it big, do it right, and do it with style.

~ Fred Astaire

I am bit sending messages with my feet.
All I ever wanted was not to come up empty.
I did it for the dough and the old applause.

~ Fred Astaire

I have no desire to prove anything by dancing.
I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself.

~ Fred Astaire

If the dance is right, there shouldn't be a single superfluous movement.

~ Fred Astaire

I'm just a hoofer with a spare set of tails.

~ Fred Astaire

Slippery stages were the terror of my life.

~ Fred Astaire

Some people seem to think that good dancers are born, but all the good dancers I have known are taught or trained.

~ Fred Astaire

The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed.
Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style.

~ Fred Astaire

This search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn't want to be tracked.
It takes time to get a dance right, to create something memorable.

~ Fred Astaire

Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding (1951) − sublimely partnering a coat tree.

I'd rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

~ Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle

Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

~ (Wystan Hugh) W. H. Auden

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters.
Dance, dance, dance – till you drop.

~ (Wystan Hugh) W. H. Auden

All the dancer's gestures are signs of things, and the dance called rational, because it aptly signifies and displays something over and above the pleasure of the senses.

~ Saint Augustine

I praise the dance, for it frees people from the heaviness of matter and binds the isolated to community.
I praise the dance, which demands everything: health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul.
Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people, who are in constant danger of becoming all brain, will, or feeling.
Dancing demands a whole person, one who is firmly anchored in the center of his life, who is not obsessed by lust for people and things and the demon of isolation in his own ego.
Dancing demands a freed person, one who vibrates with the equipoise of all his powers.
I praise the dance.
O man, learn to dance, or else the angels in heaven will not know what to do with you.

~ Saint Augustine

(Dance is)...a whole system of concepts, images, words, and practices, some of them ritual ones. One cannot possibly understand a part of the whole, if isolated from the remaining parts of that whole... dancing makes sense along with music... along with the nostalgia evoked, memories from the past together with a given way of visualizing the world...

~ Maria Susana Azzi

When you take dancing lessons, you learn steps and you learn steps and you learn steps.
It can go on for a long time.
And then one day, you just learn to dance, and it is so different.

~ Bill Austin

Bolshoi-trained Staatsoper Ballet principal Polina Semionova in the music video for Herbert Grönemeyer's 2003 composition Letzter Tag.

Fine dancing, I believe like virtue, must be its own reward.
Those who are standing by are usually thinking of something very different.

~ Jane Austen

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely.
Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind; but when a beginning is made – when the felicities of rapid motion have been once, though slightly felt – it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.

~ Jane Austen

A dance is a measured pace, as a verse is a measured speech.
~ Sir Francis Bacon

The heart of the dance is the heart of the dancer.

~ Ghazallah al-Badriyyah

A violinist had a violin, a painter his palette.
All I had was myself.
I was the instrument that I must care for.

~ Josephine Baker

Ballet dancing is arduous, strenuous activity.
Students are engaged in physical training that rivals the training Olympic athletes undergo.
At the same time, they strive for physical perfection not for the prowess alone but as a way of achieving the means necessary to express the pure nature of their art.

~ George Balanchine

Georgy Melitonovich Balanchivadze

Джорджи Мелитонович Баланчивэйдз

Ballet is important and significant – yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.

~ George Balanchine

(Choreography) is simpler than you think.
Just go and do, and don't think so much about it.
Just make something interesting.

~ George Balanchine

Dance is music made visible.

~ George Balanchine

Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.

~ George Balanchine

First comes the sweat. Then comes the
beauty if you're very lucky and have said your prayers.

~ George Balanchine

Two of Balanchine's many prodigies − Allegra Kent and Arthur Mitchell, later founder of
Dance Theatre of Harlem − dance the pas de deux from Balanchine's Agon.

God creates, I do not create.
I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it – from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do...

~ George Balanchine

I am a cloud – in trousers.

~ George Balanchine

I could never make a ballet by wrinkling my brow and concentrating.
If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished?

~ George Balanchine

I don't want people who want to dance,
I want people who have to dance.

~ George Balanchine

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell ... we can't dance synonyms.

~ George Balanchine

In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts.
God made men to sing the praises of women.
They are not equal to men: They are better.

~ George Balanchine

It's like the time capsule with everything in it.
Or like the seed that when you plant it, becomes the enormous tree with leaves and fruit.
Everybody was in that little seed, and so everything can open.
The tree of dance is like that. It just takes a long, long time to blossom.

~ George Balanchine

Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible.
If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.

~ George Balanchine

My muse must come to me on union time.

~ George Balanchine

One is born to be a dancer. No teacher can work miracles, nor will years of training make a good dancer of an untalented pupil.
One may be able to acquire a certain technical facility, but no one can ever acquire an exceptional talent.'
I have never prided myself on having an unusually gifted pupil.
A Pavlova is no one's pupil but God's.

~ George Balanchine

Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.

~ George Balanchine

Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense, but see, policemen don't have to be beautiful at the same time.

~ George Balanchine

The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.

~ George Balanchine

The choreographer and the dancer must remember that they reach the audience through the eye.
It's the illusion created which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of a magician

~ George Balanchine

Rudolf Nureyev regarded George Balanchine as the world’s greatest choreographer, and Balanchine's Apollo as the sum of his work. It was Nureyev's ”ballet of a lifetime” − and Nureyev performed it for nearly twenty-five years.

The mirror is not you.
The mirror is you looking at yourself.

~ George Balanchine

Balanchine, on approving a dancer's technique:

You know how to do battement tendu.

~ George Balanchine

You haven't got anything to dance about until you're over thirty-five anyway.

~ Bert Balladine

What do you dance?

~ Traditional African Bantu greeting to a member of another Bantu tribe

Technique is what you need to do to dance well, principally to make it feel good to your partner.
Style is everything else you do when you dance, hopefully to make it look good to your partner, and your audience.

~ David Barker

Dance has become an exclusionary enterprise.
To participate, one must be thinner than thin, of pleasing form, flexible, athletic and young.
If you are not all these things, you will be allowed to dance in the privacy of your own living room.
You just wouldn't dare to put yourself onstage.

~ Clive Barnes

One of the few things in dance to match the
Royal Ballet's curtain calls is the Royal Ballet's dancing.

~ Clive Barnes

Mikhail Baryshnikov − perhaps the greatest male dancer of the 20th Century, winning a Gold Medal at age 21 at the 1969
Moscow International Ballet Competition − as Basilio in Don Quixote.

Below, Baryshnikov's performance in the same role − approximately fourteen years later.

Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov
Mikhaïl Nikolaevitch Baryshnikov
Михаил Николаевич Барышников

If your only dance experience is the Nutcracker, it will be a shock; hopefully shocking in a good way.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

It doesn't matter how high you lift your leg.
The technique is about transparency, simplicity, making an earnest attempt.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

I do not try to dance better than anyone else.
I only try to dance better than myself.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

I like the most provocative and most surprising partnerships on stage.
Intensity and surprise.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

I want to see people dance, and I would like to guess what kind of people they are.
I don't want to know the recipe for their pasta.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

Just sit and open your eyes and open your heart.
It's dance theater.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

Baryshnikov's 1983 stage performance in Don Quixote at American Ballet Theatre.

No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

Perhaps Baryshnikov exaggerated, but what more need be said...
Fred Astaire − Putting on the Ritz:

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

The problem is not making up the steps but deciding which ones to keep.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself.
He has to put in something in order to be able to take something.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

To achieve some depth in your field requires a lot of sacrifices.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

We're trying to stretch our muscles creatively.
It gives us so much more freedom.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

What brought me to the theater, no matter you're a Jew or a Russian or Armenian or Latvian, are suddenly illuminated by stage light and one beautiful image of dance.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

You can be totally involved, you could admire just the shape of or you could be totally emotionally mushed up into the dance.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

Baryshnikov defected for artistic freedom, relishing performing contemporary works − ranging from numerous successful pieces created for him by Twyla Tharp, to
Roland Petit's classic 1946 work Le Jeune Homme Et La Mort (The Young Man And the Death).

Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.
{Même quand elle marche on croirait qu'elle danse.}

~ Charles Baudelaire

There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.

~ Vicki Baum

Dance first. Think later.
It's the natural order.

~ Samuel Beckett

In the dance, one finds the cinema, the comic strips, the Olympic hundred meters and swimming, and what's more, poetry, love and tenderness.
{Dans la danse, on retrouve à la fois le cinéma, les bandes dessinées, le cent mètres olympiques, la natation, avec, en plus, la poésie, l'amour, la tendresse.}

~ Maurice Béjart

The dance: a minimum of explanation, a minimum of anecdotes, and a maximum of sensations.
{La danse, un minimum d'explication, un minimum d'anecdotes, et un maximum de sensations.}

~ Maurice Béjart

There are two ways of being creative.
One can sing and dance.
Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.

~ Warren G. Bennis

Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.

~ Warren G. Bennis

There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them, those who only dance to their own rhythm, and those who don't dance at all.

~ José Bergamín

Let's face the music and dance.

~ Irving Berlin

A silent figure is the dancer, true but still, words become dance, and all things there express'd.

~ André Bjerke

God respects us when we work, but he loves us when we dance.

~ Les Blanc (also attributed as a Sufi saying)

A correct execution of an adagio is the ne plus ultra of our art; and I look on it as the touch-stone of the dancer.

~ Carlo Blasis

What is dance? I am dancing all the time.
Every gesture, the body line of every pose, the way I get from place to place, the movement in the acting – none of it would be the way it is if I weren't a dancer.

~ Ray Bolger

The inimitable Ray Bolger... with Judy Garland.
Wizard of Oz - Ray Bolger: Scarecrow

Nothing happens in the body without happening in the brain first... dancing is 95% mental.

~ Bobby Boling, A Dancer's Manual

Let us keep the dance of rain our fathers kept and tread our dreams beneath the jungle sky.

~ Arna Bontemps

Ballet is not technique but a way of expression that comes more closely to the inner language of man than any other.

~ George Borodin

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

All dance is about sensual expression. It is about energy and vitality, and it is one of the most liberating activities available to us.

~ Wendy Bounaventura

I'm always very true to the music and I honour the music in the way I see it.

~ Matthew Bourne

The Pas de Quatre (The Four Little Swans) from Matthew Bourne's
Broadway production of his all-male Swan Lake.

It is not so much upon the number of exercises, as the care with which they are done, that progress and skill depend.

~ August Bournonville

The beauty to which the Dance ought to aspire is not dependent upon taste or pleasure, but is founded on the immutable laws of Nature.

~ August Bournonville

The Royal Ballet's Johan Kobborg and Alina Cojocaru perform at the
2003 International Mariinsky Ballet Festival in St. Petersburg. An excerpt from August Bournonville's The Flower Festival at Genzano by Edvard Helsted.

Artists lead unglamorous daily lives of discipline and routine, but their work is full of passion.
Each has a vision and feels responsibility to that vision.

~ Merryl Brockway

Love is a lot like dancing; you just surrender to the music.

~ Pierce Brosnan

I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.

~ Louise Brooks

Movement without meaning is just exercise.

~ Marie Brooks

Opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor.

~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.

~ James Brown

James Brown lives, as long as someone steps out of their body and dances uncontrollably.

~ Rev. Al Sharpton
(Speaking to the crowd, at James Brown's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

I don’t want to feel a shoe; I want the shoe to become part of me.

~ Leslie Browne

A child sings before it speaks, dances almost before it walks, music is with us from the beginning.

~ Pamela Brown

Dance can give the inarticulate a voice.

~ Pamela Brown

The human animal dances wildest on the edge of the grave.

~ Rita Mae Brown

Dance every performance as if it were your last.

~ Erik Bruhn

The call to dance is a response to a primitive urge to rhythmic motion.
It is an unavoidable internal rhythm of life.

~ Dorothy Buck

Body language is a very powerful tool...
80% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words.

~ Deborah Bull

Retired Royal Ballet Principal Deborah Bull, CBE, dances Aurora's Variation from Sleeping Beauty, Act III

I enjoy the freedom of modern dance as well as the constraints of classical dance.

~ Deborah Bull

So if the dance is five minutes long, make yourself run for perhaps eight minutes.
That way, you over-train and the dance will seem easier...

~ Deborah Bull

I think it's useful to experience other types of dance and other cultures, and the life of a classical dancer these days is certainly not all tutus!
So experience of other dance forms is a good idea.

~ Deborah Bull

It's not magic! It's physics.
The speed of the turn is what keeps you upright.

~ Deborah Bull

You can't reduce lactic acid, but you can increase your tolerance to it.
I do this through running or cycling, but it's a good idea to match your training bout to the type of dance you do.

~ Deborah Bull

Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives...
So train the whole person, not just the dancer.

~ Deborah Bull

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.

~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Our profession creates illusions.
It is not a matter of having a perfect body, but of dancing in such a way as to look perfect.

~ Wilheim Burmann

Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable.

~ Frederich Busch

It's very easy to become selfish and narrow-minded and see ballet as the only thing in life, but there's lots more.

~ Darcey Bussell

Darcey Bussell, the youngest dancer ever promoted to principal at the Royal Ballet at the age of 20 - retires in May 2007.
Here in a contemporary excerpt:

You have to be able to cut off from the ballet and relax, or you have anxiety dreams at night, worrying about what you're going to dance the next day, going over every little detail.

~ Darcey Bussell

On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined.

~ Lord George Gordon Byron

Though I soon became typecast in Hollywood as a gangster and hoodlum,
I was originally a dancer, an Irish hoofer, trained in vaudeville tap dance.
I always leapt at the opportunity to dance in films later on.

