12 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.