Aileen Passloff: Dancing, the deepest speaking

It’s essential that people have something in their heads besides dancing. When you dance, you have your history behind you—where you’ve come from, who your friends are, where you ate dinner last night, your dreams. All that is part of the person who is dancing. I am frightened by looking at a dancer in whom there is only dancing going on.

I have known from when I was quite tiny, long before I ever trained at all, that dancing was a powerful speaking from inside oneself, and that it mattered and changed things. Dancing is the deepest kind of speaking we can do.

Aileen Passloff, from "Teacher's Wisdom: Aileen Passloff" 

by Michael Bloom (Dance Magazine: December 2010)

Found on Facebook

We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance. (Japanese Proverb)

Graham on...

Martha Graham quotes (from About.Com: Women's History)

• 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 of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.
  

• No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time. It is just that the others are behind the time.
  

• I am absorbed in the magic of movement and light. Movement never lies. It is the magic of what I call the outer space of the imagination. There is a great deal of outer space, distant from our daily lives, where I feel our imagination wanders sometimes. It will find a planet or it will not find a planet, and that is what a dancer does.
  

• In 1980, a well-meaning fundraiser came to see me and said, "Miss Graham, the most powerful thing you have going for you to raise money is your respectability." I wanted to spit. Respectable! Show me any artist who wants to be respectable.

Martha Graham Dance Company at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, May 12-16

Quotes about dancing

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