Nathan Chen Quotes

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.

Who a dancer is physically feeds into character for me. Always has.

We put too much on contemporary dancers. A lot of them cannot change styles; a lot of them can't do anything else other than run around the stage reaching and stretching in anguish to somebody off camera that I never understand who it is. But it's the teenage angst they have to live with.

Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.

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.

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.

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 rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing.

Dancers carry themselves in completely different ways to how we do in our everyday lives. They are very free with their bodies which I'm not used too.

I had always choreographed a little, beginning in high school. And I leaned toward choreography. I always had an overview of what was going on.

I'm very physical. When I'm writing, I'm playing all the parts; I'm saying the lines out loud, and if I get excited about something - which doesn't happen very often when I'm writing, but it's the greatest feeling when it does - I'll be out of the chair and walking around, and if I'm at home, I'll find myself two blocks from my house.

My movement is usually about finding the balance between artistry, athleticism, and musicality. It always originates with a classical basis and expands outwards from that platform.

I'm trying to create ballets that I would enjoy seeing.

When it comes to acting, you really have to create movement which in some ways is dancing. And dancing, I feel is very important to act as well. I wouldn't put one over the other.

I don't think of myself as a dancer. I think of myself as a singer-actress who moves really well.

I was a dancer of no repute. But dance taught me a lot. You walk into a dance studio knowing you have to walk out with a dance. You improvise.

When I was a dancer, I was acting.

'Entity' is not about science. The process behind it may dictate the nature of the piece, but it's not like a dance about Einstein where I'm trying to convert his ideas into movement and communicate that to an audience.

When the opportunity to choreograph came up, it was nothing more in my head but an opportunity. Then it suddenly became a career very quickly.

I love the way in which I make up dances. It's a complicated way and the product is usually clear. Clear and simple. I don't need everybody to know that there are all of these fabulous things going on. If you CAN see it, that's wonderful.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

I think it's one thing to be able to dance, and it's another thing to learn all the wonderful moments of dance because in my day... it was the moving of dance.

I majored in dance in college.

I really developed an early love for ballet. Like most dancers, I am still 'first' a dancer. I'm very proud of it. Once you are a dancer, the physicality never leaves you, nor does the strength. Hopefully, it keeps you like an athlete.

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.