Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky

With the gesture of a god,
Isadora Duncan

You trampled on fate,
You lifted up on high
Those that had fallen -
All the oppressed,
All the humiliated,
All the offended;
You lifted them up on high
And they were comforted.
(from "To Isadora Duncan" in Mandragora, poems by J.C.Powys, 1917)

Some of the Quotes: -

Writers Cafe Main site - Poetry of Dance 

Whosoever dances not, knoweth not the way of life – Gnostic hymn of the second century.

Dancing is a manner of being – Honore De Balzac

If people ask me when I began to dance I reply, ‘In my mother’s womb…’ I was born by the sea. My first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the waves. My life and my Art were born of the sea. – Isadora Duncan


Nijinsky
I love Russia, I love France, I love England, I love America, I love Switzerland, I love Spain, I love Japan, I love Australia, I love China, I love Africa, I love the Transvaal, I want to love everybody and therefore I am like God. I am neither Russian nor Pole. I am a man. – Vaslav Nijinsky

If my virtue be a dancer’s virtue, and if I have often sprung with both feet into the golde-emerald rapture, and if it be my Alpha and Omega that everything heavy shall become light, everybody and dancer and every spirit a bird: verily, that is my Alpha and Omega. - Nietzsche

My art is just an effort to express the truth of my Being in gesture and movement. It has taken me long years to find - Isadora Duncan 2
even one absolutely true movement. I have had no hesitation. I have given the most secret impulses of my soul. From the first I have only danced my life. – Isadora Duncan

The dance is poetry with arms and legs. It is matter, graceful and terrible, brought to life and made beautiful by movement. – Thoinot Arbeau

When you dance, I wish you
A wave o’ the sea that you may do
Nothing but that.
The Winter’s Tale – William Shakespeare

I had three great masters, the three great precursors of the dance of our century – Beethoven, Nietzsche and Wagner. Beethoven created the dance in mighty rhythm, Wagner in sculptural form, Nietzsche in spirit. Nietzsche was the first dancing philosopher. – Isadora Duncan

Maybe there’s some sixteen year old kid in place like Wichita right now who’s not just writing but singing and dancing his poetry…That’s what I’d like to see – the first poetry reading where a sixteen year old kid from Wichita comes on singing and dancing his poetry.’
Paterfamilias – Allen Ginsberg in America, Jane Kramer

Under the stress of joy, man makes words. The words are not enough; he prolongs them. The prolonged words are not enough; he modulates them. The modulated words are not enough and without even perceiving it, his hands make gestures and his feet begin to move. – Ancient Chinese Proverb

There’s nothing so necessary to man as the dance. Without dancing a man can do nothing. All the disasters of men, all the fatal misfortunes of which history is full, the blunders of the polities, the mistakes of the great commanders, all this comes only from not knowing how to dance. - Moiré – Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme