Mia Wasikowska Quotes

What dancing has helped me with is blocking; it makes me comfortable with my body. You know how to hit your mark, you know how to embody a swagger. But sitting down and looking across the table at another actor and being able to go to battle on screen is nothing to do with singing or dancing.

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.

It's something that I learned even before I started acting: the movement, the dance of the body, is very important, and it comes before words.

I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.

Dancing, as Fred Astaire said, is next to ditch-digging. You sweat and you slave and the audience doesn't think you have a brain in your head.

I was told that I was good in my dance movement classes and that I should concentrate on dance because it would enhance my ability to get acting work.

My mother was a dancer, so I like to use the body as part of the instrument of acting.

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.

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.

Physical elegance, which is what I am talking about here, comes from the body. This is no superficial matter, but rather the way that man found to honour the way he places his two feet on the ground.

Some actors have an affinity for dance, and they should explore it, train in it, and get good.

When you act, your whole body is the instrument.

I trained as a dancer when I was much younger, for a large amount of time, like 6 or 7 years. Not to be a ballet dancer, actually, but I thought it was a complement for an actor. I thought that actors should know how to move, should know how to juggle, should know how to do acrobatics.

I have rhythm, but I'm not a trained dancer.

But I was 22 before I took my first dance class. I had never been athletic, so I was very stiff; I still am. I think what I got mostly from dance was carriage.

There are a lot of things that dancers can do that actors cannot and actors can do that dancers cannot.

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 do use my body a lot, to click into a character.

when dancing is right, the movement possesss a logic common to us all, an inevitability that takes it beyond the personal and egocentric and makes of it classical art.

As unnatural as dancing is, you have to find a natural way to do the unnatural.

I just love feeling myself, and moving, flexing, jumping, expressing, dancing and doing movement. I'm in tune with it. I like to express myself with my body, more so than intellectually. But, I am a geek.

When you shake you ass, they notice fast. And some mistakes were built to last.

The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art, art of the muscle sense. The awareness of tension and relaxation within his own body, the sense of balance that distinguishes the proud stability of the vertical from the risky adventures of thrusting and falling--these are the tools of the dancer.

I have such a respect and fascination for dance. I can be light as air or stay grounded. Dance is really another universe.

I realize that once I stopped fighting the technical process of how to move my body, I made it choreography.