Betty Gilpin Quotes

I find that I put my body in my work when I am at a particularly difficult or joyous point because I want to feel that moment.

Sometimes I say I feel more like a dancer than an actor, because there are things implied about being an actor that I don't really like. I feel more comfortable with the word 'performer'. I like being the thing. I like being the doer. There's a factualness to it. And then certain resonances happen out of how you apply yourself physically.

You have an awareness of your body and how to use it and I think that if you can embody a character physically it's another really useful tool.

When you act, your whole body is the instrument.

You have to work with your body when you dance; you can't shy away from your physicality. For me, it's really linked to an incandescent way of accepting yourself and projecting. The dancing was at the core from the beginning.

I love what a women embodies. I love our bodies; I love the way we communicate with our bodies. I love the way dance creates movement. It's art in motion.

I'm a very physical actor. I use everything - toes, teeth, ears, everything. I don't simply mean physical in the sense of movement and vigour. I find myself remembering the shape of a scene by how I'm standing, what I'm doing.

I think because I am a physical person, and because my way of expressing and performing and storytelling or explaining has always been with my body, if I can combine the two I find it really liberating.

When eventually I started to act a bit more, I realised that circus school had taught me something that a lot of actors my age didn't have: physicality. They didn't know how to move. Acting is not all about talking. There is something animalistic about it.

There are times when I consciously give the character something physical - a walk, the way he sits, how he talks, or his lack of physicality, which is like a physicality.

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.

As a child, I would say that I wanted to become a dancer to honour music. For me, dancing is the physical translation of the audio recording.

Before you get into the mind, you have to inhabit the physicality. Body language is a great way of speaking.

Dance, to me, is an expression of who we are.

The actor creates with his own flesh and blood all those things which all the arts try in some way to describe.

With dancing, so much is about sexuality and sensuality and without life experience it becomes much more of a performance, rather than a living, breathing entity from the soul.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

I like to tell stories through dancing and singing.

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

Dancers are stripped enough onstage. You don't have to know more about them than they've given you already.

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.

The costume affects your posture, affects your walk, how you hold yourself, and how you breathe. The costumes make you deliver.

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.

When you step back and watch people, you realize that we use every single body part. Movement, dance - I find it genius because it's ultimate expression, really.

I have always loved contemporary dance, but it has always been a bit of a mystery to me. But choreography is very much like what I do when you are putting characters in frame on the page. It's so impressive what they do with their bodies. It's like painting: an abstraction.