Dance Criticism Quotes

I grew up going to see my sister dance, both at the ballet and later as a modern dancer, and have always been a big fan of the ballet. So I have had a long relationship with dance.

Yes, anybody can dance. Whether it is right or wrong, that doesn't matter.

Ballet Hispanico is far from Irish, and, though it has strong dancers, its Spanishness has always left me unconvinced.

I wanted to do dance with the same seriousness as art was done and acknowledged, not with the entertainment factor that is always connected to theater and film.

Bejart is almost never performed in New York City; critically, he just gets attacked here.

Twerking has to end. Not for the ones that look good doing it, but for all the ones that you feel, 'You don't have enough to twerk back there. Your twerkin' look like jerkin.'

There was a stage when Balanchine and I didn't talk. I was trying to develop my classical technique as opposed to the fast-track technique that he was pushing. We were very quiet with each other. But after two years he saw what I was doing and sent messages through other people that, yes, this is good.

I don't like the Samba; it's nonsense. With a lot of these Latin dances I can't really understand what they're all about. I like the Rumba and the Paso Doble but the others I could take or leave.

There's no point pretending that all of Martha Graham's pieces are equally strong.

There's nobody knows more about dancing and choreography than Arlene Phillips, ever.

We put too much on contemporary dancers. A lot of them cannot change styles; a lot of them can't do anything else other than run around the stage reaching and stretching in anguish to somebody off camera that I never understand who it is. But it's the teenage angst they have to live with.

Dance, v.i. To leap about to the sound of tittering music, preferably with arms about your neighbor's wife or daughter. There are many kinds of dances, but all those requiring the participation of the two sexes have two characteristics in common: they are conspicuously innocent, and warmly loved by the vicious.

Russians are very discerning about ballet. They're very opinionated about what classical ballet is.

The 'Podunk Times' is not going to have a good dance critic, I absolutely promise you that. There's just not enough dance there.

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.

At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' on pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!

Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable.

I've trained in dance for most of my life, but ballet was the thing I left behind the earliest because they felt like I didn't have the right body for it, and I didn't like that and never felt like I could be a part of that dance structure.

You can't really dance properly to James Brown. If you dance to James Brown, you look like an idiot. There's a lot of jerking.

You may feel that Peter Martins' 'Beauty' is too compressed and inexpressive, but it's loyal to the text.

Why movie and dance critics are taking 'The Company' seriously, I can't imagine. Are they impressed by Altman's reputation and naive sincerity? By the fluid semi-documentary approach?

Many people say to me, particularly about my dance writing, 'It sounds just like you.' But it sounds just like me after I've made it sound like me.

Julian Edelman. He's the worst dancer.

He who esteems the Virginia reel A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal, And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery Than crushing His African children with slavery, Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillon Are mounted for hell on the devil's own pillion, Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows, Approaches the heart through the door of the toes.

'So You Think You Can Dance' comes on as a high-minded leap up the evolutionary ladder from other reality shows - on this one, you're supposed to learn something, and the guest judges are fellow dance professionals rather than actual celebrities.