Twyla Tharp Quotes

Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

I have such a respect and fascination for dance. I can be light as air or stay grounded. Dance is really another universe.

In song and dance, man forgets how to walk and speak and is on the way into flying into the air, dancing... his very gestures express enchantment.

Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully and with inevitability.

There's just something about dance. It's like a primal thing in all of us.

My philosophy is that I'm an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.

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.

Dance is in my background.

As a child, I would say that I wanted to become a dancer to honour music. For me, dancing is the physical translation of the audio recording.

I love the physical movement and beauty of dance.

I explained it when I danced it.

Hence it is from the representation of things spoken by means of posture and gesture that the whole of the art of dance has been elaborated.

But remember that intent is everything. One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises. In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door. This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds. The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.

We were tap-dancers but we put more style into it, more bodywork, instead of just footwork.

As unnatural as dancing is, you have to find a natural way to do the unnatural.

Dance is an art that imprints on the soul. It is with you every moment, it expresses itself in everything you do.

I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.

dance is simply the refinement of human movement - walking, running, and jumping. We are all experts. There should be no art form more accessible than dance, yet no art is more mystifying in the public imagination.

The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing... there are times when the simple dignity of movement can fulfill the function of a volume of words. There are movements which impinge upon the nerves with a strength that is incomparable, for movement has power to stir the senses and emotions, unique in itself. This is the dancer's justification for being, and his reason for searching further for deeper aspects of his art.

Dancing is a very living art. It is essentially of the moment, although a very old art. A dancer's art is lived while he is dancing. Nothing is left of his art except the pictures and the memories--when his dancing days are over.

Without dance, a man can do nothing.

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance