Curt Sachs Quotes

The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.

Wherever there are four walls, consciousness of direction is far keener.

In dance, even the weakest can do wonders.

Music as a whole, in its overwhelming wealth and endlessness, is inaccessible unless we free ourselves from the limitations of our own restricted training.

Rhythmic motion has become the carrier and creator of almost every ecstatic mood of any significance in human life.

The dance is the mother of the arts, The dance breaks down the distinction of body & soul.

The adult who puts his arm around his companion in the ballroom, and the child in the roadway, skipping in a round dance - they forget themselve, they dissolve the weight of earthly contact and the rigidity of daily existence. The soul slips into a twilight stage.

A choral dance: an attempt to impose upon a chance gathering of a few dozen guests a communal feeling.

The English dance unites the guests of an evening by the spell of rhythmical movement into a chance casual community.

If you ask an Auin Bushman what realty happens at the puberty ceremonials, he will tell you, "We dance." In the initiation customs of all peoples the dances play an especially important part. The dance is the center of wedding festivities.

Every dance is and gives ecstasy.

The peoples influenced by the animal dance have a variety of movements and dance with enthusiasm; those who do not know the animal dance have few movements and show little zest for dancing.

In the earliest cultures any tie between the dancers is slight. In a higher level the choral dancers almost always touch one another and thus force themselves into the same stride and the same movement. The closer the contact, the stronger is the social character of the choral.

Whatever the nature of dance, it needs no onlooker, not even a single witness.

The oldest form of the Choral Dance is the circle. Even the chimpanzees dance in a circle, and people of every continent still do it.

The only information we have about the early history of the dance comes to us from the rock paintings created by primitive man tens of thousands of years ago in what is now France.

The superhuman power which exhiliration and hypnosis bring to a dancer is shown especially clearly in his almost inconceivable staying powers in a state of high tension. "In the dance even the weakest can do wonders."

The dance lives in all mankind as a necessary motor-rhythmic expression of excess energy and the joy of living.

A person can be danced. In all continents the dancers carry little children on their shoulders.

Only the tango has continued to enjoy undiminished favor for more than twenty years in spite of polishing and refinement. To be sure, it is no pure Negro dance and owes its best qualities to the unusual dance talents of the Spaniards.

In Europe we have the "loss of self" motif clearly illustrated in the whirl dances of the Russians sects of the Molokani in Armenia....All the countries that bordered the Meditteranean in ancient times, and the less remote sections of Asia as well, appear to have had whirl dances.

The dance in which the men form one row, the women another, and dance with and opposite each other in a form of love play, is widely diffused and may be confidentally assigned to a Protoneolithic culture level.

It removes the limitations of his body, extinguishes his consciousness, and pours the divine spirit into him. The whirl dance is the purest form of dance devotion.

Although the circle dance is known throughout the entire world, the front dance is limited to the cultures of which the rectangular hut is a part.