Mikhail Baryshnikov Quotes

The youth coming up is interested in dance now, and they're coming to the shows. That's a blessing for those of us who create.

I think that story ballets, as great as they might sell, they're a really dated and awkward medium to tell stories through. I think there needs to be an updated or different approach to storytelling in dance. There needs to be less of a separation between the storytelling and the dancing.

You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important - in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language.

People often say to me, 'I don't know anything about dance.' I say, 'Stop. You got up this morning, and you're walking. You are an expert.'

If you had to find a period in history that would equate to what the Internet has presented us with now, it would be Elizabethan England. It was a world in flux.

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

The way Alvin Ailey has transformed modern dance and dance in general is the fact of variety. It's a cornucopia of ways to move. There are choreographers in the company as - as diverse, as different from each other as Donald McKayle and Bill T. Jones, or Jawole Zollar and John Butler, Lar Lubovitch, you know, and Judith Jamison.

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.

Modern dancing is old fashioned.

If I only made dances about my own experience in dance, it would always be on my track, and I don't want that, I want to be on the track of where dance can take me.

I wanted to do dance with the same seriousness as art was done and acknowledged, not with the entertainment factor that is always connected to theater and film.

I want to see movies that explore different forms and new styles of dance, and also those that revive the old.

I'm continuing the educational process of getting people to accept dance as music.

I'm glad that nowadays people are aware of varied dance genres, thanks to reality TV dance shows.

The modern dance is no dance in the first place, and when you've finally learned it, it's not modern any more.

After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's.

The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

Merce is my favorite artist in any field.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.The explorer seeks theundiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history,the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity.If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates.

Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.

I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov do Twyla Tharp's Sinatra Suite on PBS. I have no numbers to prove it, but I bet that kids who saw that loved it. I think you will see younger dancers, who certainly have the artistic sense and capabilities, start going back to romantic numbers.

The Renaissance… was based on a new idea of the importance of the individual. But this was a fragile foundation, because individuals depended on constant applause and admiration to sustain them. There is a shortage of applause in the world, and there is not enough respect to go around.

I enjoy the freedom of modern dance as well as the constraints of classical dance.

We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance.

I am exclusively occupied with the problem of gravitation and hope with the help of a local mathematician friend [Marcel Grossman] to overcome all the difficulties. One thing is certain, however, that never in life have I been quite so tormented. A great respect for mathematics has been instilled within me, the subtler aspects of which, in my stupidity, I regarded until now as pure luxury.