When you give your students a quotation in dance it not only can inspire them and motivate them to become better it can also help them to understand that dancers all feel the same way no matter how long ago they danced, no matter where they danced. The dance world has always been a tight knit community of like thinking people and it is helpful to your students to read quotations from dancers who have gone before them. It is a way to open them up to a part of dance history. Use them in class, print them out and give them to the dancers and let them understand what dance has meant to others.
"When you perform…you are out of yourself - larger and more potent, more beautiful. You are for minutes heroic. This is power. This is glory on earth. And it is yours nightly."
Agnes De Mille
"Nothing has ever taken its (ballet's) place for disciplinary training. There is no technique in any other style of dancing that is so valuable for producing exactitude, precision, sense of form and sense of line"
Ted Shawn (1891-1972)
"Someone once said to me that dancers work as hard as policemen : always alert, always tense. But you see, policemen don't have to be beautiful at the same time!"
George Balanchine (1904-1983)
Dancing is a sweat job …When you're experimenting you have to try so many things before you choose what you want, and you may go days getting nothing but exhaustion. It takes time to get a dance right, to create something memorable."
Fred Astaire (1899-1987)
"DANCE IS FUN! It lifts the spirit, strengthens the body and stimulates the mind ….."
Wayne Sleep
When asked what dance was, Jaques D"Amboise said :
"It's your pulse, it's your heartbeat, it's your breathing. It's the rhythms of your life. It's the expression in time and movement of happiness and joy and sadness and energy. It's a venting of energy. It's extraordinary, and that's common to all the cultures and it's common to all individuals"
"You can dance anywhere and you can dance in your mind and in your heart."
Jaques D'Amboise
"Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing."
Freidrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"The small child at dancing class may never become a professional dancer - but the courtesies and disciplines, as well as the joy in movement, will touch her forever."
Helen Thompson
"To dance at all is to confront oneself. It is the art of honesty. You are completely exposed when you dance. Your physical health is exposed. Your self image is exposed. Your psychological health is exposed … It is impossible to dance out of the side of your mouth. You tell the truth when you dance. If you lie, you hurt yourself."
Shirley Maclaine
"The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure."
Mikhail Baryshnikov
