Martha Graham - Dance Quotes

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To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.
Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body. And it's partly the language that we don't want to show.

Martha Graham
We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.

Martha Graham
I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.

Martha Graham
I feel that the essence of dance is the expression of mankind — the landscape of the human soul. I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human being can be.

Martha Graham
To learn to dance by practicing dancing or to live by practicing living, the principles are the same.… One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God.

Martha Graham
You can be Eastern or Burmese or what have you, but the function of the body and the awareness of the body results in dance and you become a dancer, not just a human being.

Martha Graham
Many times I hear the phrase "the dance of life". It is an expression that touches me deeply, for the instrument through which the dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived — the human body.

Martha Graham
I don't try to tell the dancers exactly what a dance means before they do it. I can correct it and tell them what they have done after they have done it, and what it means to me. But I don't say, "Be fearful here," "Be angry here," because I think that is intrusion.

Martha Graham
A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish. After all, I choreographed for myself. I never choreographed what I could not do. I changed steps in Medea and other ballets to accommodate the change. But I knew. And it haunted me. I only wanted to dance.

Martha Graham
Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.

Martha Graham
I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. in each it is the performance of a dedicated set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes the shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some areas an athlete of God.

Martha Graham
I think the reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living.

Martha Graham
The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to the head; look at the way the hairline grows; think of all the little bones in your wrist. It is a miracle. And the dance is a celebration of that miracle.

Martha Graham
At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' en pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!

Martha Graham