~ James Cagney

As a Kennedy Center Honor recipient on December 7, 1980, James Cagney wept openly as presenter Mikhail Baryshnikov related how Cagney's films had inspired him as a child to become the greatest male dancer of the 20th Century.
This is the performance that gave the world Baryshnikov:
James Cagney - "Yankee Doodle Dandy"

Kind are her answers,
But her performance keeps no day; Breaks time, as dancers
From their own Music when they stray.

~ Thomas Campion

The further off from England the nearer is to France
–
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.

~ Lewis Carroll

Dance then wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he, and I'll lead you all.

~ Sydney Carter

Classical dancing is like being a mother: if you've never done it, you can't imagine how hard it is.

~ Harriet Cavalli

You're not here by mistake. Someone at your audition watched you dance and saw something special.
All you've gotta do is figure out how to find that again.

~ Center Stage

To dance is to be out of yourself and in yourself at the same time.
Those whom you encompass need only to look... because they are inside of you when you dance.

~ Eva Cernik

I use dancing to embellish, extend or enlarge upon an existing emotion.

~ Gower Champion

The really great dancer is perhaps a rarer phenomenon than great musicians, painters or sculptors.
This is because dance is a consummation of all these arts.
The dancer, in addition to the qualities that pure dance demands, must be sensitive to and have an uncanny ear for music, must have a painter’s sensibility to the significant line, a sculptor’s approach to form, an architect’s vision of space and a trained actor’s responses to dramatic situations.

~ K. Subhas Chandran

If their feet aren't in the right place, at least their hearts are.

~ Christian M. Chensvold, on novices

Until you're ready to look foolish, you'll never have the possibility of being great.

~ Cher

One may judge a king by the state of dancing during his reign.

~ Chinese proverb

Twenty-one dancers perform the exquisite
Thousand-Hand Guanyin for Spring Festival in Beijing.
Amazing Dance

The rest of the story: these dancers of the
Chinese Disabled People's Performing Art Troupe are profoundly deaf, relying on signals from conductors at the four corners of the stage.

Dance is movement, and movement is life.
{La danse, c'est le mouvement, et le mouvement, c'est la vie.}
~ Ludmilla Chiriaeff

Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself.
Before you can move their tears, your own must flow.
To convince them, you must yourself believe.

~ Winston Churchill

Hardly any man dances when sober, unless he is insane.
Nor does he dance while alone, nor at a respectable and moderate party.
Dancing is the final phase of a wild party with fancy decorations and a multitude of delights.
{Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi insanit, neque in solitudine neque in convivio moderato et honesto. Tempestivi convivi, amoeni loci, multarum deliciarum comes est extrema saltatio.}
~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Murena

Dancing is at once rational and healthful: it gives animal spirits; it is the natural amusement of young people, and such it has been from the days of Moses.

~ William Cobbett

As an American, the first thing I noticed about British dancers was their intellectual response to movement. In countries like Israel, the USA,
Australia and South Africa, the approach is much more athletic. People spend a lot of time outdoors, and play sports in clothing that exposes the body.
Northern Europeans tend to be more introverted – more covered up in every sense.

~ Robert Cohan

Fantasy is a reality you can dance to.

~ Richard Cohen

We have no adequate conception of the perfection of the ancient tragic dance.
The pleasure which the Greeks received from it had for its basis difference; and the more unfit the vehicle, the more lively was the curiosity & intense the delights at seeing the difficulty overcome.

~ S. T. Coleridge

How inimitably graceful children are in general – before they learn to dance.

~ S. T. Coleridge

To dance is to affirm.

~ Bayard Coll

The dance is the mother of all languages.

~ R. G. Collingwood

Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.

~ Confucius

Dancing is like dreaming with your feet!

~ Constanze

Do you love me – now that I can dance?

~ Pop song and lyric by The Contours

It's that vision of freedom you create when you're defying physical law...

~ Bart Cook, NYCB

Dancers dance through their pain
I shrink from mine.

~ Mason Cooley

Ballet is only good when it is great.

~ Arlene Croce

Good choreography fuses eye, ear and mind.

~ Arlene Croce

If Balanchine had any secret, it was one that has endured through two hundred years of classical ballet.
It is that dancing correctly in three dimensions, on the music, creates the fourth dimension of meaning.

~ Arlene Croce

It is through strength of technique that the body stays in possession of music.

~ Arlene Croce, on Balanchine’s philosophy

1. Beginning Dancer: knows nothing.
2. Intermediate Dancer: knows everything; too good to dance with beginners.
3. Hotshot Dancer: too good to dance with anyone.
4. Advanced Dancer: dances everything, especially with beginners.

~ Dick Crum

The most important thing about folk dance in its original setting is that it gives the dancer an opportunity to express both the identity with a society and the dancer's place within that society.

~ Dick Crum

Instead of seeing the rug being pulled from under us, we can learn to dance on a shifting carpet.

~ Thomas Crum

i'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

~ (edward estlin) e. e. cummings

An art process in not essentially a natural process; it is an invented one.
It can take actions of organization from the way nature functions, but essentially man invents the process. And from or for that process he derives a discipline to make and keep the process functioning.
That discipline too is not a natural process. The daily discipline, the continued keeping of the elasticity of the muscles, the continued control of the mind over the body’s actions, the constant hoped-for flow of the spirit into physical movement, both new and renewed, is not a natural way.
It is unnatural in its demands on all the sources of energy.
But the final synthesis can be a natural one, natural in the sense that the mind, body and spirit function as one.

~ Merce Cunningham

Modern Dance's uber-abstract pioneer, Merce Cunningham, performs excerpts from numerous works with his company; Charles Atlas, Caroline Brown,
John Cage, Jasper Johns, David Tudor, Andy Warhol, and more.

The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion,, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the class work not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too ...

~ Merce Cunningham

The only way to do it is to do it.

~ Merce Cunningham

A dance legacy must be performed in order to be preserved

~ Ann Daly

Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing.
It's the rhythm of your life.
It’s the expression in time and movement, in happiness, joy, sadness and envy.

~ Jacques d'Amboise

Enjoy the process of learning to dance.
The process of our profession, and not its final achievement, is the heart and soul of dance.

~ Jacques d'Amboise

Because ballet can seem remote onstage – glittering, exquisite, perfect and not quite real – Anne Belle puts her viewers in the studio and backstage to see the exacting physical and mental demands of the art, the sweat and the grueling repetition. Once brought down to earth, ballet becomes something we can all relate to: a tension-fraught and inspiring human quest to conquer the impossible.

~ Dance Magazine

A studio rehearsal with Joseph Phillips, the 2002 Gold Medalist at the
USA International Ballet Competition, the First Prague International
Ballet Competition and the Youth American Grand Prix in New York.
Joseph Phillips:

... The dancer not be separated from the dance, she also cannot be separated from the history of dancing, from the line of dancers and teachers leading to her.

~ The Dancer and the Dance (film)

You can't see a painter or a writer or a musician if you just look at them, but you can see a dancer in a child if they've studied ballet for a year.

~ The Dancer and the Dance (film)

Again, Joseph Phillips, in an unusual backstage view of Basilio's Variation − and the Coda − from the Pas de Deux in Don Quixote:

It's not just for its influence on us, but to knowknow that we can play a part in it, to understand the influence that we have outside our own existence.

~ Siobhan Davies

The dance world is too small in lots of ways – it's too intense, it rattles around itself, and it needs exposing to other ideas.

~ Siobhan Davies

Siobhan Davies Dance − excerpts and 2006 rehearsal bits in her London studios:

To understand the culture, study the dance.
To understand the dance, study the people.

~ Chuck Davis

Tap dancing all started with the old clog waltz.

~ Sammy Davis, Jr.

Dance – an art form. The body – an instrument.
Learn to play the instrument and master the art form.

~ Debbie Dee

The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart.
Something heroic and remote.

~ Edgar Degas

Locked in this dance is a secret language that tells the story of women's lives... their passions and their spirituality, their sacrifices, their joys, their intuitions, their emotional life drama.

~ Delilah

Ballet technique is arbitrary and very difficult.
It never becomes easy... it becomes possible.

~ Agnes de Mille

But remember that intent is everything.
One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises.
In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door.
This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics.
The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds.
The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.

~ Agnes de Mille

Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.

~ Agnes de Mille

Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.

~ Agnes de Mille

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.

~ Agnes de Mille

The artist never entirely knows. We guess.
We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

~ Agnes de Mille

The effort involved in making a dancer's body is so long and relentless, in many instances painful, the effort to maintain the technique so grueling that unless a certain satisfaction is derived from the disciplining and the punishing, the pace could not be maintained.

~ Agnes de Mille

The practice mirror is to be used for the correction of faults, not for a love affair, and the figure you watch should not become your dearest friend.

~ Agnes de Mille

The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music.
Bodies never lie.

~ Agnes de Mille

The universe lies before you on the floor, in the air, in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind.
From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.

~ Agnes de Mille

When you perform you are out of your self larger and more potent, more beautiful.
You are for minutes heroic.
This is power.
This is is glory on earth.
And it is yours for the taking.

~ Agnes de Mille

Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.

~ Agnes de Mille

When I dance I am really meditating rather then performing for an audience.
I am completely absorbed by the music and the steps I choose to respond to the music.

~ Agnes de Mille

All Ballets' fundamental steps are derived from the folk dances of Western Europe.

~ Dame Ninette de Valois

Diaghilev was the first to notice good character dancers and that sort of thing.

~ Dame Ninette de Valois

First of all, the most important, that is to learn everything good that has survived from other times, and carefully to watch the bad – and throw it out.

~ Dame Ninette de Valois

Nothing is done easily, first have the thing, then the thing has a success, then all sorts of difficulties arise through the success.

~ Dame Ninette de Valois

We are developing the other parts, and we can't give quite all our attention to the upper part, but soon the lower parts will be developed, and the upper part and the lower part will become partners, that will be wonderful.

~ Dame Ninette de Valois

You can't dance until you've learnt steps, the things your feet can do.

~ Dame Ninette de Valois

You never advance without losing something en passant... you lose it because you're paying so much attention to the new thing.

~ Dame Ninette de Valois

Ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening nobody on the stage at least.

~ Edwin Denby

There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.

~ Edwin Denby

Insanity in dancing, and sometimes watching: bones-of-mercury David Elsewhere from the 2001 Kollaboration. David is the second dancer, and well worth the wait...

You don't have to know about ballet to enjoy it, all you have to do is look at it.

~ Edwin Denby

Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves.
Whistle and dance the shimmy, and you've got an audience.

~ Diogenes

When you fall, try it again... everyone falls the first time!

~ Dave Dodson

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

~ John Dryden

Dancing is the last word in life.
In dancing, one draws nearer to oneself.

~ Jean Dubuffet

A dancer, if she is great, can give to the people something that they can carry with them forever.
They can never forget it, and it has changed them, though they may never know it.

~ Isadora Duncan

Dancing: the highest intelligence in the freest body.

~ Isadora Duncan

Every movement that can be danced on the seashore without being in harmony with the rhythm of the waves, every movement that can be danced in the forest without being in harmony with the swaying of the branches, every movement that one can dance... in the sunshine, in the open country, without being in harmony with the life and the solitude of the landscape – every such movement is false, in that it is out of tune in the midst of nature's harmonious lines.
That is why the dancer should above all else choose movements that express the strength, health, nobility, ease and serenity of living things.

~ Isadora Duncan

I am seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body's movement.

~ Isadora Duncan

I have discovered the dance.
I have discovered the art which has been lost for two thousand years.

~ Isadora Duncan

I intend to work for this dance of the future.
I do not know whether I have the necessary qualities;
I may have neither genius nor talent nor temperament.
But I know that I have a Will; and will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.

~ Isadora Duncan

If we seek the real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we find that the dance of the future is the dance of the past, the dance of eternity, and has been and always will be the same...
The movement of waves, of winds, of the earth is ever the same lasting harmony.

~ Isadora Duncan

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

~ Isadora Duncan

Sir Frederick Ashton, Founder Choreographer of the Royal Ballet, saw Isadora dance when he was 17; it had a profound impact. He choreographed
Five Brahms Waltzes in the manor of − and in honor of − Isadora Duncan.
Sir Frederick coached Tamara Rojo in this excerpt.

It is the mission of all art to express the highest and most beautiful ideals of man

~ Isadora Duncan

Let us first teach little children to breathe, to vibrate, to feel, and to become one with the general harmony and movement of nature.
Let us first produce a beautiful human being, a dancing child.

~ Isadora Duncan

Man must speak, then sing, then dance.
The speaking is the brain, the thinking man.
The singing is the emotion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all.

~ Isadora Duncan

My art is just an effort to express the truth of my being in gesture and movement.
It has taken me long years to find even one absolutely true movement.

~ Isadora Duncan

No, I can't explain the dance to you; if I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.

~ Isadora Duncan

Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?

~ Isadora Duncan

The Dance – it is the rhythm of all that dies in order to live again; it is the eternal rising of the sun.

~ Isadora Duncan

The dancer of the future will be one whose body & soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of the soul will have become the movement of the body.

~ Isadora Duncan

The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.
The true dance is an expression of serenity; it is controlled by the profound rhythm of inner emotion.
Emotion does not reach the moment of frenzy out of a spurt of action; it broods first, it sleeps like the life in the seed, and it unfolds with a gentle slowness.
The Greeks understood the continuing beauty of a movement that mounted, that spread, that ended with a promise of rebirth.

~ Isadora Duncan

The only dance masters I could have were
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.

~ Isadora Duncan

The real American type can never be a ballet dancer.
The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.

~ Isadora Duncan

There are likewise three kinds of dancers: first, those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of impersonal and graceful arabesques; second, those who, by concentrating their minds, lead the body into the rhythm of a desired emotion, expressing a remembered feeling or experience. And finally, there are those who convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul.

~ Isadora Duncan

To dance is to live. What I want is a school of life.

~ Isadora Duncan

To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in art this is the mission of the dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.

