An Ideal Vision

Continuing with The Wild Reed series on “The Dancer and the Dance,” I share today a short but insightful quote by Deborah Jowitt.

The virtuosic dancer goes beyond the great athlete, who develops speed and coordination and strength in service of a complex of goals, and beyond the circus acrobat, who perfects variations on a single superb trick. . . . The dancer, like athlete and acrobat, presents speed, equilibrium, coordination, limberness, strength – human attributes that, although within the reach of almost everybody, rarely combine as excellently in life as we’d like them to. But because the dancer is not limited by the athlete’s concrete purposes and the acrobat’s single-minded focus, he or she more freely presents us with an ideal vision of ourselves.

– Deborah Jowitt
Time and the Dancing Image
p. 366

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Dancer and the Dance
Recovering the Queer Artistic Heritage
Scaling the Heights
Oh! What’s This, Then?
Whimsical and Edgy
Istanbul (Part 4)
Love, Equality and the Rumba
Oh, Yeah!