“…this person who is dancing encloses herself as it were in a time that she engenders, a time consisting enteirely of immediate energy, of nothing that can last. She is the unstable element, she squanders instability, she goes beyond the impossible and overdoes the improbable; and by denying the ordinary state of things, she creates in men’s minds the idea of another, exceptional state…”
Paul Valery, “Philosophy of the Dance,” in What is Dance, p. 59
Otohime 