Jenna Dewan Quotes

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.

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 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.

When you act, your whole body is the instrument.

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.

I'm very kinesthetic, and when you're that way, you just feel it in your body. I know that other actors think with the logical part of their brain, but I wear my character inside my body, even when I'm away from the set.

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.

My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.

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

Actors always start with the voice and language. That's wrong. They should start with the body. The body is an actor's most important resource.

What musical performers bring to straight characterizations is that physical flexibility that comes with knowing your body so well. A lot of actors are terribly awkward. Terribly. And I think it's so important for them, when they're young, to work on their physical selves.

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

When you dance, you own everything you have. You are really in your own body. You do it with your muscles and your bones and your weight and your height - it's how to love yourself by moving.

'GLOW' was the first time that, from head to toe, I was asked to use my body in a functional, powerful way as an actor - and that felt amazing.

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.

It's all about the sensuality of movement, every movement you make. That's why I love doing action movies. It's all about movement, dance - even if you're hitting someone in the face. You've got to sell it all with great passion. There's a narrative to the body. It's exactly the same as dance.

I never studied dance, but if you look at 'Wild At Heart,' my mother saw that movie and said, 'You are a dancer. Look at how you're moving: all that strange energy is like 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.

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 performing in this burlesque group, and we would go to dance rehearsals every day. You'd use every part of your body. Even though some of it is slow, it takes a lot of muscle to be able to dip down and come back up.

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.

When you dance, your body just wants to find its natural weight. I'm naturally a lot more Tommy Tune than I am Wolverine.

Bathtubs, pools, water - to me, it's a very essential part of being grounded and sensual and feeling yourself.

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.