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”To dance is to live. What I want is a school of life.”
- Isadora Duncan
”The Dance –
it is the rhythm of all that dies in order to live again;
it is the eternal rising of the sun.”
- Isadora Duncan
”To express what is the most moral, healthful
and beautiful in art this is the mission of the dancer,
and to this I dedicate my life.”
- Isadora Duncan
”No, I can't explain the dance to you;
if I could tell you what it meant,
there would be no point in dancing it.”
- Isadora Duncan
”Dancing: the highest intelligence in the freest body.”
- Isadora Duncan
”It is the mission of all art
to express the highest and most beautiful ideals of man.”
- Isadora Duncan
”There are likewise three kinds of dancers:
first, those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic
drill,
made up of impersonal and graceful arabesques;
second, those who, by concentrating their minds,
lead the body into the rhythm of a desired emotion,
expressing a remembered feeling or experience.
And finally, there are those who convert the body
into a luminous fluidity,
surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul.”
- Isadora Duncan
“A dancer, if she is great, can give to the people
something that they can carry with them forever.
They can never forget it, and it has changed them,
though they may never know it.”
- Isadora Duncan
”Every movement that can be danced on the seashore
without being in harmony with the rhythm of the waves,
every movement that can be danced in the forest
without being in harmony with the swaying of the branches,
every movement that one can dance... in the sunshine,
in the open country, without being in harmony with the life
and the solitude of the landscape –
every such movement is false,
in that it is out of tune in the midst
of nature's harmonious lines.
That is why the dancer should above all else
choose movements
that express the strength, health, nobility,
ease and serenity of living things.”
- Isadora Duncan
”I am seeking that dance which might be the
divine expression of the human spirit
through the medium of the body's movement.”
- Isadora Duncan
”I have discovered the dance.
I have discovered the art
which has been lost for two thousand years.”
- Isadora Duncan
”I intend to work for this dance of the future.
I do not know whether I have the necessary qualities;
I may have neither genius nor talent nor temperament.
But I know that I have a Will;
and will and energy sometimes prove greater
than either genius or talent or temperament.”
- Isadora Duncan
”If we seek the real source of the dance, if we go to
nature,
we find that the dance of the future is the dance of the
past,
the dance of eternity,
and has been and always will be the same...
The movement of waves, of winds, of the earth
is ever the same lasting harmony.”
- Isadora Duncan
”It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research
to learn to make one simple gesture,
and I know enough about the art of writing to realize
that it would take as many years of concentrated effort
to write one simple, beautiful sentence.”
- Isadora Duncan
”Let us first teach little children to breathe,
to vibrate, to feel, and to become one
with the general harmony and movement of nature.
Let us first produce a beautiful human being,
a dancing child.”
- Isadora Duncan
”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.”
- Isadora Duncan
”My art is just an effort to express
the truth of my being in gesture and movement.
It has taken me long years
to find even one absolutely true movement.”
- Isadora Duncan
“Perhaps he was a bit different from other people,
but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?”
- Isadora Duncan
”The dancer of the future will be one
whose body & soul have grown so harmoniously together
that the natural language of the soul
will have become the movement of the body.”
- Isadora Duncan
”The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation
of the soul.
The true dance is an expression of serenity;
it is controlled by the profound rhythm of inner emotion.
Emotion does not reach the moment of frenzy
out of a spurt of action;
it broods first, it sleeps like the life in the seed,
and it unfolds with a gentle slowness.
The Greeks understood the continuing beauty of a movement
that mounted, that spread, that ended with
a promise of rebirth.”
- Isadora Duncan
”The only dance masters I could have were
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.”
- Isadora Duncan
”The real American type can never be a ballet dancer.
The legs are too long, the body too supple
and the spirit too free
for this school of affected grace and toe walking.”
- Isadora Duncan
”When I was sixteen,
I danced before an audience without music.
At the end someone suddenly cried 'its Death and the
Maiden'.
But that was not my intention;
I was only endeavoring to express
my first knowledge of the underlying tragedy
in all seemingly joyous manifestation.
The dance according with my comprehension,
should have been called 'Life and the Maiden'.”
- Isadora Duncan
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