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.

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.

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

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.

Dance has been transformed from an involuntary motor discharge, a ceremonial rite, into a work of art, conscious of, intended for, observation.

For Indians, images are a means of celebrating mystery and not a manner of explaining it

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.