Twyla Tharp Quotes

When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.

My go-go dancing was not your typical go-go dancing: I really was doing performance art. I would do dramatic, elaborate lyricals across the bar. I learned a lot, actually, as an artist during that time.

I've always been a dancer, and I will always be a dancer.

The floor exercise is a way to express your personality.

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

I kind of lost interest in the classical dance. I was very much interested in the modern choreography.

Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work.

My philosophy is that I'm an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.

Honestly, I am so ignorant of how dance works that I can't even imagine a story that you would want to tell through movement.

Dance has been a big passion for me.

I had to work out that it was something that could move, without having everybody in spray painted leotards.

I used to dance when I was younger - ballet and modern dance.

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.

Obviously I always wanted to do a contemporary piece.

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 was a dancer first, which made me realize how much I loved performing.

Dance is definitely what I love doing much more than anything else.

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.

I wanted to give people - which is fairly bizarre considering my whole life is contemporary dance really - I wanted to give people a really fulfilling sense that they had seen a white classical ballet - in a very pure form.

When I was a dancer, I was acting.

Dancers are a work of art - they are the canvas on which their work is painted.

When I first began choreographing, I never thought of it as choreography but as expressing feelings. Though every piece is different, they are all trying to get at certain things that are difficult to put into words. In the work, everything belongs to everything else - the music, the set, the movement and whatever is said.

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.

What interested me was dance - the way that it was constructed with time-space constructions, and that it was abstract. I always thought: 'Why couldn't theater be that way? Or an opera?'

My method is much like choreography. I don't sit at a table. I work in a room with people.