21 Quotes by Curt Sachs

Every dance is and gives ecstasy.

The English dance unites the guests of an evening by the spell of rhythmical movement into a chance casual community.

A choral dance: an attempt to impose upon a chance gathering of a few dozen guests a communal feeling.

The peoples influenced by the animal dance have a variety of movements and dance with enthusiasm; those who do not know the animal dance have few movements and show little zest for dancing.

The oldest form of the Choral Dance is the circle. Even the chimpanzees dance in a circle, and people of every continent still do it.

In the earliest cultures any tie between the dancers is slight. In a higher level the choral dancers almost always touch one another and thus force themselves into the same stride and the same movement. The closer the contact, the stronger is the social character of the choral.

Music as a whole, in its overwhelming wealth and endlessness, is inaccessible unless we free ourselves from the limitations of our own restricted training.

If you ask an Auin Bushman what realty happens at the puberty ceremonials, he will tell you, “We dance.” In the initiation customs of all peoples the dances play an especially important part. The dance is the center of wedding festivities.

The dance lives in all mankind as a necessary motor-rhythmic expression of excess energy and the joy of living.