Edwin Denby > Quotes

“You don't have to know about ballet to enjoy it, all you have to do is look at it.”
― Edwin Denby

“There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good. ”
― Edwin Denby

“You know it is an illusion, but you see it happen; you feel it happen, you enjoy believing it. There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.”
― Edwin Denby, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets

“Style can only be created at a risk, it's a from of courage, it is an exposed and often indefensible position”
― Edwin Denby

“Tyl Ulenspiegel" is a hearty Flemish grabbag—dirt and folk and anarchism and Robin Hood-ness, Bosch and I suppose Rembrandt and a Flemish philosophical novel, and the final denouement even offers the concept of the gifted man who from the solitude of intelligence slips gratefully into ordinary human happiness, the progress from the "hero" to "a man.”
― Edwin Denby, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets

“Art takes what in life is an accidental pleasure and tries to repeat and prolong it.”
― Edwin Denby

“Images such as these familiar ones (I mean to suggest) build up an imaginary country in which the story becomes credible; we recognize it as the particular country of our imagination where people would act as they do in the story, would do the deed they do. And the largeness of the images makes it a country wide enough so that the victim could escape, if he chose; like Achilles. But it is the rhythmic power of the dancing, of the dance scenes, that turns the pantomime quality of a gesture into an emblem, into an image with all its own country all around it.”
― Edwin Denby, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets

“In dancing one keeps taking a step and recovering one’s balance. The risk is a part of the rhythm. One steps out of and into balance; one keeps on doing it, and step by step the mass of the body moves about. But the action is more fun and the risk increases when the dancers step to a rhythmic beat of music. Then the pulse of the downbeat can lift the dancer as he takes a step, it can carry him through the air for a moment;”
― Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry

“It is not the critic's historic function to have the right opinions but to have interesting ones. He talks but he has nothing to sell. His social value is that of a man standing on a street corner talking so intently about his subject that he doesn't realize how peculiar he looks doing it. The intentness of his interest makes people who don't know what he's talking about believe that whatever it is, it must be real somehow--that the art of dancing must be a real thing to some people some of the time. That educates citizens who didn't know it and cheers up those who do.”
― Edwin Denby