Jamake Highwater

“I have spent most of my adult life in a ghetto among countless other outsiders who have also learned how to talk…

— Jamake Highwater

The story of dance in the Western world is as much an alternative vision of the events of history as is the…

— Jamake Highwater

“The wall that separates insiders from outsiders is not born of human nature but methodically built, brick by brick, by tribal convention.…

— Jamake Highwater

Dance in this century has remained primarily a personal ritual operating, like most avant-garde art, as an idiosyncratic form rather than a…

— Jamake Highwater

At the root of all the various manifestations of dancing lies the common impulse to resort to movement to externalize emotional states…

— Jamake Highwater

What dance achieves, what play and sex achieve are the same thing that poetry achieves. They transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

— Jamake Highwater

For Indians, images are a means of celebrating mystery and not a manner of explaining it

— Jamake Highwater

Some of the most popular discos in America and Europe were started as gay establishments, which began to open their doors to…

— Jamake Highwater

In the New Hebrides, any dancer making a mistake was assaulted, wounded, and possibly killed by bowmen posted to keep careful watch…

— Jamake Highwater

The nobility danced for the sake of social grace, to exhibit their finery...peasants danced to make themselves happy, to escape the routine…

— Jamake Highwater

We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a…

— Jamake Highwater

Art is a staple of mankind... So urgent, so utterly linked with the pulse of feeling that it becomes the singular sign…

— Jamake Highwater

For the Indian,dance is a personal form of prayer. When the Eagle Dancer puts on his costume,when he begins to dance to…

— Jamake Highwater

“Not everyone has a voice. Many outsiders cannot speak through walls, and, as a consequence, they become silent and invisible. Some give…

— Jamake Highwater

“People who exist at the margins of society are very much like Alice in Wonderland. They are not required to make the…

— Jamake Highwater

What outsiders discover in their adventures on the other side of the looking glass is the courage to repudiate self-contempt and recognise…

— Jamake Highwater

We've reached a point where we are not a very empathetic people, and art without empathy is art without an audience. My…

— Jamake Highwater

White performances were always dull in comparison to the astonishing expressiveness of Black dancers. Behind the white person's inarticulate body were centuries…

— Jamake Highwater

At the root of all the varied manifestations of dancing, lies the common impulse to resort to movement to externalize emotional states…

— Jamake Highwater

Dance has been transformed from an involuntary motor discharge, a ceremonial rite, into a work of art, conscious of, intended for, observation.

— Jamake Highwater

Among the language of the American Indians, there is no word for 'art'... For Indians, everything is art... therefore needs no name.

— Jamake Highwater

Art doesn't want to be familiar. It wants to astonish us. Or, in some cases, to enrage us. It wants to move…

— Jamake Highwater