~ Isadora Duncan

When I was sixteen, I danced before an audience without music.
At the end someone suddenly cried 'its Death and the Maiden'.
But that was not my intention; I was only endeavoring to express my first knowledge of the underlying tragedy in all seemingly joyous manifestation.
The dance according with my comprehension, should have been called 'Life and the Maiden'.

~ Isadora Duncan

Isadora [Duncan], by simplifying the dance, by cutting away all extraneous matters, such as technical virtuosity for its own sake, and the like, was able to focus our attention on the meaning of each work and the grace and appropriateness of the movements used to express that meaning.

~ Isadora Duncan biographer Frederika Blair

We had never imagined that what is deepest and most active in the life of the mind could be expressed by the hands, the fingers, the soles of the feet − not merely the face.

~ The Russian magazine Iskusstvo, 1905, in reference to Isadora Duncan

Life isn't choreographed. That's why I fall down a lot.

~ Sacha Duncan

I had certain physical limitations that made me change the choreography for myself or made me more interested in choreography only rather than dancing.
I have never been a person who wanted to just dance.
I have always been interested in developing for other people.

~ Katherine Dunham

Excerpts from Katherine Dunham works and a brief overview on her influence on Modern Dance.

If you dance, you dance because you have to.
Every dancer hurts, you know.

~ Katherine Dunham

I can do my dance, and I can feel one thing, and the audience member can see it and feel another, and there's nothing wrong...
It gives everybody a lot of room.

~ Douglas Dunn

Art always unites people − their hearts and nations around the world.

~ Kizlarkhon Dustmuhamedova

When you dance, your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor.
It's to enjoy each step along the way.

~ Wayne Dyer

To everything there is a season... a time to dance...

~ Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Dancers are the athletes of God.

~ Albert Einstein

Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune intoned in the distance by an invisible player.

~ Albert Einstein

There is only the dance.

~ T. S. Eliot

After the horse dance was over, it seemed that I was above the ground and did not touch it when I walked.

~ Black Elk

North Carolina Cherokee Native Americans perform the Cherokee War Dance while attending the First Peoples Festival in Montreal, Canada − 2006:

Dancing is very important to people who play music with a beat.
I think that people who don't dance, or who never did dance, don't really understand the beat... I know musicians who don't and never did dance, and they have difficulty communicating.

~ Duke Ellington, The World of Duke Ellington

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is not mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

~ Henry Havelock Ellis

Lose yourself in the music, the moment − you own it.

~ Eminem

I describe things in terms of body movements.
I dance a bit to describe what sort of movement it ought to make, and that's a good way of talking to musicians.
Particularly bass players.

~ Brian Eno

Many a maiden,
With white feet dancing light as air,
Made happy music through the gloom.

~ Euripides (The Trojan Women)

To dance, put your hand on your heart and listen to the sound of your soul.

~ Eugene Louis (Luigi) Faccuito

Dance is so important in the world.
It needs no language.
Our bodies speak a language of its own.

~ Robert (Bobby) Ibrahim Farrah

This point of being a mature artist (is) where realism replaces fantasy, where hopes never diminish, where the love of art is more passionate than ever.
And yet that which we love has brought us a lot of suffering, because the life of an artist is often uncompromising at times.
It’s brought us a lot of pain, a lot of angst. And yet no matter what it’s brought, the love of your craft will overpower it all. (Because when) you see life, you see dance.
You see feeling. We change the meaning of the words of our vocabulary with age.

~ Robert (Bobby) Ibrahim Farrah

You know when you are an artist when you evoke an emotional response – whether its love or hate. It's when you evoke no response that you have to worry.

~ Robert (Bobby) Ibrahim Farrah

After I stopped dancing, I was unable to listen to beautiful music.

~ Suzanne Farrell

Although we do come from a silent profession, it is important for us to verbalize what we want to say.
(As I tell my students): you could love someone all your life, but if you never say it how are they going to know?
There comes a point when you have to say what you mean, which makes you scream louder when you dance.

~ Suzanne Farrell

As soon as I hear music, something in me starts to vibrate.

~ Suzanne Farrell

This photo of Kristy Nilsson's Consumed - performed by Atlanta Ballet Centre Theatre - ran as an ad in Dance Magazine for two years, for Atlanta Ballet's Summer Intensive Program.

Dancers are a great breed of people.
And they really want to dance so you don't have to beg them to work.
However, dancers sometimes build walls around themselves because they are presenting themselves all the time: dancing is very much a confession.

~ Suzanne Farrell

Fifth positions, heads, musicality, energy.
Not technical things so much-getting your leg higher or doing more turns but things that would set you apart from other dancers.
The only way you can be different is to be yourself
If you don't find your spirit and reveal it, you just look like every other dancer.

~ Suzanne Farrell

Even though I am a professional, and I know what the steps are,
I don't quite know how I'm going to do them, because I haven't lived that moment yet.
I always feel very insecure and I get very excited.

~ Suzanne Farrell

I think it was important that I learned to love to dance eventually for its own sake, as opposed to wanting to be a ballerina.

~ Suzanne Farrell

I was very happy that I was as normal as possible before I went into serious dance.

~ Suzanne Farrell

It's a wonderful thing to be able to dance, tell your body what you want it to do.

~ Suzanne Farrell

Plié is the first thing you learn and the last thing you master.

~ Suzanne Farrell

My friends and I had taken dancing lessons, although none of us would ever admit it.
In those depression days, a friend of my mother was trying to make a living by teaching dancing in the evening, in an upstairs dance studio.
There was a back door to the place, and she arranged it so the young men could come up through the back way without being seen.

~ Richard Feynman

Inspiration is always within reach.
It is life's way of reaching out and inviting you to dance.

~ Flavia

It takes an athlete to dance, but an artist to be a dancer.

~ Shanna La Fleur

Dame Margot Fonteyn in a 1966 performance of Odette, Swan Lake Act II − age 47.

Dancing was something to be taken very seriously when engaged in and otherwise put out of mind.

~ Dame Margot Fonteyn

Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable.

~ Dame Margot Fonteyn

Great artists are people who find ways to be themselves in their art.
Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

~ Dame Margot Fonteyn

I explained it when I danced it.

~ Dame Margot Fonteyn

Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the first time

~ Dame Margot Fonteyn

The one important thing I have learnt over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking oneself seriously.
The first is imperative and the second disastrous.

~ Dame Margot Fonteyn

The mechanics of épaulement are what gives ballet its inner transitions.

~ William Forsythe

I think Balanchine and Robbins talk to God and when I call, he's out to lunch.

~ Bob Fosse

Bob Fosse, legendary choreographer, writer and director, won an Emmy for directing Liza with a Z, a Tony for directing Pippin, and an Academy Award for directing Cabaret − all in 1973.
He remains the only director in history to win the top three directing awards in one year. Fosse's superb
Rich Man's Frug number, The Aloof, from Sweet Charity:

Human beings are born with the instinct to express themselves through movement. Even before he could communicate with words, primitive man was dancing to the beat of his own heart.

~ Bob Fosse

We dance round in a ring and suppose.

~ Robert Frost

All dance has expression. If there is no expression, I prefer the circus.
The performers do more dangerous, more difficult technical things than we do.
But we are dancers. We have to express and we have to project.

~ Luis Fuente

Live a balanced life – learn some and think some, and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

~ Robert Fulghum

There are three steps you have to complete to become a professional dancer: learn to dance, learn to perform and learn how to cope with injuries.

~ D. Gere

She danced the dance of flames and fire, and the dance of swords and spears; she danced the dance of stars and the dance of space, and then she danced the dance of flowers in the wind.

~ Khalil Gibran, “The Wanderer”

They're not particular about whether you're playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it.

~ Dizzy Gillespie

Poise is the finest point of balance it is possible to attain, both mentally and physically. The various parts of the physique having been adjusted truly to the centre of gravity, poise lifts the whole being to a point so delicate that it almost defies definition... Poise, the great law of equilibrium, is that second in infinity when action ceases and there is rest.

~ Ruby Ginner

The actor should know how to use his body, and have every part of it completely under his command, that he may use the whole of himself to interpret any character in its own rhythm. Conversely the dancer should study emotion and character in order that his every movement may have meaning.

~ Ruby Ginner

... the ultimate aim of all dance must be to move the whole being together in harmony. Therefore, having made the body sensitive, let it be swept by rhythm: the rhythm of music, by moving to a good swinging simple tune; the rhythm of nature, by floating in the sea, and surrendering to the will of the waves; or by lying on the branches of a tree in the wind to feel its effortless swaying.
In this way the outer and the inner being will be harmonised...

~ Ruby Ginner

To dance without the help of any other art, to express, not another's thought or rhythm, but the vision of the artist's own spirit, that is the highest form of dance. The most exquisite expressions are those when the spirit only makes the song, and the dancer moves in a beauty of silence akin to the silence of the stars.

~ Ruby Ginner

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.

~ Rudolph Giuliani

Correction does much, but encouragement does more.
Encouragement after censure is as the sun after a shower.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

~ Emma Goldman

Samuel Goldwyn What kind of dancing does Martha Graham do?
His Associate Modern dancing.

Samuel Goldwyn I don't want her then; modern dancing is so old fashioned.

Birthing my baby boy was the essence of a contact dance.
For me, the key to a satisfying improvisational dance means abandoning my analytical mind and embracing the center of my intuitive self...
I danced my baby out into this world, and he danced with me.
Now, when we hold each other and move together through our days and nights
I feel the continuation of our original improv on the day he was born.

~ Lisa Gottlieb-Clark

A building – if it's beautiful – is the love of one man, he's made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that.

~ Martha Graham

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

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

Martha Graham's Flute of Krishna. Eastman Kodak's original
1926 color film, featuring Robert Ross and Evelyn Sabin, is remarkable both choreographically, and in the color and condition of the print.
Were that the work of Diaghilev's Ballet Russe were so preserved...

Dance is a song of the body.
Either of joy or pain.

~ Martha Graham

Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully, and with inevitability.

~ Martha Graham

Dance is the hidden language of the soul.

~ Martha Graham

Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal.
The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.

~ Martha Graham

Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful.
But the path to paradise of the achievement is not easier than any other.
There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep.
There are times of complete frustration, there are daily small deaths.

~ Martha Graham

Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.

~ Martha Graham

Every dance is kind of a fever chart, a graph of the heart.

~ Martha Graham

Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.

~ Martha Graham

First we have to believe, and then we believe.

~ Martha Graham

Freedom to a dancer means discipline.
That is what technique is for – liberation.

~ Martha Graham

Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

~ Martha Graham

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave.
In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.

~ Martha Graham

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

~ Martha Graham

It is difficult to see the great dance effects as they happen, to see them accurately, catch them fast in memory.
It is even more difficult to verbalize them for critical discussion.
The particular essence of a performance, its human sweep of articulate rhythm in space and in time has no specific terminology to describe it by.

~ Martha Graham

It's what I always wanted to do: to show the laughter, the fun – the joy of dance.

~ Martha Graham

It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer.
It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely.

~ Martha Graham

Learn by practice.

~ Martha Graham

Martha Graham, in her mid-to-late 60s, narrates over the Greek Chorus dance in her work Night Journey − touching on the meaning and significance of the Contraction, and of acknowledging and using gravity.
Graham appears center in the last few seconds, with Bertram Ross as Oedipus.

Movement never lies:lies: it is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.

~ Martha Graham

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

~ Martha Graham

No artist is ahead of his time. He is time; the others are just behind the times.

~ Martha Graham

Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
Great dancers are not great because of their technique; they are great because of their passion.

~ Martha Graham

Nothing is more revealing than movement.

~ Martha Graham

Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire.
Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

~ Martha Graham

Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.

~ Martha Graham

The body is a sacred garment.

~ Martha Graham

Theater is a verb before it is a noun...

~ Martha Graham

The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to the head; look at the way the hairline grows; think of all the little bones in your wrist.
It is a miracle.
And the dance is a celebration of that miracle.

~ Martha Graham

The spine is the tree of life. Respect it.

~ Martha Graham

The world I'm interested in is the one where things are not named.

~ Martha Graham

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 time, this expression is unique.

~ Martha Graham

Think of the magic of that foot... upon which your whole weight rests.
It’s a miracle and the dance...is a celebration of that miracle.

~ Martha Graham

To learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same.

~ Martha Graham

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

We learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same.
One becomes in some area an athlete of God.

~ Martha Graham

We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life.
This is the function of the American dance.

~ Martha Graham

Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.

~ Martha Graham

You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost.

~ Martha Graham

You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out.

~ Martha Graham

The Martha Graham Company on tour: Jacquelyn Elder's video 'Postcards from the Road'
− a too-brief, artfully-stylish documentary love letter of real life on the dancers' road.
Martha Graham Dance Company

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

The Gypsy Dancer appears to be free from the societal constraints.
The Gypsy as the Wild Woman archetype has magical powers, powers which make her dangerous. She is out-of-control, or at least beyond the control of the patriarchy. She evokes fear, especially in the subconscious where the Wild Woman lurks within us all.
We are afraid to let her out because we may loose control.

~ Laurel Victoria Gray

If life is a dance, then friends are the music.

~ Eva Gregory

I just know that when I go on stage, I give everything I have, not only my legs, not only my feet, not only my body.
I try to tell a story.
Sometimes I'm able to cry because I feel like it.
Sometimes I'm able to love because I feel like it.

~ Sylvie Guillem

Sylvie Guillem rehearses − and talks about − the pas de deux in
William Forsythe's In The Middle, Somewhat Elevated:

Technical perfection is insufficient.
It is an orphan without the true soul of the dancer.

~ Sylvie Guillem

The more you understand the music, the easier you can dance.

~ Orlando Gutinez

Don't carry a grudge.
While you're carrying the grudge, the other guy's out dancing.

