Dance in this century has remained primarily a personal ritual operating, like most avant-garde art, as an idiosyncratic form rather than a tribal expression of religious powers or a corporate expression of societal values.

The nobility danced for the sake of social grace, to exhibit their finery...peasants danced to make themselves happy, to escape the routine of their life, and to meet their future wives and husbands.

In the New Hebrides, any dancer making a mistake was assaulted, wounded, and possibly killed by bowmen posted to keep careful watch for inaccuracies in rituals.

At the root of all the varied manifestations of dancing, lies the common impulse to resort to movement to externalize emotional states which we cannot extemalize by rational means.

What outsiders discover in their adventures on the other side of the looking glass is the courage to repudiate self-contempt and recognise their “alienation” as a precious gift of freedom from arbitrary norms that they did not make and did not sanction. At the moment a person questions the validity of the rules, the victim is no longer a victim.

What dance achieves, what play and sex achieve are the same thing that poetry achieves. They transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

For the Indian,dance is a personal form of prayer. When the Eagle Dancer puts on his costume,when he begins to dance to the music,he doesn't simply perform it; he actually becomes the eagle itself. The dancer is virtually inseparable from the dance.