Doris Humphrey Quotes

Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.

when dancing is right, the movement possesss a logic common to us all, an inevitability that takes it beyond the personal and egocentric and makes of it classical art.

I believe that dance is the oldest, noblest and most cogent of the arts. I believe that dance is the most perfect symbol of the activity of God and His angels. I believe that dance has the power to heal, mentally and physically. I believe that true education in the art of dance is education of the whole man.

I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.

I am more expressive when I dance.

I believe that one of the most powerful things of all is aesthetics.

I explained it when I danced it.

Hence it is from the representation of things spoken by means of posture and gesture that the whole of the art of dance has been elaborated.

I have such a respect and fascination for dance. I can be light as air or stay grounded. Dance is really another universe.

But remember that intent is everything. One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises. In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door. This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds. The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

I learned how to communicate and articulate myself from ballet. It's just insane to me, when they don't think of that as a part of our education.

I'm not expressing anything. I'm presenting people moving.

She danced because she needed to. She needed to say things which could be said in no other way, and she needed to take her meaning and her living from the saying of them.

I believe dance is a manifestation and celebration of the tenacity of the human spirit.

Dance is an art that imprints on the soul. It is with you every moment, it expresses itself in everything you do.

In song and dance, man forgets how to walk and speak and is on the way into flying into the air, dancing... his very gestures express enchantment.

dance is simply the refinement of human movement - walking, running, and jumping. We are all experts. There should be no art form more accessible than dance, yet no art is more mystifying in the public imagination.

The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

Dancing is a very living art. It is essentially of the moment, although a very old art. A dancer's art is lived while he is dancing. Nothing is left of his art except the pictures and the memories--when his dancing days are over.

Man must speak, then sing, then dance. The speaking is the brain, the thinking man. The singing is the emotion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all.

Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully and with inevitability.

The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art, art of the muscle sense. The awareness of tension and relaxation within his own body, the sense of balance that distinguishes the proud stability of the vertical from the risky adventures of thrusting and falling--these are the tools of the dancer.

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.