QuOtEs..

“A dance is a very profound means to integrate the internal world with the external world.” Bill T. Jones, dancer/choreographer

“…the poetry of dance is the expression of unseen spiritual grace.”
Stewart Headler (19th century)

“The art of dancing…perhaps more than all other arts, is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”
Ruth St. Denis, pioneer of modern dance, founder Sacred Dance Guild

“No, art is not catharsis. Just the opposite: Art is rehearsal. Watching or listening to other people do something is a way of mentally rehearsing it—which makes it easier for us to do the same thing. After all, that’s why businesses spend untold millions of dollars on advertising every year.” Chuck Colson, founder, Prison Fellowship

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, writer

“Art takes the ordinary and alters it in ways which make us see a deeper reality, one of things not merely seen but both implied and inferred. It alters relationships and makes us move off our comfortable center, to see, hear and think anew. Art can, in the hands of great talent, make beauty which reverberates through our lives and carries us into rarified strata. It can shatter our perceptions. It can clarify our anger. It can help us to understand our sorrow…Art provides the channel for those qualities which endure beyond the turmoil of a chaotic and threatened world…In dance, one returns to long forgotten basics: the revelations of non-verbal symbology – the physical knowledge of emotion. The body has been learning since before birth.”
Bella Lewitzky, dancer/choreographer

“I scrub my hands with the purest soap, then join hands with the others in the great circle dancing around your altar, God, Singing God-songs at the top of my lungs, telling God-stories.” David, song writer, king (Psalm 26)

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—which is your spiritual worship.”
Romans 12:1 (NIV)

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life – and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.”
Romans 12:1 (The Message)

“The very moment you separate body and spirit, you end up with a corpse. Separate faith and works and you get the same thing: a corpse.”
James 2:26 (The Message)

“Beauty is not only a terrible thing, it is also a mysterious thing. There God and the Devil strive for mastery, and the battleground is the heart of men.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, novelist (The Brothers Karamazov)