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.
Jamake HighwaterWhite performances were always dull in comparison to the astonishing expressiveness of Black dancers. Behind the white person's inarticulate body were centuries of condemnation of dancing on religious grounds.
Jamake HighwaterDance has been transformed from an involuntary motor discharge, a ceremonial rite, into a work of art, conscious of, intended for, observation.
Jamake HighwaterWhat dance achieves, what play and sex achieve are the same thing that poetry achieves. They transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Jamake HighwaterFor 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.
Jamake HighwaterIn 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.
Jamake HighwaterFor Indians, images are a means of celebrating mystery and not a manner of explaining it
Jamake HighwaterWhat outsiders discover in their adventures on the other side of the looking glass is the courage to repudiate self-contempt and recognise their โalienationโ 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.
Jamake HighwaterAt 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.
Jamake HighwaterWe've reached a point where we are not a very empathetic people, and art without empathy is art without an audience. My basic viewpoint is that without art we're alone.
Jamake HighwaterThe story of dance in the Western world is as much an alternative vision of the events of history as is the folk history told for generations by primal people.
Jamake HighwaterWe often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality.
Jamake Highwater