Top 5 Quotes & Sayings by Gerard van der Leeuw

The dance is the most universal of the arts, since, as Goethe justly said, it could destroy all the fine arts. It is an expression of all the emotions of the spirit, from the lowest to the highest. It accompanies and stimulates all the processes of life, from hunting and farming to war and fertility, from love to death. It enables, in turn other arts to come into being: music, song, drama. Despite all their riches, the dance is no formless complex, but a simple unity.

Historically and phenomenologically viewed, dance is the original art. All arts are found within it, in its undivided unity. The image, made dynamic through movement and countermovement, sings and speaks simultaneously.

In the dance the boundaries between body and soul are effaced. The body moves itself spiritually, the spirit bodily.

The surrender of oneself to a stronger power, the unification of one's own movements with the movements of the whole is what makes dance religious and lets it become a service of God.

The art of beautiful motion is far and away the oldest. Before man learned how to use any instruments at all, he moved the most perfect instrument of all, his body. He did this with such abandon that the cultural history of prehistoric and ancient man is, for the most part, nothing but the history of the dance.