Aerial Dance Quotes

Have you ever observed a humming-bird moving about in an aerial dance among the flowers--a living prismatic gem that changes its colour with every change of position.

No one in this dogfight has any illusions: it is all instinct and training. They move like machines. But they never lose their own sense of style. Their own dance moves. They speak the same aerial language.

THREE BUTTERFLIES, AERIAL GEISHAS, DANCED out of the sunshine, into the porch shadows. Their silken kimonos flaring and folding and flaring in graceful swirls of color, as bashful as faces hidden behind the pleats of hand-painted fans, they fled, quick, into the brightness from which they had come.

You have been a child, reader, and you would, perhaps, be very happy to be one still. It is quite certain that you have not, more than once (and for my part, I have passed whole days, the best employed of my life, at it) followed from thicket to thicket, by the side of running water, on a sunny day, a beautiful green or blue dragon-fly, breaking its flight in abrupt angles, and kissing the tips of all the branches. You recollect with what amorous curiosity your thought and your gaze were riveted upon this little whirlwind, hissing and humming with wings of purple and azure, in the midst of which floated an imperceptible body, veiled by the very rapidity of its movement. The aerial being which was dimly outlined amid this quivering of wings, appeared to you chimerical, imaginary, impossible to touch, impossible to see. But when, at length, the dragon-fly alighted on the tip of a reed, and, holding your breath the while, you were able to examine the long, gauze wings, the long enamel robe, the two globes of crystal, what astonishment you felt, and what fear lest you should again behold the form disappear into a shade, and the creature into a chimera! Recall these impressions, and you will readily appreciate what Gringoire felt on contemplating, beneath her visible and palpable form, that Esmeralda of whom, up to that time, he had only caught a glimpse, amidst a whirlwind of dance, song, and tumult.

Height to height and light to light, like butterflies and minor gods or aerial photographers we make this plot, pretend to view a former fate where Hardy’s rustics still forgive what seems to them but nature’s lot.

How to reconcile the strangeness of an adult’s intellect and experience wrapped up in a hatchling’s body? Or now, as her mood spun on a wingtip, endlessly unpredictable, for she began to dance first with some of the aerial movements Grandion himself had taught her, then very quickly modifying and expanding upon those as the desire to express herself became irrepressible and she spiralled about the much larger Dragons, calculating at an ever more furious pace. He could no longer follow her thoughts, for they sparked off in effervescent spirals far quicker even than her dance; one second she was battling Numistar, the next he saw spin-offs of an eggling-dream and a memory of her mother’s reaction to the Reaving and here was a Dragon Rider Academy with Elki at its head, a place where Dragons and Humans learned freely together, and another flash-memory of Imbalance detected and pondered through at least fourteen separate vectors … and she danced with him in courtship and saw him slough free of the volcanic lake beside the monastery building, sleek and gleaming of gemstone scales, snatching her breath from her chest … and she charged into battle with him against ten thousand two-headed Dragons – what had become of that scourge of the East? Now, she recounted the nth detail of the shield constructs which, laced in soul-shadowing grief, had composed the paean of his honour-offering for his slain father, Sapphurion. A flicker of insight saw those constructs modified and enriched, while she simultaneously visited with the filthy Maroon Dragoness, Ianthine, and recalled her bedazzling, hypnotic power which had so nearly opened the path to slaying Azziala. The Empress would not be surprised like that again. Then, Grandion’s mind hurtled out of her orbit, overwhelmed. He clutched hopefully at the fireflies of her thoughts.

His 1968 film of Finian’s Rainbow, a fanciful 1947 Broadway blast from the left by Fred Saidy, E. Y. “Yip” Harburg and Burton Lane, is a guidebook to other movies and musicals. Coppola packs his film with intrusive references that proclaim the artifices of filmusical style and the tension between credible storytelling and musical convention. The editing of an arrival by train comes directly from Hallelujah; a dance with laundry on a clothesline from Dames; the aerial floating on that clothing from Mary Poppins; the spray of fire hoses on a burning church from Strike; the passing of water pails, “Keep the water coming,” from Our Daily Bread; the use of blackface from two decades of filmusicals between The Jazz Singer and The Jolson Story.

Petipa responds with vigor equal to Ralph's robust song and flamboyant gestures. Once the energy level is raised, Ralph feels that his postures become imbued with an unconscious spiritual significance which Petipa affirms by countering with her own complementary moves. A hopping arabesque from Ralph may provoke a series of elegant stalking leaps from Petipa, while a fluttering of fingers may be countered with tiny aerial flurries. Poignant moments of unconcerned fur licking punctuate the patterns of the dance. Dancing with a tail of his own attached, Fred becomes a psychic extension of the cat. 'I share its grace, power, and oneness with the universe. I relate to Fluff and the whole spectrum of feline physicality on a profound level--I even regard birds differently.' Cat dancing is likely a complex vocabulary of gestures that we have yet to recognize and fully understand. Helen, along with others who share her covenant, has come to feel that Boot's studied poses communicate his inner thoughts and embody his souls unexpressed desires. But you have to be careful; sometimes the energy is so powerful I worry about overstimulating my aura. At those levels, an unstable etheric oscillation could collapse into an astral vortex and suck my spiritual reserves into a sate of negative sub-matter.

There are several aerial films of the incoming tsunami, but the one that plays and replays in my imagination was shot above the town of Natori, south of the city of Sendai. It begins over land rather than sea, with a view of dun winter paddy fields. Something is moving across the landscape as if it is alive, a brown-snouted animal hungrily bounding over the earth. Its head is a scum of splintered debris; entire cars bob along on its back. It seems to steam and smoke as it moves; its body looks less like water or mud than a kind of solid vapor. And then a large boat can be seen riding it inland, hundreds of yards from the sea, and—unbelievably—blue-tiled houses, still structurally intact, spinning across the inundated fields with orange flames dancing on their roofs. The creature turns a road into a river, then swallows it whole, and then it is raging over more fields and roads towards a village and a highway thick with cars. One driver is accelerating ahead of it, racing to escape—before the car and its occupants are gobbled up by the wave.