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.
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 HighwaterDance 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 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 Highwater