Evan Esar Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

Modern dancing is old fashioned.

Now there is in a way a renaissance of modern dance - suddenly, it is more respected and discovered.

Every artist will one day face the moment when he or she is doing what he or she does after the style has passed and the art-world heat-seeking machine has moved on.

When I started making dances in the '60s, narrative dance was sort of off the radar screen. What was important at the time in the avant-garde was minimalism.

The fact is popular art dates. It grows quaint. How many people feel strongly about Gilbert and Sullivan today compared to those who felt strongly in 1890?

I danced modern dance my whole life, and it makes me feel young again.

Merce is my favorite artist in any field.

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

I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn't catch on right away - but I had some good mentors in New York who encouraged me.

I definitely don't feel like I'm watching ballet during 'Raze.'

Well, it is curious what lasts and what doesn't. Publishing empires and whatnot would pay anything to figure it out. But they can't figure it out.

My brother had written 'Ocean Eyes,' and we recorded it, basing all of the production around contemporary and lyrical dance. I think of most songs that way - if you can't dance to a song, it's not a song.

As I get older, I'm looking more and more for films that are actually about something rather than just narrative vehicles.

American ballet... is ultimately an evolutionary art form, requiring many voices to creatively carry forward.

Of course, no single entertainment device can enjoy eternal popularity.

As you get older you lose interest in what you hear on the radio. But you can't be like that, you have to enjoy what's going on.

A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet, that the two disciplines were totally separate, and if you did one, you couldn’t do the other. I’m beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.

The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed by it — and that it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived.

My first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the wave.

If you told me thirty years ago that people would be parodying documentary films, I never would have believed it. It wasn't clear that the films themselves even had an audience, let alone an audience for parodies of them.