Merce Cunningham Quotes

The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion.

I was really creative. I started to dance very young. I loved to dance. I begged my mother to put me into dance classes, and finally, in third grade, she did. Tap and jazz, but not ballet.

It was my whole life; I spent all my time dancing, and I loved it very much.

Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for -- liberation.

Ballet is more than a profession - it is a way of life.

Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.

Girls who are dancers tend to be much better models than girls who just got picked off the street. Dance is a discipline, just like martial arts. No matter what you do, you have this sort of confidence that no one can take away from you - every time you step somewhere, you're sure of where you're going.

Each time a dancer moves devoutly or a composer faithfully searches the silence for the veiled melodies, eternity is engaged.

I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls .

To me, this acquirement of nervous, physical, and emotional concentration is the one element possessed to the highest degree by the truly great dancers of the world. Its acquirement is the result of discipline, of energy in the deep sense. That is why there are so few great dancers.

Christianity was never meant to be defined by its disciplines, but by its passions.

Music was my ultimate ambition but I liked all of it. I wanted to discipline myself in dance and acting too and I'd done all three since I was 9-years-old. I could sing, but I didn't become a great singer.

I got myself into a lovely little shall we say controversy with André Breton, by pointing out that the discipline of spontaneity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been practicing for centuries.

The Arts are learnt by reason and method; they are mastered by practice.

If I ask you to plunge into the Ganga or to jump from the roof of a house, meaning it all for your good, could you do even that without any hesitations Just think of it even now; otherwise don't rush forward on the spur of the moment to accept me as your Guru.

To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

Devotees are not impressed by the poverty or wealth in material sense in any way; what impresses is devotion.

I grew up always wanting to be a dancer and when I went to New York, I fell in love with the idea of performing in all ways.

I continually stress to my players that all I expect from them at practice and in the games is their maximum effort.

If you dance, you dance because you have to. Every dancer hurts, you know.

I have performed for thousands when they found me exotic, the vogue, daring, but I have danced, at any given time, for about ten people... They were the ones that left the theater forever different from the way they were when they came in. All of my long, long life, I have danced for those ten.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

The choreographic process is exhausting. It happens on one's feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously.

Jazz is about freedom within discipline.