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Edwin Denby Biography

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“In dancing one keeps taking a step and recovering one’s balance. The risk is a part of the rhythm. One steps out of and into balance; one keeps on doing it, and step by step the mass of the body moves about. But the action is more fun and the risk increases when the dancers step to a rhythmic beat of music. Then the pulse of the downbeat can lift the dancer as he takes a step, it can carry him through the air for a moment;”

“Tyl Ulenspiegel" is a hearty Flemish grabbag—dirt and folk and anarchism and Robin Hood-ness, Bosch and I suppose Rembrandt and a Flemish philosophical novel, and the final denouement even offers the concept of the gifted man who from the solitude of intelligence slips gratefully into ordinary human happiness, the progress from the "hero" to "a man.”

“Images such as these familiar ones (I mean to suggest) build up an imaginary country in which the story becomes credible; we recognize it as the particular country of our imagination where people would act as they do in the story, would do the deed they do. And the largeness of the images makes it a country wide enough so that the victim could escape, if he chose; like Achilles. But it is the rhythmic power of the dancing, of the dance scenes, that turns the pantomime quality of a gesture into an emblem, into an image with all its own country all around it.”