Tufts University - Jumbo Yearbook (Medford, MA)

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Dance is growing in popularity here at Tufts as well as all over the country. An increasing number of people are coming to the realization that dance is an exciting experience at any level, for both participants and members of an audience. Exciting because movement is inherent to all and the dancer’s instrument is his body. To develop human movement to its fullest potential is to enable an individual to generate beauty and promote aesthetic communication. A student of dance leaves a class with a sense of historical significance. Each movement is a reflection of an age as well as of a momentary interpretation. Dance involves inescapable concentration which results in the physical and mental awareness essential to feeling alive. An art process is not essentially a natural process; it is an invented one. It can take actions of organization from the way nature functions, but essentially man invents the process. And from or for that process he derives a discipline to make and keep the process functioning. That discipline too is not a natural process. The daily discipline, the continued keeping of the elasticity of the muscles, the continued control of the mind over the body’s actions, the constant hoped-for flow of the spirit into physical movement, both new and renewed, is not a natural way. It is unnatural in its demands on all the sources of energy. But the final synthesis can be a natural one, natural in the sense that the mind, body and spirit function as one. —Merce Cunningham 20

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§5191 mmm

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Dance is concerned with the single instant as it comes along