78 Dance Quotes

And the jocund rebecks sound To many a youth, and many a maid, Dancing in the checkered shade. And young and old come forth to play On a sunshine holiday.

Dance is bigger than the physical body. When you extend your arm, it doesn't stop at the end of your fingers, because you're dancing bigger than that; you're dancing spirit.

I've always felt that complement of opposites: body and soul, solitude and companionship, and in the dance studio, contraction and release, rise and fall.

The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.

Dancing was always part of my culture growing up in Barbados! When I shot my 1st video I worked really hard with my choreographer to perfect the routines!

But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it's here that we need to be. That if we are living as we were this week, that we had to be awake with the people who are still dancing.

I have no desire to prove anything by it. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance.

Sport, that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter, holding both his sides. Come, and trip it, as you go. On the light fantastic toe.

I love the whole world of dance, because dancing is really the emotions through bodily movement. And however you feel, you just bring out that inner feeling through your mood. A lot of people don't think about the importance of it, but there's a whole psychological thing to just letting loose. Dancing is important, like laughing, to back off tension. Escapism...it's great.

Stately as a galleon, I sail across the floor, Doing the military two-step, as in the days of yore.

Women don't care, man. If the beat's all right, she will dance all night! I've seen girls on the floor dancing to the nastiest shit ever made. It's like, 'Smack her with a dick, smack her with a dick! : I put a dick in the ear, a dick in the ear! : Fuck her in the eye, fuck her in the eye! : Blind the bitch, blind the bitch!'

'Elvis had a center of gravity that was low, but also set back and deep; his sexiest moves - legs lolling back and forth, smooth like jelly, hips rolling and tossing everywhere - were performed as if there were a paperweight on a string tied around his waist, and hung from his lower back; with his own weight adjusted to the back, he could free one leg to twist, pop, and jerk while maintaining perfect balance; Elvis' glory was in the shifting of his weight; when he gets going fast, the force of the shifts make his shoulders jerk so hard he looks like he is being electrocuted'

He is the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times... you see a little bit of Astaire in everybody's dancing--a pause here, a move there. It was all Astaire originally.

When I was in the Soviet Union recently I was being interviewed by a newspaperman and he said, 'Which dancers influenced you the most?' and I said, 'Oh, well, Fred Astaire.' He looked very surprised and shocked and I said, 'What's the matter?' He said, 'Well, Mr. Balanchine just said the same thing.'

Once after a dinner party, Gregory Peck and I drove Fred Astaire home. Fred lived in a colonial house that had a long porch with many pillars. When we dropped him off, he danced along the whole front porch, then opened the door, tipped his hat to us, and disappeared. Wow! Greg and I couldn't speak for a few minutes. It was a beautiful way to say thank you.

It was on tiny wheels with a mount for the camera that put the lens about two feet above the ground. On it rode the camera operator and the assistant who changed the focus and that's all. Fred always wanted to keep the camera in as tight as possible, and they used to shoot with a 40 millimetre lens, which doesn't give you too much leeway. So every time Fred and Ginger moved toward us, the camera had to go back, and every time they went back, the camera went in. The head grip who was in charge of pushing this thing was a joy to watch. He would maintain a consistent distance, and when they were in the midst of a hectic dance that's quite a stunt.

Just try and keep up with those feet of his sometime! Try and look graceful while thinking where your right hand should be, and how your head should be held, and which foot you end the next eight bars on, and whether you're near enough to the steps to leap up six of them backward without looking. Not to mention those Astaire rhythms. Did you ever count the different tempos he can think up in three minutes?

I suspect it is this Camelot view that leads Miss Croce to be rather unfair to Gene Kelly...I should say the difference starts with their bodies. If you compare Kelly to Astaire, accepting Astaire's debonair style as perfection then, of course, Kelly looks bad. But in popular dance forms, in which movement is not rigidly codified, as it is in ballet, perfection is a romantic myth or a figure of speech, nothing more. Kelly isn't a winged dancer; he's a hoofer and more eartbound. But he has warmth and range as an actor...Astaire's grasshopper lightness was his limitation as an actor - confining him to perennial gosh-oh-gee adolescence;; he was always and only a light comedian and could function only in fairytale vehicles.

He's the greatest dancer who ever lived--greater than Nijinsky.

Dancing: The vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music.

Feel your hair come tumbling down Feel your feet start kissing the ground Feel your arms are opening out And see your eyes are lifted to God With no words, with no song I'm gonna dance the dream And make the dream come true...

