Quotes from Jamake Highwater

The nobility danced for the sake of social grace, to exhibit their finery...peasants danced to make themselves happy, to escape the routine of their life, and to meet their future wives and husbands.

We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality.

Not everyone has a voice. Many outsiders cannot speak through walls, and, as a consequence, they become silent and invisible. Some give up their voices willingly. Others cannot face the ferocious silence of their lives; so they replace their genuine voices with incomprehensible shrieks of rage. They bombard the wall with wrath or batter it with explosives. The silence is broken by their rage, but nothing changes. They remain outsiders who are desperate to be allowed into the world.

too many people who had come west to escape the past

To find an animal body within himself Hawkins tells me, he had to abandon narrative dancing.

her music; its unmatched poetic shape and impact, which, like metaphor in language, breaks out of its own restrictions and — with vast imaginal inference and resonance — expresses for us things yet unknown.

Dance has been transformed from an involuntary motor discharge, a ceremonial rite, into a work of art, conscious of, intended for, observation.

Art is a staple of mankind... So urgent, so utterly linked with the pulse of feeling that it becomes the singular sign of life when every other aspect of civilization fails.

Among the language of the American Indians, there is no word for 'art'... For Indians, everything is art... therefore needs no name.