Nadia Gamel quotes

I am NOT a belly dancer. I have never been one, and never will be. What I do is not what Hollywood vulgarly calls 'belly dance', but it's art. I have traveled the world to prove that my dance is not a dance of the belly but a refined, artistic dance full of tradition, of dreaming and beauty. Oriental dance is primarily an expressive dance; in that resides the beauty.
-- Nadia Gamel

#Dream #Art #Dancer

Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?

Sleeping on it didn't make accepting it any easier. It seemed like a really bad dream.

You have to dream before your dreams can come true.

The truth and the facts aren't necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have instead of ideas.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

The obedient in art are always the forgotten . . . The country is glorious but its beauties are unknown, and but waiting for a real live artist to splash them onto canvas . . . Chop your own path. Get off the car track.

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists.

Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science. The bringing to light of factual material and the development of ideas is to a large extent cumulative. But when artists themselves were, from about 1910, beginning to tear down the bastions protecting Art in its ivory tower, questioning the idea of Art with a capital 'A', photography was inevitably to assume a new stature both in the eyes of artists and the public, too.

I never wanted to be a painter; I wanted to be a tap dancer.

I always considered myself a dancer before anything else.