Quote of the Day: Ted Shawn on Daily Inspiration

Before he was revered as a pioneer, Ted Shawn watched audiences and patrons dismiss dance as decorative, nice to look at, hard to take seriously. He built companies in an America that didn’t yet have a cultural vocabulary for modern movement, and he endured the quiet humiliations that come with trying to make a “frivolous” art sound necessary. Out of that grind came a hard-won conviction: “I believe that dance communicates man's deepest, highest and most truly spiritual thoughts and emotions far better than words, spoken or written.”

Shawn isn’t arguing that language is useless; he’s arguing that it is edited. Words arrive with grammar, social permission, and the constant temptation to tidy up what we actually feel. Even our best sentences can end up sounding like summaries, accurate, maybe, but reduced. Dance, by contrast, is sensation before explanation. It’s the body telling the truth in real time, without waiting for the mind to negotiate.

That immediacy matters because the most consequential parts of being human, grief, devotion, desire, awe, often show up first as weather in the nervous system. Movement can hold contradiction: trembling and strength, surrender and defiance, stillness and eruption. It can also cross borders that speech can’t, offering a kind of humanity that doesn’t require a shared dictionary. When Shawn calls dance “spiritual,” he’s pointing to its ancient job: to make the invisible felt, not merely described.

Ted Shawn earned the right to say this by reinventing American contemporary dance, through daring choreography, the cultivation of male dancers, and a lasting home for the art at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.

January can make us live in our heads, planning, resolving, translating ourselves into bullet points. Today, try a different practice of resilience: before you explain what you feel, let your body answer first, walk, stretch, sway, dance, until the truth has shape.