As to dancing, my dear, I never dance, unless I am allowed to do it in my own peculiar way. There is no use trying to describe it: it has to be seen to be believed. The last house I tried it in, the floor broke through. But then it was a poor sort of floor--the beams were only six inches thick, hardly worth calling beams at all: stone arches are much more sensible, when any dancing, of my peculiar kind, is to be done. Did you ever see the Rhinoceros, and the Hippopotamus, at the Zoological Gardens, trying to dance a minuet together? It is a touching sight. Give any message from me to Amy that you think will be most likely to surprise her.

Bonfires dot the rolling hillsides Figures dance around and around To drums that pulse out echoes of darkness And moving to the pagan sound.

'Fire is the first and final mask of my God. We dance and weep between two enormous pyres.' Our thoughts and our bodies flash and glitter with reflected light. Between the two pyres I stand serenely, my brain unshaken amid the vertigo, and I say: 'Time is most short and space most narrow between these two pyres, the rhythm of this life is most sluggish, and I have no time, nor a place to dance in. I cannot wait.' Then all at once the rhythm of the earth becomes a vertigo, time disappears, the moment whirls, becomes eternity, and every point in space - insect or star or idea - turns into dance.

Disco is the best floor show in town. It's very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix.

'I merely leap and pause.'

'I know everyone will say 'Nijinsky has gone mad', but I don't care because I have already played the mad man at home. That is what everyone will think, but they won't put me in an insane asylum because I dance very well and give money to anyone who asks. People like eccentrics, so they will leave me alone and say I'm a mad clown. I like the mentally ill because I know how to talk to them. When my brother was in an insane asylum, I loved him and he could feel me. His friends liked me. I was eighteen then. I understood the life of a mentally ill person.'

'Danse Russe' (1917) from Al Que Qiuere! (1917)

She was our queen, our rose, our star; And then she danced-O Heaven, her dancing!

'The D the E the F the I the A the N C the E, the Mind of a revolutionary.'

'I need to dance, you fucker, don't you see it? I need to dance. And I'll tell you, I'm gonna dance all over you, you scumbag. I'm gonna do a dance right in your fucking ass. Are you crazy? You fuck.' (from 'The Need to Dance')

Finger tips on the hips as I dip, gotta get a tight grip, don't slip/Loose lips sink ships, it's a trip/I love the way she licks her lips, see me jocking/Put a little twist in her hips cause I'm watching

He has a remarkable ear for intonation, a great sense of rhythm and what is most important, he has great style - style in my way of thinking is a matter of delivery, phrasing, pace, emphasis, and most of all presence

There never was a greater perfectionist, there never was, and never will be, a better dancer, and I never knew anybody more kind, more considerate, or more completely a gentleman...I love Fred, John, and I admire and respect him. I guess it's because he's so many things I'd like to be and I'm not

Fred Astaire once worked so hard/ he often lost his breath/ and now he taps all other chaps to death

You're the nimble tread/Of the feet of Fred Astaire

Can't act, slightly bald, also dances

I don't think that I will plunge the nation into war by stating that Fred Astaire is the greatest tap-dancer in the world

Mr. Astaire is the nearest approach we are ever likely to have to a human Mickey Mouse; he might have been drawn by Mr. Walt Disney, with his quick physical wit, his incredible agility. He belongs to a fantasy world almost as free as Mickey's from the law of Gravity

If people would only realize when they ask me why I don't do a picture with him - they ask me that all the time, and were quite keen on it while I was in Hollywood - if they'd only realize that he's gone 'way ahead of me. Why I couldn't begin to keep up with him. I couldn't even reach the steps he throws away

I once said that fifty years from now, the only one of today's dancers who will be remembered is Fred Astaire

If I was black and blue, it was Gene. If I didn't have a scratch it was Fred

As one of the handful of girls who worked with both of those dance geniuses, I think I can give an honest comparison. In my opinion, Kelly is the more inventive choreographer of the two. Astaire, with Hermes Pan's help, creates fabulous numbers - for himself and his partner. But Kelly can create an entire number for somebody else... I think, however, that Astaire's coordination is better than Kelly's... his sense of rhythm is uncanny. Kelly, on the other hand, is the stronger of the two. When he lifts you, he lifts you!... To sum it up, I'd say they were the two greatest dancing personalities who were ever on screen. But it's like comparing apples and oranges. They're both delicious.

Fred taught me a step because I said I can't let this experience be over without my learning something. He taught me the most wonderful Fred Astaire-like step, with an umbrella. It was a complete throwaway; it was almost invisible. It was in the way he walked. As he moved along, he bounced the umbrella on the floor to the beat and then he grabbed it. It was effortless and invisible. As a matter of fact, a few years later I was photographing Gene Kelly and told him that Fred Astaire had taught me this trick with an umbrella. And Kelly said, 'Oh I'll teach you one,' and he did, and the two tricks with the umbrella in some way define the difference between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and, in my view, demonstrate who is the greater of the two artists. With Gene Kelly, he threw the umbrella way up into the air, and then he moved to catch it, very slowly, grabbing it behind his back. It was a big, grandstand play, about nothing.

