Quotes by Choreographers - Page 2

Sometimes we focus on the lyrics too much and forget to dance to the music.

You are the architect of your own loneliness.

What a magical place," she whispered in an awed voice. "I expect a unicorn or fairies to appear.""What would the fairies be doing?" Shermont asked. "Waltzing with the butterflies," she answered before thinking.

Laurie Brown

Slavery is a memory of something we cannot remember, and yet we cannot forget.

Bill T. Jones

Go within every day and find the inner strengthso that the world will not blow your candle out.

Katherine Dunham

(reporter interviewing Broadway dancer Tommy Tune:) 'Do you think that greats like Fred Astaire possessed some kind of magic?'(pause)'No. Magic possesses them'.

Tommy Tune

Here’s how I learned to improvise: I played some music in the studio and I started to move. It sounds obvious, but I wonder how many people, whatever their medium, appreciate the gift of improvisation. It’s your one opportunity in life to be completely free, with no responsibilities and no consequences. You don’t have to be good or even interesting. It’s you alone, with no one watching or judging. If anything comes of it, you decide whether the world gets to see it. In essence, you are giving yourself permission to daydream during working hours.

Twyla Tharp

You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident.

Twyla Tharp

I never set out to create a technique. I started out on the floor to find myself, to find what the body could do, and what would give me satisfaction - emotionally, dramatically and bodily. But I did not ever dream of establishing a technique. I still can't believe anything like that happened.

Martha Graham

But out of limitations comes creativity.

Debbie Allen

Learn the craft of knowing how to open your heart and to turn on your creativity. There’s a light inside of you.

Judith Jamison

Vulnerability does not take away your strength

Derek Hough

Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion.

Martha Graham

You didn't earn your heart; you didn't pay for it. It was given to you as a gift. So take advantage of it, enjoy it, and treat yourself the best way possible. A lot of us are just getting through or managing. Raise your standards. Grow, progress, push yourself, and in turn you will love yourself more. And when you love yourself more, you can love others.

Derek Hough

Music is a holy place, a cathedral so majestic that we can sense the magnificence of the universe, and also a hovel so simple and private that none of us can plumb its deepest secrets.

Don Campbell

Music is a holy place, a cathedral so majestic that we can sense the magnificence of the universe.

Don Campbell

Many women to whom I have preached the doctrine of freedom have weakly replied, 'But who is to support the children?' It seems to me that if the marriage ceremony is needed as a protection to insure the enforced support of children, then you are marrying a man who, you suspect, would under certain conditions, refuse to support his children, and it is a pretty low-down proposition. For you are marrying a man whom you already suspect of being a villain. But I have not so poor an opinion of men that I believe the greater percentage of them to be such low specimens of humanity.

Isadora Duncan

Reading is your first line of defense against an empty head.

Twyla Tharp

If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

Twyla Tharp

When an artist is asked to speak about form, you expect something different than when a critic talks about it. Because you think that somewhere between sentences and words, the secret will slip out. I am trying to give you that secret; it isn't a secret at all, but it is building solidly, not using secrets. I had been trying to extend into metaphysical extension; that film is changing, metamorphic; that is, infinite; the idea that the movement of life is totally important rather than a single life. My films were built on an incline, an increase in intensity. I hoped to make a form which was infinite, the changingness of things. I thought I would want to find a total form which conveyed that sense, particularly in reference to an Oriental subject. My impression was: one is walking down a corridor of a hotel. One hears a sound, opens a door and a man is playing; one listens for three minutes and closes the door. The music went on before you opened the door and it continues after you close the door. There was neither beginning nor end. Western music increases in intensity to a climax and then resolves itself. Oriental music is infinite; it goes on and on. The Chinese theater goes on for hours and hours with time for lunch moving scenery, etc.

Maya Deren

In every situation, at the beginning or end of the workday, you have a choice. You can look back or you can look forward. My advice: look forward. Always think about the next day. Don't go into the studio thinking, 'Hmmm, let's see what I was doing yesterday?' It takes more energy to twist yourself around and look back that it does to face forward.

Twyla Tharp

Creativity is an act of defiance.

Twyla Tharp

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.

Martha Graham

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others

Martha Graham

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.  And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.  The world will not have it.  It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions.  It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.  You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.  You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.  Keep the channel open.

Martha Graham

Now I am going to reveal to you something which is very pure, a totally white thought. It is always in my heart; it blooms at each of my steps... The Dance is love, it is only love, it alone, and that is enough... I, then, it is amorously that I dance: to poems, to music but now I would like to no longer dance to anything but the rhythm of my soul.

Isadora Duncan

If one can picture the words, then the works of the writer is an accomplishment!

Shobana

You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams. And I know if I can make you smile by jumping over a couple of couches or running through a rainstorm, then I'll be very glad to be a song and dance man.

Gene Kelly

Oh Woman, come before us, before our eyes longing for beauty, and tired of the ugliness of civilization, come in simple tunics, letting us see the line and harmony of the body beneath, and dance for us. Dance us the sweetness of life. Give us again the sweetness and the beauty of the true dance, give us again the joy of seeing the simple unconscious pure body of a woman. Like a great call it has come, and women must hear it and answer it.

Isadora Duncan

I have heard stories that it was love at first sight for both of us, that we disappeared to a guest room at Merle's house, had our meals sent up, and didn't emerge for several days. This is absolutely untrue. I would never behave like that as a guest in someone's home. Carlos and I went to my beach house.

Martha Graham

There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.

Martha Graham

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

Martha Graham

we tend to steer our lives in the direction of the lessons we need to learn

Don Campbell

Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.

Twyla Tharp

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

Isadora Duncan

They are stupid, they are beasts, they are meat, they are death. I am talking simply but without any affectation.

Vaslav Nijinsky

Death is harder on those who are left behind.

Robert La Fosse

Life is about moving, it’s about change. And when things stop doing that they’re dead.

Twyla Tharp

I am not an ape, I am a man. The world has been created by God. Man has been created by God. It is not possible for man to understand God - God understands God. Man is God and therefore understands God. I am God. I am a man. I am good and not a beast. I am an animal with reason. I have flesh, I *am* flesh, I am not descended from flesh. Flesh is created by God. I am God. I am God. I am God.

Vaslav Nijinsky

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.

Merce Cunningham

All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.

Martha Graham

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