Dance Innovation Quotes

In the Thirties, when I was in New York, I did the first surrealistic ballet in a show of mine.

I wanted to do new things with dance, adapt it to the motion picture medium.

When I started, there was a very strong image of what the ballerina was supposed to be in her tights and her costume, and then I started doing photo shoots in bomber boots, and it wasn't seen as the done thing.

Michael Jackson changed the format and history of music. His videos were films. He was the first who floated on the stage and changed the concept of a musical performance. He created something that's still the basis of a lot of what's done today.

On the other hand in London you can get an audience that desires dance to go as far as it can go: they've seen the bricks of ideas built over a period so therefore there is an acceptance of what otherwise might seem out on a limb.

Dropkicks are old moves, but I wanted to make a new version of an old move.

The modern dance is no dance in the first place, and when you've finally learned it, it's not modern any more.

Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work.

I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn't catch on right away - but I had some good mentors in New York who encouraged me.

The way Alvin Ailey has transformed modern dance and dance in general is the fact of variety. It's a cornucopia of ways to move. There are choreographers in the company as - as diverse, as different from each other as Donald McKayle and Bill T. Jones, or Jawole Zollar and John Butler, Lar Lubovitch, you know, and Judith Jamison.

When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.

I had daydreamed through many performances of Swan Lake, thinking the dancing tutus only ever conveyed one aspect of swans: their beauty gliding on water. I wondered what it would be like to use male dancers and bring out swans' aggressive, muscular side.

I feel it's my duty, my job, now to allow people to hear the dance to different genres of music, to ensure audiences have the chance to listen to tap dancing up against all these other styles.

Despite the rigid classicism of the famous Paris Opera school and company, the French have done more than their share to unmoor la Danse from its traditions and standards.

Now there is in a way a renaissance of modern dance - suddenly, it is more respected and discovered.

I'm trying to create ballets that I would enjoy seeing.

American ballet... is ultimately an evolutionary art form, requiring many voices to creatively carry forward.

If I only made dances about my own experience in dance, it would always be on my track, and I don't want that, I want to be on the track of where dance can take me.

I think that story ballets, as great as they might sell, they're a really dated and awkward medium to tell stories through. I think there needs to be an updated or different approach to storytelling in dance. There needs to be less of a separation between the storytelling and the dancing.

Twyla Tharp set her sights on ballet, and ballet, hungry for major talent, succumbed.