~ Buddy Hackett

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

I’m very excited about dance and love it with a deep passion.
I also struggle, tire and become discouraged.
But what has always revived me... has been the rebirth of energy each time the creative process is awakened and artistic activity begins to unfold – even in some infinitesimal measure.

~ Anna Halprin

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

It is the process of regularly engaging in meaningful activity [class] that is truly rewarding to the dancer, not just the school recital or getting a glowing review in the New York Times. This intrinsic enjoyment is based on physical mastery, with little or no separation between who you are as a person and your ability to perform.

~ Linda H. Hamilton

To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.

~ Jack Handey

Capoeira: boxing − fighting− meets dance in Capoeira, a Brazilian dancing martial art fought to music. Capoeira was developed by enslaved Africans in the sixteenth century.
This exciting montage is called Capoeira Sul Da Bahai.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, dance is not a universal “language’ but many languages and dialects.
There are close to 6000 verbal languages, and probably that many dance languages.

~ Judith Lynne Hanna

The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.

~ Mata Hari

So many dancers rely on some sort of magic happening on the stage.
They never, for various reasons, work full out in rehearsal. That’s very uncreative.
They don’t discover the kinds of things that add up to a remarkable performance.

~ Benjamin Harkarvy

It is more important who they are as people and only then is it important who they are as dancers.

~ Marcia Haydée

Someone need not be perfect to be a great dancer – feeling a soul is more important than what the body can do.

~ Marcia Haydée

Learning to walk set you free.
Learning to dance gives you the greatest freedom of all: to express with your whole self the person you are.

~ Melissa Hayden

No move is too tricky, no spin too excessive. For my partner.

~ John Hayes

Aren't all ballets sexy? I think they should be.
I can think of nothing more kinky than a prince chasing a swan around all night.

~ Sir Robert Murray Helpmann

For though man has sorrow and grief in his soul, at once he forgets his dark thoughts and remembers not his troubles.
Such is the holy gift of Terpsichore.

~ Hesiod, 7th century BC

So you can't dance? Not at all? Not even one step?
How can you say that you've taken any trouble to live when you won't even dance?

~ Hermann Hesse

I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.

~ Hillel

He who cannot dance puts the blame on the floor.

~ Hindu proverb

Graham Principal, Stuart Hodes, on Martha Graham in creative flow:

If she felt you were resistant when she was creating, she'd go at you like a savage animal.

~ Stuart Hodes

Dances without purpose have false starts and stops.

~ Hanya Holm (Johanna Eckert)

The more you are challenged the more strength you gain.
The strength and quiet you have are concentrated during conflict, and if you overcome the conflict it will buoy you up.

~ Hanya Holm (Johanna Eckert)

Showing off the body or the emotions is tacky.

~ Hanya Holm (Johanna Eckert)

Simplicity is a delight.

~ Hanya Holm (Johanna Eckert)

I grew up with six brothers.
That's how I learned to dance – waiting for the bathroom.

~ Bob Hope

To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak.

~ Derrick "Suwaima" Davis, Hopi/Chocktaw Indian

Dance for yourself.
If someone else understands, good.
If not, then no matter – go right on doing what you love.

~ Louis Horst

Oh, 'tis jesting, dancing, drinking
Spins the heavy world around.

~ A. E. Housman

The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing...
There are times when the simple dignity of movement can fulfill the function of a volume of words.
There are movements which impinge upon the nerves with a strength that is incomparable, for movement has power to stir the senses and emotions, unique in itself.
This is the dancer's justification for being, and his reason for searching further for deeper aspects of his art.

~ Doris Humphrey

Nothing so clearly and inevitably reveals the inner man than movement and gesture.
It is quite possible, if one chooses, to conceal and dissimulate behind words or paintings or statues or other forms of human expression, but the moment you move you stand revealed, for good or ill, for what you are.

~ Doris Humphrey

Remember that dance has a dimension beyond the physical.
The body – as imperfect as it always is – is only part of the picture.
Your energy, the quality of your movement, your feeling about the world, your dance spirit – that is what we see under the lights.

~ Mary Ellen Hunt

The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing...
There are times when the simple dignity of movement can fulfill the function of a volume of words.
There are movements which impinge upon the nerves with a strength that is incomparable, for movement has power to stir the senses and emotions, unique in itself.
This is the dancer's justification for being, and his reason for searching further for deeper aspects of his art.

~ Doris Humphrey

Nothing so clearly and inevitably reveals the inner man than movement and gesture.
It is quite possible, if one chooses, to conceal and dissimulate behind words or paintings or statues or other forms of human expression, but the moment you move you stand revealed, for good or ill, for what you are.

~ Doris Humphrey

Remember that dance has a dimension beyond the physical.
The body – as imperfect as it always is – is only part of the picture.
Your energy, the quality of your movement, your feeling about the world, your dance spirit – that is what we see under the lights.

~ Mary Ellen Hunt

He who makes a mistake is still our friend; he who adds to or shortens a melody is still our friend; but he who violates a rhythm unawares can no longer be our friend.

~ Ishaq Ibn Ibrahim (musician: 767-850 AD)

The physical language of the body is so much more powerful than words.

~ Bill Irwin

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, in Geisha, A Life

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

Michael Jackson is an extraordinarily talented dancer − exclusive of his status as a singer, superstar and philanthropist, or his endlessly troubled personal life.
All the more astonishing: he was self-trained; he never studied dance, save for studying others on stage and television... and practicing.
These two MJ videos are more mini-theatrical productions than rock-videos, produced by film directors: Jon Landis, Thriller, and −
Martin Scorsese, Bad, (1987):

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

Bad and Thriller (1982) rank as the best dance rock-video productions of all time.
The full-length Thriller is 14 minutes; this extract is 9 minutes.
{A 2 minute excerpt of just the longest dance sequence is below.

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

A two minute dance excerpt from Michael Jackson and Jon Landis' Thriller video.

People tend to look at dancers like we are these little jewels, little cardboard cut-outs, and yet we have blood and guts and go through hell.

~ Susan Jaffe

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds.
A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

~ Clive James

Dance is about never-ending aspiration.

~ Judith Jamison

Dance is bigger than the physical body.
Think bigger than that.
When you extend your arm, it doesn't stop at the end of your fingers, because you're dancing bigger than that: you're dancing spirit.

~ Judith Jamison

People come to see beauty, and I dance to give it to them.

~ Judith Jamison

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

~ S. Janaki

All dancing girls are nineteen years old.

~ Japanese proverb

'Tis not enough that ev'ry Stander-by
No glaring Errors in your Steps can 'spy;
The Dance and Music must so nicely meet,
Each Note must seem an Echo to your Feet;
A nameless Grace must in each Movement dwell,
Which words can ne'er express, nor Precepts tell...

~ Soame Jenyns

The trained dancer must not only have grace and elegance, but also the leap of an Olympic hurdler, the balance of a tight-rope walker and panther-like strength and agility.

~ Camilla Jessel

On the plié and rélevé is based the whole structure of the classical ballet.

~ Christian Johansson
Principal teacher at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must first learn to do with diligence.

~ Samuel Johnson

The body is a reservoir of all sorts of tensions and dark forces.
And it's also the potential source of amazing energy.
This thing wants to live. It is a powerful engine.
The brain (is) a reservoir of images, dreams, fears, associations, language.
And its potential we can't even begin to understand.
Movement begins to negotiate the distance between the brain and the body and it can be surprising what we learn about each other.

~ Bill T. Jones

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

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

~ Deborah Jowitt

If you want to dance seriously, do.
You must think about it day and night, dream about it – desire it.

~ Christa Justus

Creative self-expression through dance should not be a territory solely and defensively occupied by professional dancers; everyone is a dancer!
The pleasure to be found in dancing and a pride in one's own movement should be the sole criteria – and not physical achievement and technical perfection.

~ Thomas Kaltenbrunner

Western civilisation tends to couple artistic expression with accomplishment and productivity. Especially with dance, the criteria for beauty and worth are technical perfection and virtuosity. But in order for us to express ourselves we don't need to be the 'perfect' dancer, on the contrary − it is about the joy of dancing.

~ Thomas Kaltenbrunner

Dance has been, so to speak, democratised: dancing has rid itself of the aristocratic attitude (professional versus amateur) and from extreme physical demands.
Dance is judged not by its technical perfection but by its ability to communicate, the tangible bond between performer and audience.

~ Thomas Kaltenbrunner

Your body is the voice that sings what there are no words for, the instrument that plays the music of your soul.

~ Katisha

Most people think of ballet as children in little tutus.
They don't know it is sweat, blood and tears as well!

~ Nan Keating

One can never consent to creep when one feels the impulse to soar.

~ Helen Keller

I'd studied dance in Chicago every summer and taught it all winter, and I was well-rounded.
I wasn't worried about getting a job on Broadway.
In fact, I got one the first week.

Gene Kelly

Gene: singing.... and dancing... in the rain.
Gene Kelly-Singing In The Rain

I got started dancing because I knew it was one way to meet girls.

~ Gene Kelly

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

Gene and his all-time favorite partner...
Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly

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

The incomparable, legendary dance partnership − Fred and Ginger in 1935:

My reverence for improvisational dance comes from those sacred moments in in which I have felt forces deep within my body and psyche rise up together as partners.
There is a feeling of humility and truth, and it is obvious what is to be done.

~ Keriac

When it comes to the requirements for pleasing an audience, all the knowledge and instruction and apparatus in the world is worth less than one ounce of soul.

~ Ottawa Keyes

I danced with passion to spite the music.

~ Gelsey Kirkland

The dance goes on forever. So shall I. So shall we.

~ Gelsey Kirkland

When you are on stage you are having an affair with three thousand people.

~ Gelsey Kirkland

Gelsey Kirkland, whom Baryshnikov called the greatest ballerina of her generation, as Clara in Act I of American Ballet Theatre's 1977 television production of Baryshnikov's Nutcracker.

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

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

If one had to define one essential gift with which a dancer needs to be endowed, there might be a rush of answers. A beautiful body, grace of line, graciousness of spirit, joy in the work, ability to please, unswerving integrity, relentless ambition towards some abstract perfection. Certainly all these factors determine a dancer’s character, and every element exists in some combination within the performing artist’s presence.

~ Lincoln Kirstein

A weak first step transmits nothing.

~ Mai Kishikawa, "Shall We Dansu"

Many dances leave me untouched, unmoved.
A dancer should be able to raise an arm and make someone cry – in the way Isadora Duncan did.
It is a necessity for any art to move you.

~ Pauline Koner

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

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it.
That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Every teacher will tell you that you cannot dance classical technique with perfection, there is no such thing, there is no way. So you have to adapt the technique to your abilities or to your deficiencies.
Learn to cheat!

~ Jiří Kylián

The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time...
Both space and time, as perceptible factors, disappear almost entirely in the dance illusion.

~ Susanne K. Langer

We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive... and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.

~ D. H. Lawrence

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon.

~ Edward Lear

Dancing is the coordination, the musicality, all of that combined into one feeling. It's not about a pirouette. The people who don't know ballet, who are there that night maybe for the first time aren't going to know 2 pirouettes from 3 pirouettes.
They're going to be left with an impression and that impression, hopefully, is of movement and of dance – of a soul feeling the music.

~ Tina LeBlanc

Never trust spiritual leader who cannot dance.

~ Mark Lee, screenwriter − as Mr. Miyagi, "The Next Karate Kid"

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

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

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

~ Maris Liepa

Dancers aren’t pompous; they’re too tired.

~ José Limón

Thousands of emotions well up inside me through out the day.
They are released when I dance.

~ Abraham Lincoln

To dance is to challenge the body which is also the self.
To generate an action which has a force of its own and allow the movement to penetrate the inner sensibilities, or to calculate the action and try to tune out – this is difficult, perhaps impossible.

~ Katherine Litz

Football isn't a contact sport; it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.

~ Vince Lombardi

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

~ Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Let go of her like the heart is being ripped from your chest.

~ Jennifer Lopez in "Shall We Dance"

The teacher doesn't teach, not really. The teacher offers stimulation and ways in which the person can educate himself or herself.
At best the teacher wakes up that person and makes a person hungry.

~ Murray Louis

Dancers work and live from the inside.
They drive themselves constantly producing a glow that lights not only themselves but audience after audience.

~ Murray Louis

Dancing is as old as love.

~ Lucian

The lips are closed, for the dancer has plenty of other voices at his service.

~ Lucian

Fred Astaire's great achievement was that instead of saying it he danced it – the main emotional moments [in his films] would be told through dance.

~ Baz Luhrman, Director − Strictly Ballroom

Filmed in one shot, and considered by many the best tap dance sequence ever filmed:
Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, in 1940. Brief narration by Frank Sinatra.
The Good Old Days

Striving for a connection with the audience is essential because you are in the moment it is a give and take relationship.
Catching someone's eye during a performance makes it more special.

~ Aubrey Lynch

To touch, to move, to inspire.
This is the true gift of dance.

~ Aubrey Lynch

Dance is an art that imprints on the soul. It is with you every moment, it expresses itself in everything you do.

~ Shirley MacLaine

When come the lights shining on you from above. You are a performer.
You forget all you learned, the process of technique, the fear, the pain, you even forget who you are you become one with the music, the lights, indeed one with the dance.

~ Shirley MacLaine

Dancers are an admirable bunch of people.
The way they work. The stress is extraordinary.
It's a difficult career. I think it's hellish; the fact that they are over the hill as they're emotionally maturing.
That calls for a terrific strength of character.

~ Lady D. MacMillan

Dance has to unfold with the grace of a tree giving out leaves, flowers and then tiny fruit.
Nothing so beautiful can be done in haste.

~ Pt. Birju Maharaj

Always the question for dancers is: Can we fly?

~ Jean-Christophe Maillot

Whoever finds that they're not prepared to give their all should draw the inescapable conclusion from that and stop.

