Justin Peck Quotes

Unlike a lot of choreographers, I don't always start with the music. I often start with a visual artist, and then find music that fits the world of that visual artist.

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

As a person, I believe that I am sensitive, which helped me be the artist I am.

When I started, I wanted to be thought of as tortured and seductive, not funny, but humor tends to be a reflexive part of a person's sensibility. It's an almost impossible thing to teach anyone, which leads me to believe that it's intuitive.

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

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.

Physical elegance, which is what I am talking about here, comes from the body. This is no superficial matter, but rather the way that man found to honour the way he places his two feet on the ground.

I can't do choreographed movement. It has to come from my heart... and my pelvis.

When you act, your whole body is the instrument.

There's a style in modern dance right now called Release Technique. It's based on a feeling of falling and catching yourself, and I thought it was such a good metaphor for the way life feels.

I just don't see myself as a songwriter or a country singer or any of those things anymore. It's more trying to express ideas and emotional textures.

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.

When you have a sense of yourself in space, in your movement, in your muscles, you can express yourself through your body, your instrument. You learn so much about who you are and what your truth is.

I think dancing is contributed hugely to how I am as an actor, just a level of comfort in my body and in movement. Things can become strangely physically technical when you're acting, and often something that just feels so unnatural is actually what you need to do in a certain scene.

When I would create a dance, I wouldn't have the luxury that ballet people do when they take a piece of music and impose a dance upon it. What we did in motion pictures was have a song and within that song try to elaborate. My usual method was to do what a writer does: get a plot.

Get in front of a mirror, know your body.

Self-portraits are a way of revealing something about oneself.

I never really consider myself as a great artist. I just always like to draw.

I just love feeling myself, and moving, flexing, jumping, expressing, dancing and doing movement. I'm in tune with it. I like to express myself with my body, more so than intellectually. But, I am a geek.

Coming from being a dancer, it was a great way for me to transition into being an actress. I get to really be expressive through my physical self, and that was just a comfortable way for me to start experimenting with how to get my character across.

I am not a juicy painter.

The body is not simply the combination of dance, muscles, body-building, strength and sex: it is a universe.

I wouldn't even say that I'm a rapper. I'd say I'm more of a messenger.

What makes people and companies and artistic directors and choreographers interested in working with dancers is the ability to kind of let go of everything you think you know and be a blank canvas.

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.