I HAVE DISCOVERED THE
DANCE
“I have discovered the
dance. I have discovered the art which
has been lost for two thousand years. … I bring you the idea that is going to
revolutionize our entire epoch."
"I am asked to speak upon the `Dance of the Future'—yet how
is it possible? In fifty years I may
have something to say. Besides, I have
always found it indiscreet for me to speak of my dance. The people who are in sympathy with me
understand what I am trying to do better than myself, the people who are not in
sympathy, understand better than I why they are not."
"I had three great Masters, the three great precursors of the
Dance in our century—Beethoven, Nietzsche and Wagner. Beethoven created the dance in mighty
rhythm. Wagner in sculptural form. Nietzsche in spirit. Nietzsche was the first dancing
philosopher."
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE:
"The world itself is the will to power—and nothing
else! And you yourself are the will to
power—and nothing else!"
"Raise your hearts, my brethren, high, higher, and forget not
your legs! Moreover it is better still
if ye stand on your heads. ... And be that day reckoned lost on which we did
not dance once."
"For others do I wait ... for higher ones, stronger ones,
more triumphant ones, merrier ones, for such as are built squarely in body and
soul: laughing lions must come."
In the Theatre of Dionysus, Athens (Raymond Duncan)
"I was possessed by the dream of Promethean creation that, at
my call, there might spring from the Earth, descend from the Heavens, such
dancing figures as the world had never seen."
LINCOLN KIRSTEIN: "Her
dances were hymns to freedom -- of sensibility, of passion, of the
transcendentally convinced and convincing Emersonian soul.... Today it is hard
to picture convincing interpretations of Joy, Hope, Immortality, the Soul. But at the turn of the century an American
girl, incarnating these and more, coincided with historical promise."
THE NEW REPUBLIC (1928): "‘A book separate,’ this Life of Isadora
Duncan, a book, as Whitman said of Leaves of Grass, ‘not to be linked
with the rest nor felt by the intellect.’"
WALT WHITMAN: "I
celebrate myself, and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume / For
every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."
"I see America dancing, beautiful, strong, with one foot
poised on the highest point of the Rockies, her two hands stretched out from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, her fine head tossed to the sky, her forehead
shining with a crown of a million stars."
San Francisco Performing Arts
Library and Museum