Dance Art Form Quotes

“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance - not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.”

— Jane Jacobs

“Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

“Whether you dance, draw, make music, shoot field goals, build houses, tune engines, or sit around all day watching television, you are an artist. Your single greatest work of art is your self. As with any art form, the more you understand and develop your talents, the more empowered and masterful you become as an artist. This is particularly important when engaging in the art of consciously shaping your own life.”

— Scott Edmund Miller

“Dance is more than an art form; it is life itself.”

— Marty Rubin

“I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.”

— Sydney Pollack

“Obviously, there's the seedy side of the strip club world and pole dancing. But, pole dancing, as an art form, is really beautiful. It's been hyper-sexualized because it's associated with strippers, but if you think about it, just in terms of other kinds of dancing, they're using an instrument to create these amazing dance forms.”

— Megalyn Echikunwoke

“Opera is the ultimate art form. It has singing and music and drama and dance and emotion and story.”

— Diane Paulus

“90% of every art form is garbage - dance and stand-up, painting and music. Focus on the 10% that's good, suck it up, and drive on.”

— Patton Oswalt

“Music requires a particular type of education which is simply not given to most people. And, as a result, it's set further apart. It has a special place. People who are familiar with painting and photography and drama and dance, and so on, cannot talk so easily about music. And yet, as Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, music is potentially the most accessible art form because, with the Apollonian and the Dionysian coming together, it makes a”

— Edward W. Said

“Opera is the most complete art form. It includes drama, acting, technology (lighting), art (the sets), dance, and the epitome of the human voices. But mostly, go for the glorious music. The arts are crucial to the life of every community.”

— Karen DeCrow

“Dance in this century has remained primarily a personal ritual operating, like most avant-garde art, as an idiosyncratic form rather than a tribal expression of religious powers or a corporate expression of societal values.”

— Jamake Highwater

“Dance removes you from this construct of the world that you have, and it's a conversation that you're having with people. That's how dance grew, as an art form.”

— Stephen Boss

“Hosting is an art form. Like acting, singing, or comedy hosting is a craft. It's a delicate dance of timing, the ability to read the room, and the art of conversation.”

— Todd Newton

“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.”

— Twyla Tharp

“The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.”

— Joshua Foer

“Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.”

— Susan Sontag