~ Jean-Christophe Maillot

Even the ears must dance.

~ Natalya Makarova

Versatile American Ballet Theatre star Natalya Makarova, perhaps the definitive
Odile/Odette for Swan Lake, won a Tony Award for her Slaughter On 10th Avenue performance in the 1983 Broadway revival of Rodger's & Hart's On Your Toes.

The expression should come from within oneself, conveying the spiritual – something between earth and heaven.
And if one runs, one should not seem to touch the ground.

~ Natalya Makarova

When you are dancing with your partner, for that two and a half minutes, you are in love with each other. You're corresponding with each other by the moves that you make. It's a love affair, between you and your partner and the music. You feel the music, you feel your partner, she feels you and she feels the music. So there the three of you are together.
You've got a triangle, you know. Which one do you love best?

~ Frankie Manning

Poetry is like dancing.
Not all of us can be ballet dancers, but all of us dance.
Everyone has a poet inside of him struggling to get out.

~ Marks and Spencer

Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys. but to move an audience in such a role, to hear in the applause that unmistakable note which breaks through good theatre manners and comes from the heart, is to feel that you have won through to life itself.
Such pleasure does not vanish with the fall of the curtain, but becomes part of one's own life.

~ Dame Alice Markova

Dancing should look easy; like an optical illusion.
It should seem effortless. When you do a difficult variation, the audience is aware that it is demanding and that you have the power and strength to do it. But in the end, when you take your bow, you should look as if you were saying, ‘Oh, it was nothing. I could do it again.’

~ Bruce Marks

The dance exists exclusively in terms of the movement of the body, not only in the obvious sense that the dancer moves, but also in the less apparent sense that its response in the spectator is likewise a matter of body movement.

~ John Martin

Wives are people who feel they don't dance enough.

~ Groucho Marx

The ballet.
I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life.
It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion.
So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

Gypsy dance is never just to be dancing. Instead it seems to be a part of an immense and significant non-verbal vocabulary of Gypsy communication and behavior.
It is at the heart of an essential transformation, a transcended state, an escape from the realities of their daily lives to a more satisfying state of mind.

~ Kate McGowen

I started Ballet at a very young age and I was captivated immediately. It became my voice, means to overcome those final barriers to expressing myself. Letting myself fly free.
The more experience I have, the more I get to know myself.

~ Amanda McKerrow

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute.
Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.

~ Margaret Mead

The Marquesan girls dance all over; not only do their feet dance, but their arms, hands, fingers, ay, their very eyes seem to dance in their heads.

~ Herman Melville

Technique – bodily control – must be mastered only because the body must not stand in the way of the soul's expression.

~ La Meri

We have come to consider the word technique applicable only to movements that are so showy as to approach acrobatics...

~ La Meri

Ballet: it's to be there and to experience every day, every minute, the ballets, the performances, growing-up, getting older, getting better. It's my world!

~ Monique Meunier

If you dance with your heart your body will follow.

~ Mia Michaels

Bleeding feet will bond us.

~ Liza Minnelli

Liza at 26, performs Bob Fosse's choreography for Cabaret's Mein Herr.

He [Gene Kelly] once told me dancing was a man's game, as much of a sport as baseball itself. And he made us believe that.
He changed our minds and suddenly, all of America wanted to dance just like Gene Kelly.

~ Liza Minnelli

Come & trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic toe.

~ John Milton

Dancing is a way to meet people – you don't have to speak a word of their language – you communicate with your bodies.

~ Pimpa Mingkwan

Once you begin improvising, allow your body to go with the flow of energy that comes forth.
Dance is a nonverbal experience, and excessive thinking blocks the body's energy flow.

~ Sandra Cerny Minton

All the ills of mankind,
All the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books,
All the political blunders,
All the failures of the great leaders,
Have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.

~ Molière or Jean Baptiste Poquelin; from a play

Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.

~ Angela Monet

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

~ Michel de Montaigne

Life's a dance you learn as you go.

~ John Michael Montgomery

The dance, more than any other art, lives through the genius of its interpreters.

~ Lillian Moore

If you hear a different drummer – dreamer, take a chance...
The road you choose to travel means the difference in the dance.

~ Daniel Morgan

Ballet class is like Life Lessons 101. You learn some of life's most important lessons here that you will carry with you forever.

~ Joanne H. Morscher

Do not deny yourself the opportunity for a spontaneous exchange between the musician and yourself. Let the music come inside of you and dance that music. It is this most intimate musical self and your most intimate dancing self. Feel the music. Fill yourself with it...
This is the art of takseem.

~ Artemis Mourat

Hold your hands out gently. Ask others to do the same. See how different each person looks. Each person has their own unique and natural beauty.
Use this natural beauty when you dance. Respect your individuality.

~ Artemis Mourat

People in the audience, when they've watched the dance, should feel like they've accomplished something, that they've gone on a journey.

~ Paul Mercurio

I'm not interested in a group of people with some sort of incredible homogeny, a group that can do the movement I want.
I'm interested in people who can take the movement somewhere.

~ Graeme Murphy

It's the emotional trigger points that are important to me because I know if I could believe in the characters and try and imagine how they felt then I'd be able to do something quite honest.

~ Graeme Murphy

Some are less giving, others are more reticent and you actually have to create for them.
Others have within them the next step.

~ Graeme Murphy

Dance is about movement and can be an art, but it's also about communication
– with yourself, as much as with other people.

~ Jan Murray

Without dance I cannot feel my soul, hear my heart, or see my dreams.

~ Nahara

Dance in the Middle East celebrates war and peace, birth and other passages of life; affirms the solidarity of the family, the tribe, the people; even effects oneness with God, or the All in the Muslim dhikr and hadra ceremonies.
The line between spectator and participant often disappears; dancers, musicians and audience are interchangeable when the call of the blood breaks down social barriers. In the ancient Middle East, and among the Arabs before Islam, the blood was the life, and the blood has it's rhythm, and the quam –
'The People', the Arab Tribe – dances the dahiyya to the rhythm of the blood.

~ Edwina Nearing

We were tap-dancers but we put more style into it, more bodywork, instead of just footwork.

~ Harold Nicholas

A fabulous tap dancing tribute to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson featuring
Sammy Davis, Jr. and Gregory Hines, excerpted from the 2001 film Bojangles.

Dance is the medium that ties together modern cultures with those that are fading, and a form that appeals to both the wealthy and the poor.

~ Madeline Nichols

At present I am light, now I fly, now I see myself below me, now a god dances through me.

{A présent je suis léger, à présent je vole, à présent je me vois moi-même au-dessous de moi, à présent un dieu danse à travers moi.}

~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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 Wilhelm Nietzsche

I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might more wish to be than a good dancer.
For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art; finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his divine service.

~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

I should not believe in a God who does not dance.

~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
(also attributed to Angela Monet and George Carlin)

We should consider every day lost during which we have not danced at least once.

~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The Faun is Me.

~ Vaslav Nijinsky
Wacław Fomich Niżyński
Вацлав Фомич Нижинский

Hommage to Vaslav Nijinsky, with brief excerpts from
Le Spectre de la Rose, Jeux, Scheherazade (as the Golden
Slave), Le Sacre du Printemps {The Rite of Spring}, Petrushka and L'après-midi d'un faune {Afternoon of a Faun}.

I have come to the conclusion that it is better to be silent than to speak.

~ Vaslav Nijinsky

A cat is never a presentation, but an innocent happening.

~ Alwin Nikolais

Basic dance – and I should qualify the word basic – is primarily concerned with motion.
So immediately you will say but the basketball player is concerned with motion.
That is so – but he is not concerned with it primarily. His action is a means towards an end beyond motion. In basic dance the motion is its own end – that is, it is concerned with nothing beyond itself.

~ Alwin Nikolais

Dance is advanced body language.

~ Kristy Nilsson © 1995

Dance is fluent body language.

~ Kristy Nilsson © 2007

Dancing is the world's favorite metaphor.

~ Kristy Nilsson © 1999

Eddie Uehara created two, short inspirational Dance Quotes videos, and chose two of Kristy's quotes. MTV's DanceLife requested permission to use Eddie's video. Eddie Uehara's Dance Quote:

Eddie's newest short video, Dance is Life, is further down the page... and quietly wonderful.

Dance is the world's most famous metaphor.

~ Kristy Nilsson © 1999

Dance – no translation needed.

~ Kristy Nilsson © 1999

It is not the movements that make a dance beautiful, it is the emotions that inspired the movements that make it beautiful.

Kristy Nilsson © 1999

Musicality is when the dancers' movements appear to create the music – and not the other way around.

~ Kristy Nilsson © 2002

The easiest part should be the best part; don't ignore the little steps.

~ Kristy Nilsson © 2006

Dance is the poetic baring of the soul through motion.

~ Scott Nilsson © 2001

Life is better with a little drama in it.

~ Scott Nilsson © 2000

Turn-out: Verb or Noun?

~ Antony Noa

I will make an average man into an average dancer, provided he be passably well made. I will teach him how to move his arms and legs, to turn his head.
I will give him steadiness, brilliancy and speed; but I cannot endow him with that fire and intelligence, those graces and that expression of feeling which is the soul of true pantomime.

~ Jean Georges Noverre

When the music and dance create with accord... their magic captivates both the heart and the mind.

~ Jean Georges Noverre

A pas de deux is a dialogue of love.
How can there be conversation if one partner is dumb?

~ Rudolf Nureyev
Rudolf Xämät ulı Nuriev
Рудольф Хаметович Нуриев

Rudolf Nureyev (also Nuriev and Noureev), widely held as one of the three greatest male ballet dancers of the 20th Century − along with
Baryishnikov and Vaslav Nijinsky, appearing on The Muppet Show for a pas de deux with Miss Piggy (actually Royal Ballet Soloist Graham Fletcher).

Each time I try to go into society, it doesn't work. It's artificial,
I will do it as a performance and get out as fast as I can. I don't fit.

~ Rudolf Nureyev

My feet are dogs.

~ Rudolf Nureyev

Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration.

~ Rudolf Nureyev

When I miss class for one day, I know it. When I miss class for two days, my teacher knows it.
When I miss class for three days, the audience knows it.

~ Rudolf Nureyev

We danced with one body, one soul... For me,
Margot is my family. She is all I have, only her.

~ Rudolf Nureyev on his partnership with Dame Margot Fonteyn

Nureyev's Romeo to Fonteyn's Juliet − revealing the exuberance of their partnership.

Birds use their wings to fly, because they do not know how to dance.

~ Zeynep Okcu

If somebody asks, "What is a dance?" how can you define it?
But you can dance and you can know the inner feel of it.

~ Osho

When movement becomes ecstatic, then this is dance.
When the movement is so total there is no ego, then it is dance.

~ Osho

It is a temptation to exploit one's technique because an audience is easily reached this way, but they cannot be moved by technique alone and to move an audience is the role of dance as an art.

~ Alla Ossipenko

All great stars are competitive. That's a sign of a true artist – if you don't have the fire of competition deep down inside, you're never going to achieve anything.
You have to want to be king of the heap.

~ Camille Paglia

My experience with dancers has been very peculiar.
They generally like a studio photo shoot before their actual performances.
I sometimes wonder how they are more careful about their costumes during the shoot.
It is interesting to see them adjust to their surroundings to get the best shots, they would get restless, put music on to give the best poses.
The same evening you see them so involved in their art form, oblivious of costumes and makeup.

~ Avinash Pascricha, photographer

Learning ballet is wonderful for children even if they never become dancers.
It is wonderful because it teaches discipline, grace, and manners.

~ Anna Paskevska

To dance is to give oneself up to the rhythms of all life.

~ Dr. Maya V. Patel

Classical ballet is so unforgiving.

~ Francis Patrellel

To dance, above all, is to enter into the motions of life.
It is an action, a movement, a process.
The dance of life is not so much a metaphor as a fact; to dance is to know oneself alone and to celebrate it.

~ Sherman Paul

After I perform, I hope the audience is excited, inspired, and taken away from their everyday grind or work.
Perhaps even inspired enough to get up and dance themselves.

~ Lenore Pavlakos

I danced from the moment I could stand.

~ Anna Pavlova
Anna Pavlovna Pavlova
Анна Павловна Павлова

Master technique and then forget about it and be natural.

~ Anna Pavlova

No one can arrive from being talented alone.
God gives talent; work transforms talent into genius.

~ Anna Pavlova

Where there is no heart there is no art.

~ Anna Pavlova

If I can not dance, I shall die!

~ Anna Pavlova

Anna Pavlova died from pneumonia on tour at near 50:
"the night after she died her company performed and at the end of the show they played the Dying Swan with the spotlight floating across the empty stage where Pavlova would have danced."
Her signature performance of Mikhail Fokine's Dying Swan in 1907:

Anna Pavlova was looking at her swan costume as she was dying.
Her final words:
Get my swan costume ready.

~ Anna Pavlova

Hence it is from the representation of things spoken by means of posture and gesture that the whole of the art of dance has been elaborated.

~ Plato

The Dance, of all the arts, is the one that most influences the soul.
Dancing is divine in its nature and is the gift of God.

~ Plato

...the instinctive desire to explain words by gestures of the entire body.

~ Plato (concerning dancing)

To sing well and to dance is to be well educated.

~ Plato

Maya Plisetskaya to Gennady Smakov regarding KGB persecution she suffered while Prima Ballerina Assoluta at the Bolshoi Ballet.
The only weapon I had was my dancing.
With that I fought like a general without an army.
If I could have saved all the energy I wasted on my struggle it would have sufficed me to cover a dozen ballets.

~ Maya Plisetskaya
Maya Mikhailovna Plisetskaya
Майя Михайловна Плисецкая

Above, Maya Plisetskaya performed a tribute to Isadora Duncan at age 70, dancing − and appearing − decades younger.
Maya Plisetskaya in Act III of Sleeping Beauty.

