“Whenever Lifar dances, I see blood: his knees are wounded, his mouth is a wound, his veins open. It literally flows, not the red blood that the crowd and families quickly hide in sheets, but the soul’s blood, the loss of which exhausts us and which is the perspiration of love… When this supernatural, stigmata-like privilege is compounded with the grace of youth, then dance, instead of being a somewhat ridiculous art, finds its sublime and religious character again…”