2024
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"When it appears so obvious that dance can either enhance or diminish
our humanness, why do we seem to use it so frequently for the latter and
so infrequently for the former?"
- Dance educator Susan Stinson in 1984
('Examining the dance world's ethics' by Naomi M. Jackson, Dance Magazine, Feb 7, 2024)
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Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia and is
one of those who still lives by the humanist code. In his book “Why
Read?” he describes the potential charge embedded in a great work of
art: “Literature is, I believe, our best goad toward new beginnings, our
best chance for what we might call secular rebirth. However much
society at large despises imaginative writing, however much those
supposedly committed to preserve and spread literary art may demean it,
the fact remains that in literature there abide major hopes for human
renovation.”
Wouldn’t you love to take a course from that guy?
How does it work? How does culture do its thing? The shortest answer is
that culture teaches us how to see. “The greatest thing a human soul
ever does in this world is to SEE something, and tell what it saw in a
plain way,” the Victorian art critic John Ruskin wrote. “Hundreds of
people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one
who can see.”
(‘How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society’ by David Brooks, The New York Times, Jan 25, 2024)
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"I do believe that if we could all align our pelvises, wars would stop
and everything would take its right place… The more dancers we have, the
more healing can take place."
- Dan Wagoner (Dance Magazine, 2007)
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"There is, in art, neither past nor future. Art that is not in the present will never be."
- Pablo Picasso
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"We learn to practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing
dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the
same. One becomes in some area an athlete of god."
- Martha Graham
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Learning dance is tough
To perfect it is tough
To perform is tough
To get program is tough
Having learnt not to perform is tough
To pay money and get program is tough
To watch others pay and perform is tough
To get reviews is tough
To watch others run for reviews is tough
To focus with determination is tough
To break loose and get out of it is tough
To surrender to the lord is not tough
Dance for the divine with divinity and dignity
Everything will fall in place.
- Sailaja, artistic director of Saila Sudha (on Facebook, Dec 19, 2023)
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