POETRY AND DANCE

In the actual state of things, it is poetry that must save the world. Those who no longer see the Marvelous live in the desert - and death. Let the poets be read fervently each day! They alone reveal to us how precious, intimate, and astonishing the things around us are. They alone will reveal the secret of the ties that attach us to these things. And let us know how to distinguish the false poets, who debase all that is human, from the true poets - those who “animate a world in recreating it”. Dance, joyous and powerful expression of the enthusiasm for life, must have the same misson as poetry. It creates forms in time and space.

Dance is the vertigo of matter. 

To communicate with life’s forces by means of gesture and movement - the simplest and most direct expression.

To rediscover the truth of being.

To acquire, at the same time, the sense of the invisible powers that attract us even while repelling us : Is this not a means of surpassing ourselves, a way out of the marasmus and mediocrity - a method of attaining the grandeur that we so shamefully abandoned?

Helene Vanel in the Cahiers G.L.M. no. 9, March, 1938

translated from the French by Franklin Rosemont 

found in Surrealist women: an international anthology  by Penelope Rosemont