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I feel that the essence of dance is the expression of mankind — the landscape of the human soul. I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human being can be.

 

Martha Graham

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To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.
Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body. And it's partly the language that we don't want to show.

 

Martha Graham

 

Many times I hear the phrase "the dance of life". It is an expression that touches me deeply, for the instrument through which the dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived — the human body.

 

Martha Graham

 

O my child, who wronged you first, and began
First the dance of death that you dance so well?
Soul for soul: and I think the soul of a man
Shall answer for yours in hell.

 

Arthur Symons

 

It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!

 

Oscar Wilde

 

Perhaps the greatest personality who has ever devoted herself to developing the art of the dance …  Her interests ranged over a wide field of activities. There was a time when she wished to initiate a reform of human life in its least details of costume, of hygiene, of morals. But gradually she came to concentrate her interest upon the dance. For her the dance is not merely the art which permits the spirit to express itself in movement; it is the base of a whole conception of life, a life flexible, harmonious, natural. In the development of the dance she found herself confronted by the dilemma which has just been alluded to. On the one hand was the limited technique of the ballet, on the other the unnatural contortions of the eccentric school. To return to the unconscious gesture of the people — that is to say, the crude, stereotyped gestures of the street — offered no way of escape. She found the solution in a return to the natural gesture of human life as represented in Greek art.

 

Isadora Duncan