Dance Legacy Quotes

Fred Astaire told me things I will never forget. Gene Kelly also said he liked my dancing. It was a fantastic experience because I felt I had been inducted into an informal fraternity of dancers, and I felt so honored because these were the people I most admired in the world.

I never studied with Balanchine, but his work was very important to me.

I say over and over again that I am just standing on the shoulders of so many who have set this path for me, and they may not be seen or recognized or have been given an opportunity to have a voice, but I'm here representing all of those dancers. Dance Theatre of Harlem Virginia Johnson, Tai Jimenez, Lauren Anderson.

I was a dancer, and my father was a dancer, so I really grew up in that environment.

Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire.

People don't remember me for how high my legs went, even though they went up very high, and how many pirouettes I did. They don't remember me for that. They remember me and any other dancer because something touched them inside. It's an indelible memory on the heart and in the mind.

When Ginger Rogers danced with Astaire, it was the only time in the movies when you looked at the man, not the woman.

I've always danced and exercised. I can't imagine not doing it. I'll be Martha Graham in my 90s doing contractions on the floor.

I see myself helping the next generation of dancers who come along, helping them to keep the dance focused, so we don't get into a position where they're saying in 2050, or whatever, that around 2001 or 2002 or something the dance died.

I'm born originally in Toronto, and I have what I call my 'Fame' story. I took a Greyhound bus and went to Alvin Ailey and received Dunham, Horton, Graham technique there, but I could never take my eyes off of Balanchine doing 'Nutcracker'; to me he's the best who ever did it.

Patrick Swayze reminded me a lot of Gene Kelly. Patrick had that Everyman quality. Gene made dancing sort of an accessible idea for the regular guy out there.

Classical ballet will never die.

I was an international krumper at one time. I can't talk about it, really, because when you've lived for krump like I have, when you get a bit older and you move away from it, it's hard.

If age someday grounds my feet and wilts my port de bras, what vestige of the old life will be left? The signs that I was a dancer will gradually fade like stripes on a beach towel. Even my knowledge of the art form, reaped in sweat over decades, could be lost over time.

Has there ever been a dance career with more ups and downs than Twyla Tharp's? Or with more varied ambitions? Or larger ambition?

The early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art.

The crazy thing about the dab is like - dance moves, once you create them, they last forever.

As long as there are dancers around who love to dance, there will be an Alvin Ailey American Dance Company. We miss him so much, but he's alive as soon as you see a dancer hit the stage.

We know how Merce Cunningham works and how he thinks - we've been told, over and over again, by him and by others.

I'm not interested in seeing dance die. It's not to my advantage. Nor is it to our culture's advantage or anybody else's.

My mum and dad teach, and all my brothers and sisters have been in 'Riverdance' and so forth. So I was forced to become a dancer; it's part of my family history.

It's weird when you see pieces of choreography that were done for you 15 or 20 years ago and now they are being done by another dance company.

There would never have been a British Ballet without Diaghilev. He had a wonderful influence.

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.

I'm a tap dancer. Once you're a tap dancer, you're always a tap dancer. In 'After Midnight,' I get to dance, but I don't do a full tap number.