Nathan Chen Quotes

I've always been excited by the strangeness of ballet, but I can't bear it when people just come forward and do a turn in the air for no reason.

I look at the dancers and I get the inspiration for the work from them.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

I am dancing all the time. Every gesture, the body line of every pose, the way I get from place to place, the movement in the acting - none of it would be the way it is if I weren't a dancer.

I began to fear that the Graham work was not in lots of ways sufficient for me. I suppose it came about from looking at other dancing and being involved with the ballet - something about the air and the way she thought about dancing.

For me, the choreography always comes from the music.

I've made storylines through dance to complement the music. It's all about enhancing the singing and acting. It's been an amazing learning curve for me.

I try to convey the musical notes through dance, take on the music.

For ballet dancers, style is about melding personal expression with physical form.

I've always thought of the process of creating ballets as being this kind of team effort. It's not like being a painter, where you have your paint, and you have canvas, and you just go at it. I'm working with these living, breathing, functioning human beings, and they have their own thoughts and ideas about what works well movement-wise.

I think as a filmmaker and as a director, you shortchange yourself if you inhibit the ability of your actor to bring their own personal experiences to the characters.

Unlike a lot of choreographers, I don't always start with the music. I often start with a visual artist, and then find music that fits the world of that visual artist.

I am different because I have better schooling, better understanding of the line, gesture, how feet working, positions. They taught me modern things... and I wanted to give what I had: my schooling.

The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.

I've always believed that the facts about dancing are more interesting than the myths, and this was a great chance for me to explore how the human body does such incredible things.

Dancers, many dancers today can do so much technically. You can give them steps that are complicated, then more complicated, pyrotechnical - and they can execute these steps to perfection. But to do simple steps with a pure classical line, that is truly difficult.

Dance is one of the most revealing art forms.

For me, purity of movement wasn't enough. I needed expression, more intensity, more mind.

When I was dancing, whether it was the music or the story, the question was 'Why am I doing this piece, and why am I dancing?' It is exactly the same when you are acting. You have a very close relationship with your body movement. You have to find the physicality of your character.

Dance has been a big passion for me.

It's one of my strongest dance pieces - having just done Play Without Words which was veering away from a lot of dance - I thought it would be nice to go back to something with almost the most dance I'd done.

Action choreographer is like talking. When you talk, you have a rhythm. When you act, you have a rhythm. When you're moving your body, you have a rhythm. So as an actor, as a choreographer, the objective is trying to blend everything in - into - ultimately back into that character.

I wasn't a ballet baby. My first dance class was in an outdoor pavilion when I was three. It was called 'creative movement.' The teacher gave us chiffon scarves in beautiful colors. She turned on some music and said, 'Now go dance.' So for me, dance has always been about self-expression.

I would describe my dancing talents as incredibly deep.

That piece has been choreographed so badly so many times. I'm loathe to do it but I may eventually because it is one of the seminal art works of the twentieth century.