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Are you planning a speech to your fellow dancers that is crying out for a few quotes to liven it up? Do you need a pithy comment to fill the bottom of a column in your dance newsletter? Do you feel the urge to put a witty statement about dance in the signature block of your electronic mail messages? Then maybe this page can help! Here is a collection of quotations about dance in general. The reason I didn't limit it to quotations about Oriental dance is because there are many wonderful things people have said about dance that can apply just as strongly to our flavor of dance as they do to ballet, modern dance, tap, jazz, and other forms. |
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The audiences' ears hear the music & their eyes see you being that music. Dance is the music made visible. You are the music!
Turkish dancers strut, Egyptian dancers glide.
A woman doesn't have anything to dance about until she's over 35 years old.
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.
A day I don't dance is a day I don't live.
She must express life, death, happiness, sorrow, love and anger, but above all she must have dignity.
I am NOT a belly dancer. I have never been one, and never will be. What I do is not what Hollywood vulgarly calls "belly dance", but it's art. I have traveled the world to prove that my dance is not a dance of the belly but a refined, artistic dance full of tradition, of dreaming and beauty. Oriental dance is primarily an expressive dance, in that resides the beauty.
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Temoot el raqqasa we westaha beyel3ab. ("When the belly dancer dies, her waist is still moving." It means that habits stay with a person forever.)
Life is like a ghaziya, she dances just briefly for each.
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Dance is music made visible.
[They are] poets of gesture.
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Sometimes it's blood memory... not the blood your mother and father gave you... but that which stretches back two or three thousand years.
The spine is the tree of life. Respect it.
Think of the magic of that foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests. It's a miracle, and the dance... is a celebration of that miracle.
Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.
Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.
In the end, it all comes down to the art of breathing.
Dance is the hidden language of the soul.
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I want one word on my tombstone--dancer.
Who am I?, the artist asks. And he devotes his whole life to finding out.
A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.
[Her feet] were priceless little mummies... [and she] chuckled with a tiny sound like something very valuable breaking.
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music.
The choreographic process is exhausting. It happens on one's feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously.
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You can't lie when you dance. It's so direct. You do what is in you. You can't dance out of the side of your mouth.
Being a dancer meant you nearly always thought about food.
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The nature of my compulsion was such that I danced in my sleep. The entire household was sometimes awakened by loud thumping sounds coming from my room.
I danced with a passion to spite the music.
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Dance is low on the totem pole of the arts, because you're not left with a painting... a book that will stay there, a score you can read.
[Dance is] like life, it exists as you're flitting through it and when it's over it's gone.
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Do you know what happens when an Arabian woman dances? She does not dance, she protests, she loves, she cries, she makes love, she dreams, she goes away from her reality, to her own world, where love is really meant and she does not want to come back, because that is her reality.
If I could have said it, I shouldn't have had to dance it.
Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching.
Those who hear not the music think the dancers mad.
Some people march to the beat of a different drum - and some people polka.
If you are going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance.
Let them praise His name with dancing; Let them sing praises to Him with timbrel and lyre.
Lady, if you got to ask, you ain't got it [on being asked to explain rhythm].
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.
Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.
Dance is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution.
There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.
Man learned to resort to the dance when he felt helpless or fragmentary, when he felt dislocated in his universe.
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Good choreography fuses eye, ear, and mind.
Arlene Croce, Afterimages (1976)
Dancing is like bank robbery. It takes split-second timing.
Twyla Tharp, in Ms. (1976)
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, My Life (1927)
Dancers are both athletes and artists.
Margot Fonteyn, A Dancer's World (1979)
Every dancer lives on the threshold of chucking it.
Judith Jamison, in The New York Times Magazine (1976)
Bleeding feet will bond us.
Liza Minelli, to fellow dancers, NBC TV (October 2, 1991)
You leap like living music thru the air.
Babette Deutsch, "The Dancers," Banners (1919)
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, Emma (1816)
Even the ears must dance.
Natalia Makarova, in Newsweek (1975)
The trouble with nude dancing is that not everything stops when the music stops.
Robert Helpmann, regarding Broadway musical Oh Calcutta!, recalled upon his death (March 15, 1983)
| ARTWORK CREDIT: All drawings on this page were done by Shira. Copyright 1998 by Julie Anne Elliot. All rights reserved. If you want to use them elsewhere, you must first get permission. |
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