Jamake Highwater Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

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

Jamake Highwater

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Jamake Highwater

#11. 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

#12. For Indians, images are a means of celebrating mystery and not a manner of explaining it

Jamake Highwater

#13. 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

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

Jamake Highwater

#15. 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

#16. 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