A Quote by Camille A. Brown

I think a lot of times when people hear the word dance, they think 'oh, that's something that I can't do.' But dance really lives in our bodies and the thing that I've come to learn, embrace and lift up is that we have history in our bodies that's living and breathing. We have our own individual history but we also have our heritage. Each one of us has our movement language and it's about tapping into that and pulling that out. That's the thing that I try to encourage everybody because it's not about dance, it's about the movement and the gesture and how we honor it.
Your body is the ground metaphor of your life, the expression of your existence... So many of us are not in our bodies, really at home and vibrantly present there. Nor are we in touch with the basic rhythms that constitute our bodily life. We live outside ourselves - in our heads, our memories, our longings - absentee landlords of our own estate. My way back into life was ecstatic dance. I reentered my body by learning to move my self, to dance my own dance from the inside out, not the outside in.
Movement has the capacity to take us to the home of the soul, the world within for which we have no name. Movement reaches our deepest nature, and dance creatively expresses it. Through dance, we gain new insights into the mystery of our lives. When brought forth from the inside and forged by the desire to create personal change, dance has the profound power to heal the body, psyche and soul.
According to energy medicine, we are all living history books. Our bodies contain our histories- every chapter, line and verse of every event and relationship in our lives. As our lives unfold, our biological health becomes a living, breathing biographical statement that conveys our strengths, weaknesses, hopes and fears.
How our availability, our showing up, our presence, leaves us open to that violence. I think it's a question of language, as it arrives from one body to another. It becomes the thing in between the two bodies.
It's only when movement becomes the most natural state in our lives that we can finally begin to enjoy the motion. And it's only when standing still becomes impossible that we can finally embrace the kinds of changes that are inevitable in our lives. We were not designed to stand still. If we were, we'd have at least three legs. We were designed to move. Our bodies are bodies that have walked across vast continents. Our bodies are bodies that have carried objects of art and war over great distances. We are no less mobile than our ancestors. We are athletes. We are warriors. We are human.
We have our own history, our own language, our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people - history has made us all South Africans.
I love what a women embodies. I love our bodies; I love the way we communicate with our bodies. I love the way dance creates movement. It's art in motion.
I think our work as movement leaders isn't just about our own visibility but rather how do we make the whole visible. How do we not just fight for our individual selves but fight for everybody?
Presumably there are energies, to which each human is sensitive, that we cannot yet detect by means of our instruments. Built into our brains and our bodies are very sensitive tuneable receivers for energies that we do not yet know about in our science but that each one of us can detect under the proper circumstances and the proper state of mind. We can tune our nervous systems and bodies to receive these energies. We can also tune our brains and bodies to transmit these energies.
Consciousness creates the body. Our bodies are made up of dynamic energy systems that are affected by our diets, relationships, heredity, and culture and the interplay of all these factors and activities... We cannot hope to reclaim our bodily wisdom and inherent ability to create health without first understanding the influence of our society on how we think about and care for our bodies.
I've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech-if not all human speech-is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder-they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.
The Underground Railroad, which was the first integrated civil rights movement, is a part of our history that not a lot of us know about. And it's actually a very empowering side of our history.
The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at and marketed to us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.
Some people come into our lives and they move our souls to sing and make our spirits dance. They help us to see that everything on earth is part of the incredibility of life... and that it is always there for us to take of its joy. Some people come into our lives and leave footprints on our hearts and we are never ever the same.
I was very happy with the success of 'Noise/Funk,' but of course, there is a lot more that I have to say about the dance, about the history, about the people involved with the dance and their history.
When I was 16, my friends and I were all starting to think about what we were going to do with our lives, and I started picturing myself majoring in dance at college traveling around with a contemporary dance company, and it didn't excite me as I thought it would all those years. I was just thinking about the things that I loved most about dance, which was entertaining and telling a story, and that's when I kind of opened my eyes again to acting.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!