[…] The Muses were nine sisters, daughters of Zeus and the goddess Memory (Mnemosyne); through the state of trance or madness they provoked in the chosen faithful, the flow of all inherited memories passed into the minds of the poets, who were their unsuspecting disciples, tools for enriching the present with knowledge of the past or more mysteriously, of the predicted future, as if time were also something that ebbs and flows, without any real linearity.

[…] Were they moving in joyful solemn processions, conforming to their role as custodians of an ancient cultural heritage, custodians and managers of memory and ethnic identity? In part, yes, but not only and one might also wonder why such majestic and wise creatures had to dance. The ecstasy of dance was perhaps all they needed to access visionary communion with other realities: this is in fact the function of every sacred dance, all over the world […]

Speech given at the SISSC conference “In praise of Trance”, 2005