A poor dancer will be disturbed even by the hem of her skirt.

~ Polish Proverb

And men must walk at least before they dance.

~ Alexander Pope

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

~ Alexander Pope

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.

~ Ezra Pound

Dancing serves no necessary use, no profitable, laudable, or pious end at all.
It is only from the inbred pravity, vanity, wantonness, incontinency, pride, profaneness, or madness of man's depraved nature.

~ Puritan William Prynne

The way to heaven is too steep, too narrow for men to dance in and keep revel rout. No way is large or smooth enough for capering rousters, for jumping, skipping, dancing dames but that broad, beaten, pleasant road that leads to hell.
The gate of heaven is too narrow for whole rounds, whole troops of dancers to march in together.

~ Puritan William Prynne

Dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt.
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.

~ William W. Purkey

Purkey later added an additional final line:

And speak from the heart to be heard.

Frequently misattributed - notably to Mark Twain - and misquoted as,
"Dance like no one is watching," and "Dance like nobody's watching" -
Purkey's poem was incorporated in lyrics of Come From The Heart − by Susannah Clark and Richard Leigh.

Ballet is a dance executed by the human soul.

~ Alexander Pushkin

Dance, like music and other arts, helps us rise above the beast in ourselves.

~ Sudharani Raghupathy

Forget the dancer, the center of the ego.
Become the dance.
Then the dancer disappears and only the dance remains.
Then the dancer is the dance.
There is no dancer separate from dance, no dance separate from the dancer.

~ Acharya Rajneesh

My long association with classical dance forms makes it difficult for me to change and accept radical transformations.
On further thought, I feel change is inevitable and dance is no exception.
Modernity need not be viewed as a thing to be confronted.
Many a time certain aspects of modernity have helped regeneration.
Hence, the introduction of new conceptualisation and innovative techniques are necessary for dance to grow. However not at the cost of tradition.
Branching off or grafting need not necessarily involve uprooting the tree.
... the introduction of new forms need not be a cause for concern.
I believe that ultimately it is the core values that enable art forms to survive.

~ Leela Ramanathan

Listen to the music.

~ Hossam Ramzy

I knew I was completely missing out many things but I also knew that was the price I had to pay for what would truly make me happy, so it was not a painful sacrifice.
But I was very conscious of what I was missing.
I accepted that and took joy in it.

~ Anthony Randazzo

Sometimes I gave conflicting emotions because it's been going on for so long now, but then I see somebody dancing real well and it just comes back like an old love.
The flame ignites again.

~ Ann Reinking

Ann Reinking performs There Will Be Some Changes Made from All That Jazz, from the fancifully theatrical 1979 film-bio of Broadway legend Bob Fosse.

There is a general decline of taste for classical dance,ce, which is neglected and this must be developed from the grassroots.
There is so much of razzle-dazzle... that classical dance suffers.

~ Kanak Rele

All the gestures of children are graceful; the reign of distortion and unnatural attitudes commences with the introduction of the dancing master.

~ Sir Joshua Reynolds

My hope remains to shed light, provoke thought, entertain, and move through dance.

~ Dwight Rhoden

The gymnasium of running, walking on stilts, climbing, etc. stells and makes hardy single powers and muscles, but dancing, like a corporeal poesy, embellishes, exercises, and equalizes all the muscles at once.

~ Jean Paul Richter
("Stell": to place firmly in position.)

You get obsessed by dancing there seems to be no choice.
Sometimes you are miserable, sometimes you are floating in elation.
But you can't leave it alone until the passion is spun out.
If you are lucky you try not to hate it when you leave.

~ Lisa Rinehart

I remember looking around in company class and seeing all the faces I would later watch twice a week onstage and realizing that they were normal people and had to take ballet class too!
It was definitely a big adjustment being at the theater 10 to 12 hours a day.

~ Jennifer Ringer

Dance, in its broadest sense, is a physical acknowledgment of the rhythm of the universe and of our own lives.

~ Carol Roan

You danced! (pointing to the dancers)

And you didn't! (pointing to the audience)

~ Mario Robau

Dance is like life, it exists as you're flitting through it, and when it's over, it's done.

~ Jerome Robbins

From the 43rd Annual Tony Awards in 1989: excerpt from the new Tony-award winning show Jerome Robbins Broadway − West Side Story's Dance at the Gym:

I told you to sell it, not give it away.

~ Jerome Robbins

Either you do the pirouette or you shoot yourself.
One or the other, but something must happen.

~ Monet Robier

Everyday there must be something I can't do, otherwise it's boring.

~ Monet Robier

It's the easiest things that cause the most problems.

~ Monet Robier

Dancing's just a conversation between two people.
Talk to me.

~ Steven Rogers, "Hope Floats"

The people who do not dance are dead.

~ Jerry Rose of Dance Caravan

Graham Principal, Bertram Ross, on seeing Martha Graham dance the first time:

It was the greatest revelation of my life.
I couldn't believe that the human body was capable of making visible all those feelings you had inside you and couldn't put into words.

~ Bertram Ross

Dance is movement, is action, and like all action, it reveals us to ourselves in the doing.

~ Gabrielle Roth

It's beautiful to dance alone, beautiful to dance with your children, beautiful to dance with your friends, beautiful to dance with your lover, or even collectively.
But the ultimate dance is the one we do by ourselves, when we make ourselves known to God.

~ Gabrielle Roth

The self is a dance, constantly in motion.

~ Gabrielle Roth

When we give ourselves over completely to the spirit of the dance, it becomes a prayer.

~ Gabrielle Roth

I was a ballerina.
I had to quit after I injured a groin muscle.
It wasn't mine.

~ Rita Rudner

In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.

~ Rumi

Whosoever knoweth the power of the dance, dwelleth in God.

~ Rumi

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.

~ Curt Sachs

A solid, confident and well-founded sense of self worth is one of the most attractive features a woman can have.
It is completely independent of physical form, and dance is one of many avenues to developing that.

~ Aziza Sa'id

But in reality we are accompanied by the whole dancing universe.

~ Ruth St. Denis

I have performed for thousands when they found me exotic, the vogue, daring, but I have danced, at any given time, for about ten people...
They were the ones that left the theater forever different from the way they were when they came in.
All of my long, long life, I have danced for those ten.

~ Ruth St. Denis

I see dance being used as communication between body and soul, to express what it too deep, too fine for words.

~ Ruth St. Denis

It is not a question of who dances but of who or what does not dance.

~ Ruth St. Denis

It is this mission of the dancer to contribute to the betterment of all mankind.

~ Ruth St. Denis

It was then that my religious consciousness emerged to flower years afterward into definite forms of religious dancing in which there is no sense of division between spirit and flesh, religion and art.

~ Ruth St. Denis

The Gods have meant
That I should dance
And in some mystic hour
I shall move to unheard rhythms
Of the cosmic orchestra of heaven
And you will know the language
Of my wordless poems
And will come to me
For that is why I dance.

~ Ruth St. Denis

Ruth St. Denis − teacher of and profound influence on
Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Wiedman; from a National Museum of Dance project celebrating her legacy.

The real message of the Dance opens up the vistas of life to all who have the urge to express beauty with no other instrument than their own bodies, with no apparatus and no dependence on anything other than space.

~ Ruth St. Denis

We should realize in a vivid and revolutionary sense that we are not in our bodies but our bodies are in us.

~ Ruth St. Denis

When you are fifty, you're neither young nor old; you're just uninteresting. When you are sixty, and still dancing, you become something of a curiosity. And boy! if you hit seventy, and can still get a foot off the ground, you're phenomenal!

~ Ruth St. Denis

You and I are but specks of that rhythmic urge which is Brahma, which is Allah, which is God.

~ Ruth St. Denis

Talk about dance?
Dance is not something to talk about.
Dance is to dance.

~ Peter Saint James

A teacher must possess many qualities – firmness and softness, patience and perseverance and sturdiness...
But above all is love for children, desire to train them up, all of them, both week and strong.
And, creativity in one's approach to one's task is also above all...

~ Lyudmila Sakharova

Dancing up the full moon
Round some fair new altar
Trample the soft blossoms of fine grass.

~ Sappho

The real self of an artiste lies in art, so when an artiste performs, all the pain, trauma and tension get released through art, be it dancing, painting, singing, writing or even martial arts.

~ Mrinalini Sarabhai

There is no other knowledge, no other learning, no other art... that is not found in dance.

~ Natya Sastra

Dance, like music, knows no geographical boundaries, no linguistic barriers and no racial divisions.
All walls crumble where art is concerned.
It is a great unifying and integrating force.

~ Vempatti Chinna Satyam

To those of us with real understanding, dancing is the only pure art form.

~ Charles Schulz as Snoopy, Peanuts

Snoopy dances to Woodstock's whistling in Snoopy Come Home, 1972:

To live is to dance, to dance is to live.

~ Charles Schulz as Snoopy, Peanuts

Art is something vital.
It may be beautiful or even hideous, but it must be deep and strong in its expression.
Art is not, and should not be mechanical.
It must always be alive.

~ Igor Schwezoff

There are two basic elements to classical ballet. They are quality and quantity. Quantity is how much a dancer can physically do… the element that gives an artist the freedom to concentrate on quality, while quality is how he or she does it…quality of movement… the most difficult phase… requires long and arduous training.

~ Igor Schwezoff

To dance is to share – to share is to teach.

~ Selayma

There was never a merry world since the fairies left off dancing.

~ John Selden

Maya (was) able to absorb within a month what some other dancers cannot do in a decade.

~ Marina Semyonova on Maya Plisetskaya

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

~ Rod Serling

Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion.
You must set yourself on fire.

~ Fred Sero

He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May.

~ William Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor

She is your treasure, she must have a husband;
I must dance barefoot on her wedding day ...

~ William Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew

A star danced, and under that was I born.

~ William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

When you do dance,
I wish you a wave o' the sea, that you might ever do.

~ William Shakespeare, Winter's Tale

Wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly modest as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance, and with his bad legs, falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave.

~ William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

All the world is a stage... and life is the dance there performed.

~ Half Shakespeare & half anonymous

Just like it is rare to get a good guru, it is equally rare for gurus to get a good disciple.
Every performer is not an able guru and vice-versa.
Not everyone has the kind of patience required for teaching.

~ Pt Shiv Kumar Sharma

Dance communicates man’s deepest, highest and most truly spiritual thoughts and emotions far better than words, spoken or written.

~ Ted Shawn

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

~ Ted Shawn

Education in the art of dance is education of the whole man − his physical, mental and emotional natures are disciplined and nourished simultaneously in dance.

~ Ted Shawn

I wanted to see if the American man in plain brown pants and a bare torso could speak profound things.

~ Ted Shawn

Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer – words.

~ Ted Shawn

Dancing is more than rhythmically performing a series of grouped or patterned movements. That is exercise.
Dancing is artistic self-expression and good dancing is a synergism between the dancer and the music.
Great dancing creates a synergy between the dancer, the music and the audience!

~ Shibar

A choreographic idea flows only as fast as the initiator can communicate it to bodies and see them realize it.

~ Marcia B. Siegal

Classical language and musicality are not simply effete traditions belonging to the bygone upper classes.
The vocabulary and manner of classical ballet express a high order of discipline and restraint, a sense of harmony with forces larger and more lasting than the individual.

~ Marsha B. Siegel

What is modern about modern dance is its resistance to the past, its response to the present, its constant redefining if the idea of dance.

~ Marsha B. Siegel

About Fred Astaire:

He is a model for transforming the entire body into a Jazz instrument.
He seems to understand that Jazz rhythm has a better chance of impacting the viewer when expressed through several parts of the body at once, not just the feet... like a drummer, he plays these gestures against the space, as if the air were stacked with drum heads and his chief concern was to zing them with sharpshooter precision.

~ Billy Siegenfeld

The last two clips of Fred Astaire − this time with his favorite partner, Rita Hayworth.
The first clip features just Fred and Rita:
Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth

This second clip features an enormous sound stage full of show dancers.
More Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth

Draw a crazy picture
Write a nutty poem
Sing a mumble-gumble song
Whistle through your comb
Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before.

~ Shel Silverstein

Dancing is silent poetry.
{La danse est une poésie muette.}

~ Simonides

Whoever would have his body supple, easy and healthful should learn to dance.

~ Socrates (Xenophon)

The way people move is their autobiography in motion.

~ Gerry Spence

Be responsible, a good communicator, a good team player, while pursuing individual dreams, and understanding the pitfalls of being a perfectionist – a common characteristic among ballet staff and students around the world.

~ Mavis Staines

Igor Stravinsky yelling at Vaslav Nijinsky:

There is no 27 in my music!

Nijinsky's response:

Dancers and musicians have always counted music differently.

Dance is the essence of mystery.
Through dance we experience a dimension that the linear mind is not structured to perceive.
It may have been dance that enabled us to first conceive of existences beyond our immediate physical experience, thereby creating the concept of spirituality, of 'God'.

~ Iris Stewart, "Sacred Woman Sacred Dance"

For all those who are interested in the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, esthetic, historical or any other aspects of our dance art...
It is high time that our universities had faculties for dance, giving the art its due place in the academic world.

~ Padma Subrahmanyam

But oh, she dances such a way! No sun upon an Easter-day Is half so fine a sight

~ Sir John Suckling

Man must create – or destroy.

~ David Suggs

Listen to the silence as it echoes around you.
Ancient spirits dance to it.

~ Amber Coverdale Sumrall

Dance is the pure language of the soul – it's been with us from the very beginning.

~ Patrick Swayze

Eddie Uehara's Dance is Life - a tribute to the solitary dedication of the dancer, recalling Twyla Tharp's words in The Creative Habit:
"I begin each day of my life with a ritual." A morning from the dancer's ritual:

Thank you, Eddie. I'm sure this touches home for a lot of us...

