Travel and Dancing

What one expects and gets from travel and dance—a liberation from earthly woes, the possibility of an aesthetic relation to organized toil—corresponds to the sort of elevation above the ephemeral and the contingent that might occur within people’s existence in the relation to the eternal and the absolute. . . . Through their travels (and for the time being it doesn’t matter where they are headed) the shackles are burst, and they imagine that infinity itself is spreading out before them. In trains they are already on the other side, and the world in which they land is a new world for them. The dancer also grasps eternity in the rhythm: the contrast between the time in which he floats about and the time that demolishes him is his authentic rapture within the inauthentic domain. Dance itself can readily be reduced to a mere step, since after all it is only the act of dancing that is essential.

Siegfried Kracauer, 16th November, 1924, Frankfurter Zeitung

As quoted in the New Yorker article, Only Disconnect