Dance Creation Quotes

I love doing concert choreography because everything is about your vision, come heck or high water. Of course, you also take the blame for everything, but it's wonderful to be able to make up dance for dance's sake.

There's an innate feeling when I choreograph in juxtaposition to how I feel as a dancer. When I choreograph, I never really look into the mirror. But as dancers, we always check ourselves in the mirror. I do feel that when I choreograph, I am making a dance on my own body. Much of it is my own response to the music.

For me, the choreography always comes from the music.

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.

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.

To understand what I am saying, you have to believe that dance is something other than technique. We forget where the movements come from. They are born from life. When you create a new work, the point of departure must be contemporary life -- not existing forms of dance.

It isn't easy to create a dance show, and it's different from choreographing for films... You need a lot of stamina and practice.

The rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing.

I look at the dancers and I get the inspiration for the work from them.

Choreography is mentally draining, but there's a pleasure in getting into the studio with the dancers and the music.

I had certain physical limitations that made me change the choreography for myself or made me more interested in choreography only rather than dancing. I have never been a person who wanted to just dance. I have always been interested in developing for other people.

I think that there was a fad where everyone said, 'I want you to create a signature step for my artist.' The thing is, for me, music creates the step. The artist commands the step, you know?

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.

I try and create choreography that's in conversation with the music that the audience is hearing.

There is something very cyclical about the way fashion designers work. They work and work and work, the collection is finally shown, and after those 15 minutes, they must start over from the beginning. This is not unlike the way I work creating new dances.