... a person who can connect with their partner, another human being who can connect with their soul − it's not just learning steps, it's about expressing something. I've found in dancing all my life that I can release something as a dancer that I can't in any other way...

~ Patrick Swayze

A poetic critical review of Maria Taglioni from 1838:
Her dance is an Acted Poem, sparkling with images...
She achieves the office of wings, without their incumbrance (sic).
Her sweetness and gentleness have a wooing tone, which breathes from her with no more external appearance than the aroma from flowers.

~ The Monthly Chronicle, excerpted from
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, Vol. 32 − 1838

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

I don't mind being listed alphabetically.
I do mind being treated alphabetically.

Maria Tallchief

Dancing was It. Dancing was what life was all about.
If you wanted to be a dancer, you didn't just want it, you felt chosen to be one...

~ Paul Taylor

For a dancer, to be able to perform well, most of his waking hours must be devoted to preparing for the holy white instant of performance.

~ Paul Taylor

I like to think dance is an international language that all people can appreciate.
All societies have some form of dance as a form of communication.

~ Paul Taylor

I would like to make it clear from the start that these dances are primarily meant to be a kind of food for the eye.
If they evoke dramatic images and riddles, the key to their solution lies not so much in the brain, but in the senses and the eye of the spectator.

~ Paul Taylor

It's a religion, a monstrous itch, a huge and illogical church.
In my case, even before learning to dance,
I was positive I'd been ordained to it...

~ Paul Taylor

Dance just gets more exciting the more you know about it, which is why you have to do it well at school so you can spend the rest of your life supporting your habit.

~ Kay Teague

All night have the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon;
All night has the casement jessamine stirr'd
To the dancers dancing in tune;
Till a silence fell with the waking bird,
And a hush with the setting moon.

~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson

They who love dancing too much seem to have more brains in their feet than in their head.

~ Terence (c. 190-159 BCE)

A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet.
I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.

~ Twyla Tharp

Twyla Tharp Dance, from a television ad for their performances at Sadler's Wells in London, in 2003:

Dancing is like bank robbery,ery, it takes split second timing.

~ Twyla Tharp

Twyla Tharp on creating “Brahms/Hande” with Jerome Robbins:
He basically made me crazy, because it would be like, you know,
I plan what I'm going to do, I do it, I'm ready to move on; he plans what he's going to do, he does it, he's ready to go back.

~ Twyla Tharp

I also had a will that let me eliminate everything that stood in the way of my becoming the best dancer I could be. By a gradual process... (I) had invested every bit of my dreams, my hopes, my energies in defining myself as a dancer.

~ Twyla Tharp

I always, somehow, knew that I was going to dance.

~ Twyla Tharp

I began to discriminate between fear and excitement.
The two, though very close, are completely different.
Fear is negative excitement, choking your imagination.
Real excitement produces an energy that overcomes apprehension and makes you want to close in on your goal.

~ Twyla Tharp

I do everything I know how in a dance.

~ Twyla Tharp

I often say that in making dances I can make a world where I think things are done morally, done democratically, done honestly.

~ Twyla Tharp

I think that probably the moments of discovery do come from a place that is not totally organized. Order is something that we already know about.
Discoveries are in a place we don't already know about.

~ Twyla Tharp

I would have to challenge the term, modern dance.
I don't really use that term in relation to my work.
I simply think of it as dancing. I think of it as moving.

~ Twyla Tharp

I'm not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories.
Either something works, or it doesn't.

~ Twyla Tharp

It's extremely arrogant and foolish to think you can ever outwit your audience.

~ Twyla Tharp

It's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.

~ Twyla Tharp

The only thing I fear more than change is no change.

~ Twyla Tharp

This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider.
You have to be either hopelessly passionate, or very stupid.

~ Twyla Tharp

Usually kids who are talented have the brashness to think they can do anything, but they don't often get the chance to see how close they can come.

~ Twyla Tharp

We're a machine and we have to be worked in the same way we have to be fed.

~ Twyla Tharp

You have to believe there's something at the other side.
And you have to have faith in yourself.
You have to think that you have the tools to accomplish it.

~ Twyla Tharp

Swedish juggler Pär Söderlund dances while juggling as a performance tribute to Mikhail Baryshnikov in Twyla Tharp's One for the Road from Sinatra Suite:

Long experience has taught me that the crux of my fortunes is whether I can radiate good will toward my audience.
There is only one way to do it and that is to feel it.
You can fool the eyes and minds of the audience, but you cannot fool their hearts.

~ Howard Thurston

Don't dream it – dance it!

~ W. M. Tory

The dance is over, the applause subsided but the joy and feeling will stay with you forever.

~ W. M. Tory

I would like to tell all dancers to forget themselves and the desire for self-display. They must become completely absorbed in the dance.
Even in a classical variation there should never be any thought of a dancer doing a variation – he should become identified with it.

~ Anthony Tudor

If I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction.
I see it as a body.

~ Anthony Tudor

I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last.
I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkaed and schoisched with a step peculiar to myself – and the kangaroo.

~ Mark Twain in Roughing It
(after he finally found employment in San Francisco)

I am lost, and I rejoice in the openness I cannot decide where to go, so for now, I will dance where
I am and be. There is no goal, no destination, just wilderness and life and being. I sing and dance and live in the wilderness, and I am home.

~ Tziporah

It is not enough to merely leave Egypt.
To truly be free of Mitzrayim's grasp, you must emerge from the waters and dance on dry land.

~ Tziporah

Whenever we dig down into the achievements of a creative artist, we invariably trace them to the beginning of all beginnings: labour.

~ Galina Ulanova

Do you not realize that dance is the pure act of metamorphosis?

~ Paul Valéry

Dance is like wine it matures with every performance.

~ Alarmel Valli

What's so wonderful about ballet is that it's mind-driven physicality.
It's almost a Greek ideal of body, mind, and form.

~ Edward Villella

Sex in a dance is in the eyes of the beholder.
I never thought my dances sexy.
I suppose that's because I see myself with my face washed, and to me I look like a rabbit.

~ Gwen Verdon

Gwen Verdon (at 72) joins Chita Rivera (at 64) to perform a medley from Chicago, including All That Jazz − performed for the 51st Annual Tony Awards in 1997.

The sensitive artiste develops the “hearing ear” and the "seeing eye”eye” which forever lead one to seek search, making one’s entire life a voyage of discovery”.

~ Chitra Visweswaran

Dancing is an art because it is subject to rules.

~ Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire

Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

~ Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

~ Kurt Vonnegut

The mediocre teacher tells.
The good teacher explains.
The superior teacher demonstrates.
The great teacher inspires.

~ William Arthur Ward

Try to be fearless... fear can inhibit you and keep you from a life.

~ Miranda Weese

I have always added dance to my productions.
When I was directing theatre,
I added dance sequences where they didn't exist in the play.
I think dance is the ultimate form of expression.

~ Valerie Weiss

I came to see that movement is one of the great laws of life.
It is the primary medium of our aliveness, the flow of energy going on in us like a river all the time, awake or asleep, twenty-four hours a day. Our movement is our behavior; there is a direct connection between what we are like and how we move...
As people begin to move in their own way, they are faced with feelings of surprise and delight and often of anxiety and embarrassment.
Judgments, corrections and explanations are of no use.
It is their movement, and it happened just that way.

~ Mary Whitehouse

I dance with the dancers.

~ Walt Whitman

Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.

~ Faith Whittlesey

Strong and convincing art has never arisen from theories.

~ Mary Wigman

The dance grew into a colorful flower bouquet which caught and contained the glow of sun-happy summer days, the secret of star-studded nights, and the wistful sweetness of overcast and rainy hours.

~ Mary Wigman

Ballet: men wearing pants so tight that you can tell what religion they are.

~ Robin Williams

Though talent is wonderful, dance is 80% work and 20% talent.

~ Tad Williams

Being a dancer is just an extension of being a human being.

~ Tovaris Wilson

Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance.

~ Oprah Winfrey

I'm dancing to the music of the madness inside me.

~ George C. Wolfe

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney Folk dance like a wave on the sea.

~ William Butler Yeats

And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.

~ William Butler Yeats

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

~ William Butler Yeats

On dancing on pointe:
Why don't they just get taller girls?

~ Henny Youngman

Dance, one of the oldest forms of artistic expression, requires only the human body for its realization.

~ Igor Youskevitch

Discipline is the mother of the art.
Discipline is not militaristic; the dancer must be relaxed.

~ Maestro Hector Zaraspe

Music is the language of the soul, dance is the language of the body.
Body and soul, music and dance conceive an instrument of expression through which the spirit communicates.

~ Maestro Hector Zaraspe

'The Dance' is what we are all here to serve.

~ Maestro Hector Zaraspe

Try to respect the student's spiritual feeling and intelligence.
A human being is in your hands.
If you don't love your students, it's better you don't teach.
Give the truth always.

~ Maestro Hector Zaraspe

Teach me to dance!

~ from "Zorba the Greek"
Michael Cacoyannis, Screenwriter; after a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis

Anthony Quinn celebrates as Zorba the Greek − in a dance with reserved Englishman Alan Bates.

_________________________________________________________

~ Quotes of Unknown Origin ~

(please email us with any known sources)

~ The "Most Attributed" Dance Quote~

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

Attributed to: Laurie Anderson, David Breskin, David Byrne,
William S. Burroughs, John Cage, George Carlin, Elvis Costello,
Miles Davis, Nick Lowe, Steve Martin, Charles Mingus, Thelonious
Monk, Mark Mothersbaugh, Martin Mull, Clara Schumann,
W.G. "Snuffy" Walden, Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Zappa.

Alan Scott maintains a webpage dedicated to discovering the truth of this quote: home.pacifier.com/~ascott/they/tamildaa.htm. Email him at: [e-mail]

A day I don't dance is a day I don't live.

A football player is a dancer built to military specifications.

All it takes is to convince your mind to move your feet.

All that music and only two feet.

Anyone who thinks sunshine is happiness has never danced in the rain.

A passionate dancer is a poet in action.

Ballet dancers miss so much because of their exhausting schedules, many dancers hardly seem to notice the world around them.
A classical dancer is always a loner, always self-involved.

Ballet discipline: only the true believer would suffer the rigors it demanded.

Be an awake dreamer: cultivating the skills that you need, finding out the talents you have and yet not letting go of your dream of dancing.

Being a dancer means sacrificing a lot.
It's a life based on discipline and hard work, hardly the normal state of affairs for a teenager.
Of course, if you love to dance more than anything, then it's also time well spent. Only you can decide.
Just make sure you're listening to your heart.

Blood, sweat and tears of the ballet world: the nuts and bolts behind ballet's ethereal stage presence.

Choosing a life in dance is like taking vows in a nunnery, with similar frustrations.

Common sense would tell parents never to send their children to a ballet school.
Common sense would tell teenagers that there is a wider and happier world beyond the grueling strictures of daily barre and class.
Common sense would tell the graduating student that there are infinitely superior ways of making money than joining a professional ballet company.
Common sense would tell a young dancer that very few (laughably few) of his or her colleagues will ever make it to the top or even near the top.
Yet... there remains the dance and the dancer.

Dance from your heart and love your music, and the audience will love you in return.

~ Maria

Dance has a way of teaching people how to live.

Dance is a delicate balance between perfection and beauty.

Dance is a golden language written by the body.

Dance is an hourly and daily discipline, but it is also lifelong happiness.

Dance is life, the rest is just details.

Dance is not an answer. Dance is a question.
Yes! is the answer.

Dance is the thing that challenges the mind, body and soul.

Dance isn't a form – it's a way of life.

Dance isn't what I do, it's who I am.

Dance to express, not to impress.

Dancers are among the most passionate and dedicated of artists and rarely take their work for granted.

Dancers aren't made of their technique, but their passion.

Dancers are team players and individuals at the same time.
And it's... one of the professions in which students think about the excitement it can give them, rather than how much money they're going to make.
Dance people don't ever ask that.
That, in itself, is what is beautiful about the human spirit.

Dancers keep looking for the perfect teacher without realizing that it's all there within themselves. You teach yourself; your teacher is a guide.
If you do not hear the advice, corrections and words of your guide, it makes no difference how great the teacher. You will never dance.

Dancers offer us our only earthly chance to catch a glimpse of the angelic host.

Dancing is like life: it's good to have a plan, but be prepared to improvise.

Dancing with the feet is one thing, but dancing with the heart is another.

Eat, drink, sleep... dance!

Even the greatest dancers in the world must submit throughout their careers to the continual corrections of daily class.

Every day, we must dance. If only in our minds.

Every day, we must dance. If only in our minds.
Why do we dance? Because we're happy to be alive.
So every day, we must dance to say thank you to God.
Thank you for life.

Every day, we must dance to say thank you God. Thank you for life.

For some, dancing is an excuse to make money.
For the best, money is an excuse to dance.

For the ballet dancer, pain is a constant reality.

I am a dancer.
I twirl, leap, and spin.
I jump, pirouette, and tap.
I am a dancer.
I feel pain and fear.
I feel defeat and failure.
Yet, I keep going.
I smile, I practice, I perform.
I have grace and beauty.

I do not dance because I am happy,
I am happy because I dance.

I hear the applause.
I perform and do my best.
Sometimes I fail.
I don't give up.
For I am a dancer.
I am brave and strong.
I dance not for fame and glory.
But for how I feel inside.
I am happiness, joy, love, and excitement.
Strife, talent, joy.
Determination and beauty.
I am a dancer.

I still struggle in ballet class, but now I have a sense of the pure joy of being in class, rather than going after an unattainable ideal.

I was desperate in those days to do thirty-two fouettés, right and left.
I still thought, in my heart, that somehow it would happen, that I'd become a dancer.

I’d rather be dancing.

If dancing was any easier, they would call it football.

If it were not for dreams there would not be such a thing as ballet, the cruelest of the performing arts.

If you have to ask me why I dance, you’ll never understand.

If you say you can you can, but if you say you can't your right!

If you're not dancing, you're wasting your feet.

If you're on thin ice you might as well be dancing.

In conversation as in dance, each is the mirror of other.
{Dans la conversation ainsi que dans la danse, chacun est le miroir de l'autre.}

In dancing, the women usually know the steps and the men know the holds.

In order to dance professionally, one must sacrifice everything else, including individual happiness, to an all-consuming god of Art.

In swing, whatever works is right.

It doesn't matter where you are on the stage, just as long as you're there.

It isn't necessarily a matter of minimal experience or talent; it's also a question of desire.

It's not the turning that is hard in pirouettes, it's that you gotta keep on doing it.

Lesser dancers stumble, better dancers syncopate.

Let the music move your body.

Letting go of perfectionism, so ingrained in the nature of a ballet dancer, can be the most difficult thing.

Life is a dance, from one stage to the next.

Listen to your heartbeat and dance.

~ Miki H.

My feet are never at a loss for words.

~ Miki H.

[The ballet world]
Once you're in there's no way out.
It's like that enchanted forest in the Sleeping Beauty after everybody goes under the spell.

One's concentration as a performer must remain centered on the action of which one is a part. For it is in truth only one's own concentration on the imagined reality of the role that can force the audience's attention to that same place.

~ Rick

Only the wise can dance the rhythm of life.

Safety pins are a belly-dancer's best friend.

Seen from the wings, a ballerina's life is made-up of sheer physical misery relieved only by the euphoria of performance.
Physical agony is a normal thing backstage and arouses the awe and pity only of outsiders unused to its sight.

Set yourself up for success and anything is possible.

Smart girls dance. If you weren't smart, you wouldn't be here.

Socrates learned to dance when he was 70 because he felt that an essential part of himself had been neglected.

Some people march to a different drummer... and some people polka.

~ Los Angeles Times Syndicate

Striving for a connection with the audience is essential because you are in the moment – it is a give and take relationship.

Tap Dancers Have Rhythm in Their Soles.

Thank God that you are able to dance... remember there are those who cannot even walk.

The art of dance is above all about the gestures of what one feels with one's heart.
{L'art de la danse c'est avant tout de faire avec des gestes ce qu'on ressent avec son coeur.}

The ballet toe shoe is one of the few instruments of torture to survive intact into our time.

The best dancer is one who dances with expression and meaning, not the one who finishes first.

The dispassionate preparation that goes into one of the most romantic performing arts.

The feet may learn the steps, but only the spirit can dance.

The grinding discipline, the long, lonely hours of practice, the responsibility to dance, the rehearsals and the thrill of the stage: an unbroken session of days and years devoted to being a dancer.

The hardships of working as a dancer, including physical and psychological abuse and low pay, are plainly worth it.

The orchestra, the lights, the smell of make-up and powder, the back-stage nitty-gritty, the sore feet, the hard work and the petty intrigues: the real life of a ballet dancer.

The rewarding routine of dance.

There are never mistakes, just unexpected solos.

Those hours spent dancing are not deducted from ones life span.

To dance is like speaking in silence.
It is to everything without saying a word.
{Danser, c'est comme parler en silence.
C'est dire plein de choses sans dire un mot.}

To tap or not to tap... silly question!!

Until (AIDS is stopped) we will dance for life.

We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.

We dancers are very lonely people.
We work together but we are very much self-made, self-centered individuals.

We do not always dance because we are happy, but we dance and cannot help but become happy.

When in doubt... dance!

When dancing:
1. Never try to step with the foot on which you are standing,
2. Never try to turn on a foot on which you are not standing, and
3. Never dance when you are too tired to know whether you are adhering to principles 1 and 2.

When some men dance they're all feet, and when they stop they're all hand.

Why do I dance? Why do you breathe?

Why do we dance?
Because we're happy to be alive.

You can dance anywhere, even if only in your heart.

You can dance perfectly, but you will be never an artist if you dance without your soul.
{Tu peux danser parfaitement, mais tu ne sera jamais artiste si tu ne danses pas avec ton âme.}

You can't count on other people to provide happiness, the unexpected reward that comes, perversely, to those not obsessed with seeking it.
The dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a good dancer.

You can't make a pointe if you don't understand the details.

You don't stop dancing because you grow old, you grow old because you stop dancing.

You know you're dancing when tears of pain and happiness blend in with your sweat.

You live it, you breath it, you dance it.

You never know whether being a dancer is a dream or reality.
The world on stage is a fairy-tale world. You end an evening enveloped in the applause from the audience.
But outside the theater, you are back into reality, and when you come home you realize that you are just an ordinary person like everybody else.

You will only get out of a dance class what you bring to it.

Your dance identifies who you are.

Your love for yourself is only shown when you are dancing freely.

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~ Quotes on the Joys - and Risks - of Social Dancing ~

I knew the moment I met her that she was trouble... or that I was in trouble... or that we would get into trouble together − and then we danced.

~ Scott Nilsson
(on meeting Kristy Nilsson - nee Dawson)

The waltz is a dance of quite too loose a character, and unmarried ladies should refrain from it... very young married ladies may be allowed to waltz if it is very seldom...

~ The Gentleman and Lady's Book of Politeness, 2nd American edition
Boston: Allen and Ticknor and Carter, Hendee & Co., 1833.

Swing your partner, dosey-do, now clap your hands... uh-oh, that's all the square dance moves I know...
I'll bluff the rest: slap your partner in the face, write bad checks all over the place, flirt with strangers, annoy your spouse, get a divorce and lose your house – now dosey-do!

~ Scott Adams, writing as Dogbert

Disco is just jitterbug.

~ Fred Astaire

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely.
Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind.

~ Jane Austen, "Emma"

To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.

~ Jane Austen

You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.

~ Sir Arnold Bax

Look, spaghetti arms. This is my dance space. This is your dance space.
I don't go into yours, you don't go into mine. You gotta hold the frame.

~ Eleanor Bergstein, screenwriter − "Dirty Dancing"

Dance, v.i. To leap about to the sound of tittering music, preferably with arms about your neighbor's wife or daughter.
There are many kinds of dances, but all those requiring the participation of the two sexes have two characteristics in common: they are conspicuously innocent, and warmly loved by the vicious.

~ Ambrose Bierce

About a year ago I took up line dancing. I got so into it
I had to join a self-help group to stop. It's a two-step program...

~ Frederick J. Boenig

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

~ David Byrne

These days, many forms of dance and music come close to being trance-inducing.
One of the subdivisions of house music has even been given the name 'trance.'
In addition, it is not simply the style of dancing that approaches or revives the nature of tribal dancing, but also another dimension. In those places and at those moments where all the elements are just right – the crowd, the music, the ambiance, the moon – something happens that goes beyond the merely individual experience.
Suddenly, in the way of synergy, the participating individuals actually disappear and a concerted, coherent, and merged group is born, for however short a time. In those very moments, the tribal spirit is truly manifest and, just as in tribal societies, the dance becomes a release and a catharsis for the entire community.

~ Rufus C. Camphausen

Never criticize your dance partner.

~ Brave Combo

The tango is the man and woman in search of each other. It is the search for an embrace, a way to be together, when the man feels that he is a male and the woman feels that she is female, without machismo. She likes to be led; he likes to lead. Disagreements may occur later or they may not. When that moment comes, it is important to have positive and productive dialogue, fifty-fifty. The music arouses and torments, the dance is the coupling of two people defenseless against the world and powerless to change things.

~ Juan Carlos Copes

When a man and woman understand each other dancing, simply carrying the beat, dancing for three minutes to a music called tango, it's the closest thing to (sex) – but sensual rather than erotic.

~ Juan Carlos Copes

The dance can be re-born with each song and in a different way by each couple.

~ Mike Corbett

Want to spend lots of time dancing with ladies?
Impress them with how good they are!

~ Gerald Cosby

Relationships are like a dance.
People spend so much time trying to change their partner's steps, and blaming them for treading on their toes.
When they instead focus on changing their own steps, the dance changes anyway.

~ Tania Dally, Relationship Coach

O, Love's but a dance, Where Time plays the fiddle!
See the couples advance –
O, Love's but a dance!
A whisper, a glance, "Shall we twirl down the middle?"
O, Love's but a dance, Where Time plays the fiddle!

~ Henry Austin Dobson

Relationships are like a dance with visible energy racing back and forth between the partners.

~ Colette Dowling, New York psychotherapist

In couple dances, gentlemen, hold onto her like you like her.

~ Richard Duree

The aesthetic pleasure of dance is a secondary reflection of the primary, vital joy of courtship.

~ Havelock Ellis

How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget...

~ Don Felder, The Eagles – "Hotel California"

Dancing is, in itself, a very trifling and silly thing: but it is one of those established follies to which people of sense are sometimes obliged to conform; and then they should be able to do it well.
And though I would not have you a dancer, yet, when you do dance, I would have you dance well, as I would have you do everything you do well.

~ Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his son

The time honored most accepted method of inviting and accepting a request for a dance, is the eye contact and a head nod.
It speaks highly of politeness, courtesy and above all about avoiding uncomfortable and at times embarrassing experiences.
It also affords every dancer the privacy of choosing how to spend an evening.
It is unsettling being stalked by overzealous individuals or being put into the difficult situation of accepting reluctantly or declining uncomfortably.
In spite of its popularity nobody appreciates being "used."

~ extracted from "El Firulete"

If life is a dance, then friends are the music.

~ Eva Gregory

Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun.

~ Matt Groening

A man who knows how to dance can make any woman feel good.

~ Barbara Haller, ballroom champion

To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelvemonth's regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour.
To pass to courtship without acquaintance, to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road.

~ Thomas Hardy

In eroticism as dance: one of the partners is always charged with leading the other.
{Il en va de l'érotisme comme de la danse: l'un des partenaires se charge toujours de conduire l'autre.}

~ Milan Kundera

In the pivotal moves of the dance, those in which the dance partners exchange leadership, the power of the dance can be seen to alternate as quickly as that of sweat-slick wrestlers or fate-heavy duelists. ominance is always fragile and unsure; subjugation is merely quiescence in which to plot the regaining of the upper hand. Thus, energies of ego and control struggle in a psychomania in three dimensions on the dance floor.

~ Richard Martin

Do you want – do you want – do you want to dance with me baby?

~ Joni Mitchell, "All I Want"

Dancing is wonderful training for girls; it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.

~ Christopher Morley, Kitty Foyle

Chubby Checker lost pounds by demonstrating how to move as if you were
'drying your back with a towel' − the substitution of the word 'back' for 'bottom' indicates the oddly wholesome image of the Twist.

~ Jan Murray

Just the pleasure of moving and the pleasure of using your body is,
I think, maybe the main point. And the pleasure of dancing with somebody in an unplanned and spontaneous way, when you're free to invent and they're free to invent and you're neither one hampering the other – that's a very pleasant social form.

~ Steve Paxton

Dancing is an amazing activity.
You can go up to a gorgeous woman that you've never met before, spend three minutes touching her virtually anywhere on her body, and she thanks you for it afterwards!

~ Mario Robau, Jr

Everyone has seen people dancing all night.
But take a man and make him dance for a quarter of an hour without music and see if he can bear it.

~ Maurice de Saxe

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

~ George Bernard Shaw

There was an old clerk of Columbus
Who wearied of totaling numbus,
So he moved to East Lansing
And spent his time dancing
Maxixes, merengues, and rhumbus.

~ Colonel G. L. Sicherman

Relationships are like a dance.
After a while we are so used to doing certain steps that we lose our balance and awareness of our bodies in relationship to others.

~ Sheryl Stephen

These sort of boobies think that people come to balls to do nothing but dance; whereas everyone knows that the real business of a ball is either to look out for a wife, to look after a wife, or to look after somebody else's wife.

~ Robert Smith Surtees

How do you know a partner is right for you?
That has everything to do with knowing each other and practicing together until you work as one, until you begin to synchronise your movements and your thoughts and your rhythmical feel for the music with your partner.

~ Patsy Swayze

... if you desire to marry you must realize that a mistress is won by the good temper and grace displayed while dancing... for dancing is practiced to reveal whether lovers are in good health and sound of limb, after which they are permitted to kiss their mistresses in order that they may touch and savor one another thus to ascertain if they are shapley or emit an unpleasant odor as of bad meat.
Therefore, from this standpoint, quite apart from the many other advantages to be derived from dancing, it becomes an essential to a well-ordered society.

~ Jehan Tabourot, "Orchesography"

You'll find your feet at the end of your legs... you may care to move them.

~ Rose Tyler character in the BBC series Doctor Who, as written by C. E. Webber and Anthony Coburn

Whoever has seen the masked at a ball dance amicably together, and take hold of hands without knowing each other, leaving the next moment to meet no more, can form an idea of the world.

~ Vauvenargues

Feel the blood rise to your face with every beat; while an arm winds like a snake around a waist that is about to break.
This is how to dance the tango!

~ Elizardo Martinez Vilas

Alas! Our dancing days are no more.
We wish, however, all those who have a relish for so agreeable and innocent an amusement all the pleasure the season will afford them.

~ George Washington

The curve is more powerful than the sword.

~ Mae West

Dancing is all about wordless communication – a light pull on a shoulder, a step forward and a shift of weight, a shared understanding of the music and how it moves bodies.

~ Jasper Winn

The opportunities for body-contact highlight how wonderfully non-politically correct dance is. It's about display and seduction...
And once you get into real dancing – partner dancing – you've got the added inequality of somebody having to follow.

~ Jasper Winn

The girl who can't dance says the band can't play.

~ Yiddish Proverb

Dance Me to the End of Love

by Leonard Cohen

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love.
Dance me to the end of love.

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love