If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it
Isadora DuncanRead
A dancer, if she is great, can give to the people something that they can carry with them forever. They can never forget it, and it has changed them, though they may never know it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Great dancers leave a lasting impact on their audience, altering their perception and emotional state.
Isadora Duncan emphasizes the profound influence a talented dancer can have on their audience. Such performances resonate deeply, creating lasting memories and personal transformations in viewers, even if they may not consciously recognize the change.
Themes
DanceArtImpactEmotionTransformation
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote at a dance recital to highlight the importance of emotional expression in performance.
More from Isadora Duncan
All quotes →The dancer of the future will be one whose body & soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of the soul will have become the movement of the body.
Isadora DuncanRead
Master technique, so that technique NEVER prevents you from dancing.
Isadora DuncanRead
Oh Woman, come before us, before our eyes longing for beauty, and tired of the ugliness of civilization, come in simple tunics, letting us see the line and harmony of the body beneath, and dance for us. Dance us the sweetness of life. Give us again the sweetness and the beauty of the true dance, give us again the joy of seeing the simple unconscious pure body of a woman. Like a great call it has come, and women must hear it and answer it.
Isadora DuncanRead
I have only danced my life. As a child I danced the spontaneous joy of growing things. As an adolescent, I danced with joy turning to apprehension of the first realisation of tragic undercurrents; apprehension of the pitiless brutality and crushing progress of life.
Isadora DuncanRead
There are likewise three kinds of dancers: first, those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of impersonal and graceful arabesques; second, those who, by concentrating their minds, lead the body into the rhythm of a desired emotion, expressing a remembered feeling or experience. And finally, there are those who convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul.
Isadora DuncanRead
Similar quotes
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.
John Singer SargentRead
Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
Sometimes I long so much to do landscape, just as one would go for a long walk to refresh oneself, and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul.
Vincent Van GoghRead
I feed on good soup, not beautiful language.
MoliereRead
It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.
Pablo PicassoRead
I believe that one of the secret engines that allows cinema to work, and have the marvelous power over us that it does, is the fact that for thousands of years we have spent eight hours every night in a 'cinematic' dream-state, and so are familiar with this version of reality.
Walter MurchRead