Jamake Highwater Quotes & Sayings

For the Indian,dance is a personal form of prayer. When the Eagle Dancer puts on his costume,when he begins to dance to the music,he doesn't simply perform it; he actually becomes the eagle itself. The dancer is virtually inseparable from the dance. — Jamake Highwater

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. — Jamake Highwater

White performances were always dull in comparison to the astonishing expressiveness of Black dancers. Behind the white person's inarticulate body were centuries of condemnation of dancing on religious grounds. — Jamake Highwater

The story of dance in the Western world is as much an alternative vision of the events of history as is the folk history told for generations by primal people. — 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. — Jamake Highwater

What dance achieves, what play and sex achieve are the same thing that poetry achieves. They transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. — Jamake Highwater

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. — Jamake Highwater

At the root of all the various manifestations of dancing lies the common impulse to resort to movement to externalize emotional states which we cannot externalize by rational means. — Jamake Highwater

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

Art doesn't want to be familiar. It wants to astonish us. Or, in some cases, to enrage us. It wants to move us. To touch us. Not accommodate us, make us comfortable. — Jamake Highwater

Dance in this century has remained primarily a personal ritual operating, like most avant-garde art, as an idiosyncratic form rather than a tribal expression of religious powers or a corporate expression of societal values. — Jamake Highwater

People who exist at the margins of society are very much like Alice in Wonderland. They are not required to make the tough decision to risk their lives by embarking on an adventure of self-discovery. They have already been thrust beyond the city's walls that keep ordinary people at a safe distance from the unknown. For at least some outsiders, "alienation" has destroyed traditional presumptions of identity and opened up the mythic hero's path to the possibility of discovery. What outsiders discover in their adventures on the other side of the looking glass is the courage to repudiate self-contempt and recognise their "alienation" as a precious gift of freedom from arbitrary norms that they did not make and did not sanction. At the moment a person questions the validity of the rules, the victim is no longer a victim. — Jamake Highwater

We've reached a point where we are not a very empathetic people, and art without empathy is art without an audience. My basic viewpoint is that without art we're alone. — Jamake Highwater

Some of the most popular discos in America and Europe were started as gay establishments, which began to open their doors to anyone who wanted to dance. — Jamake Highwater

For Indians, images are a means of celebrating mystery and not a manner of explaining it — Jamake Highwater

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

In the New Hebrides, any dancer making a mistake was assaulted, wounded, and possibly killed by bowmen posted to keep careful watch for inaccuracies in rituals. — Jamake Highwater

The wall that separates insiders from outsiders is not born of human nature but methodically built, brick by brick, by tribal convention. The "wall" about which I will often speak in this book is not an organism or a membranous extension of some inborn aspect of "human nature". It is a mechanistic process-a barrier meticulously constructed by erratic community decrees as a means of identifying those who are part of the group and marking those who are not. It is not difficult to imagine the chauvinism that require a community to mark its territories and distinguish its members from its enemies. It is far more difficult to understand the kind of "outsiders" who are the subjects of this book-those who are part of the group and yet are rejected by their peers and cast into a terrible internal exile. It is an exile called "alienation". — Jamake Highwater