Followers

Friday 2 May 2014

Quotes - art, performance, life, belief and reality.


'I think we all choreograph our lives in the end - improvising, adapting, trying at new characters and forms, striving to give the best performance we can until the curtain falls'

Jin Xing, Shanghai Tango, 2005:195


'You are dancing and moving in the light of God.  Yes, it is better than sex.  It is being One with all there is.' 
Shirley MacLaine, I'm Over All That and Other Confessions, 2011:120


'Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life in this her thirtieth year was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva...  What a journey...what a day...what madness, so much worse than tragic!  What to do except dance, dance, only dance...'
Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone, 2010:108


'For me the act of writing is getting in touch with the subconscious mind, the realm of dreams and imagination.  I am not interested in documentary theatre.  I do engage in research and exploration, but I use my investigation as a means to fuel the imagination and as a way of questioning reality.  The story of the St. Louis is a point of departure, the beginning of the journey in the vast distance between God and man.  I write in order to enter the latitudes of this distance, the breath of space.  It is a prayer that leads us to God;  it is writing that leads us to the unknown, the dark night of the soul.
Nilo Cruz in The Clyde Fitch Report, posted Feb 17 2014.



For double the vision my Eyes do see
And a double vision is always with me
William Blake in a Letter to Butts, November 22nd 1802

Double Vision Dance Co. 1987-1990

I see a place of magical Beauty, that is and is not of this world that we know, a world created of familiar things, but arranged in a new and harmonious order: I see a life lived that bridges the two worlds, the inner and the outer, concept and expression, Nature and Art. I see groves of meditation, where Truth is learned and loved, and halls of Beauty, where the divine self is expressed.

...to some degree the saint does become the artist.  But how far the artist becomes the saint is yet to be understood.

Ruth St. Denis


Children are the meaning of life;

They are the holy people.

Children are our future.

Children are connected to spirit.

Pray for your children;

Pray that they have a good life.

Pray for the future, like previous generations prayed for us.

We are living in the prayers, intentions, and hopes of our ancestors.


This is a collection of some of the teachings I have recieved over the years from elders of many nations, including Nehiyawak (Cree), Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Anishnaabe (Ojibwe), Mohawk. Some time ago our elders, parents, grandparents, ancestors gathered together, or sat alone, and prayed for us today. We are these prayers being answered. We are a prophecy come true. As Rulan Tangen would say, ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’. Our ancestors have been planting these seeds of thought and consciousness forever. These seeds are felt by our spirit, flow in our blood, are seen in our eyes, and heard in our every breath. Each heartbeat is a reminder of the good intentions a reminder of tradition, and a call to continue this legacy. We still pray today, together or alone, and the children and their future are always in our prayers…

‘When we dance we pray’ (MariJo Moore)


Sandra la mouche
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'...ritual makes, as it were, a bridge between real life and art...'

Jane Ellen Harrison, 1951:135 
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'Will God, or somebody else, give me the power to breath into my canvases my sigh, the sigh of prayer and of sadness, the prayer of salvation, of re-birth?'

'Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul.  All souls are sacred, the soul of all the bipeds in every quarter of the globe.'


'Don't you feel our electric scaffoldings slip under our feet?  And were not the forewarnings in our plastic art right - since we are truly up in the air and suffer from one malady only - the hankering for stability?'


Marc Chagall
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  ...an impulse shared by art with ritual, the desire, that is, to utter, to give out a strongly felt emotion or desire by representing, by making or doing or enriching the object or act desired.

...This common emotional factor it is that makes are and ritual in their beginnings well-nigh indistinguishable.'

Jane Ellen Harrison, 1951:26
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All we really want to do is dance
Joseph Campbell, 1991:264