The major difference between Astaire and Kelly is a difference, not of talent or technique, but of levels of sophistication. On the face of it, Kelly looks the more sophisticated. Where Kelly has ideas, Astaire has dance steps. Where Kelly has smartly tailored, dramatically apt Comden and Green scripts, Astaire in the Thirties made do with formulas derived from nineteenth-century French Farce. But the Kelly film is no longer a dance film. It's a story film with dances, as distinguished from a dance film with a story. When Fred and Ginger go into their dance, you see it as a distinct formal entity, even if it's been elaborately built up to in the script. In a Kelly film, the plot action and the musical set pieces preserve a smooth community of high spirits, so that the pressure in a dance number will often seem too low, the dance itself plebeian or folksy in order to 'match up' with the rest of the picture.

This is where the shadows come to play twixt the day And night Dancing and skipping Along a chink of light

Hey, I'm going to ask that girl to marry me, get her over to my apartment in Tarzana, do the do and the funky chicken too, and then tomorrow morning we're off to Monterrey.

(performing his dancing moves) Now, you move very delicately, do a little bit of a flutter kick, now, what that is I lift up my right leg and kind of flutter it at the judges, then I do a little spin, I lay out and show the blouse, press my lips, squint my eyes, spin and turn. Now, I do what's called 'Working the Pants.'

As a dancer, I out-Fred the nimblest Astaire

I guess the only jewels of my life were the pictures I made with Fred Astaire

No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business

O my child, who wronged you first, and began First the dance of death that you dance so well? Soul for soul: and I think the soul of a man Shall answer for yours in hell.

I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.

Ich wurde nur an einen Gott glauben, der zu tanzen verstunde.

The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.

Dancing is an important function of music, but so is crying.

'At least Bharatanatyam is now world famous, with thousands of new votaries. What about Koodiyattam?.....I have done what I can. It has not been easy. One has to sacrifice a lot to learn Koodiyattam. How many persons will be ready for it these days? Will there be an audience capable of imbibing it? ' - Mani Madhava Chakyar to famous Bharatanatyam dancer Rukmini Dev Arundale, while latter visitited Guru at his residence[1]

'When i say Abhinaya, oh, I can't do the abhinaya like what the great man did here yesterday' - Great Bharatanatyam dancer Balasaraswati next day after Chakyar's lecture-demonstration at Madras Music Academy in 1973.[3]

'Mani Madhava Chakyar when he portrayed Arjuna on the first evening and Ravana on the second, showed himself a master of the expression of the eye' - Dr. V Raghavan, renowned scholar of Sanskrit dramaturgy, classical Indian dance and music, connoisseur of art and former director of Samskritaranga- Chennai.[4]

'He had his own style. He could convey his thoughts through expressions. His eye movement was superb!' Birju Maharaj- great Kathak dancer.[6]

'the greatest eye-wizard of the world!' - Stella Kramrisch - Curator of Indian Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA.[7]

'his Netraabhinaya is simply incomparable' - Kapila Vatsyayan (leading scholar of classical Indian dance)[9]

We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

And now, by some transition, which he did not notice, it seemed that what had begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity--only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern thereby disposed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated. He could see also ( but the word 'seeing' is now plainly inadequate)wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the secular generalities of which history tells--people, institutions, climates of opinion, civilizations, arts, sciences and the like--ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished. The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and died, were the things of some different kind. At first he could not say what. But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities. If so, the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very unlike time as we know it. Some of the thinner more delicate cords were the beings that we call short lived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things we think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. Far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours form beyond our spectrum were the lines of personal beings, yet as different from one another in splendour as all of them from the previous class. But not all the cords were individuals: some of them were universal truths or universal qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these and the persons were both cords and both stood together as against the mere atoms of generality which lived and died in the clashing of their streams: But afterwards, when he came back to earth, he wondered. And by now the thing must have passed together out of the region of sight as we understand it. For he says that the whole figure of there enamored and inter -inanimate circling was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew yet swifter, the interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and tat part of him which could reason and remember was dropped further and further behind that part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity, complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard blue burning of sky, and all simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into it's own stillness. He went up into such a quietness, a privacy, and a freshness that at the very moment when he stood farthest from our ordinary mode of being he had the sense of striping off encumbrances and awaking from a trance, and coming to himself. With a gesture of relaxation he looked about him: