Expressive Movement Quotes

As Michael (Chekhov)'s pupil, I learned more about acting. I learned psychology, history, and the good manners of art - taste.

This dance is the joy of existence.

Nothing so clearly and inevitably reveals the inner man than movement and gesture. It is quite possible, if one chooses, to conceal and dissimulate behind words or paintings or statues or other forms of human expression, but the moment you move you stand revealed, for good or ill, for what you are.

One of the reasons I moved away from painting was because I eventually discovered that I wanted to deal more with motion, time, and performance - and that became a much bigger part of my life both as an actor and as a musician and someone who goes on stage and travels around the world and works on productions.

Words can be deceitful, but pantomime necessarily is simple, clear and direct

That's my way in the very beginning - how to enter it [a role]. Very quickly in the process, I don't think about voice being separate from the way you hold your head or the way you sit or the way you put on lipstick. It's all a piece of a person, and it's all driven by conviction.

Anybody can and should dance... It's good for the body and the spirit.

Even if I'm sad, dancing is a way to let stuff out.

Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.

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.

I do not say with words. I do not say it with images either.… I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do, but that is my true subject.

Words are useless, especially sentences.

I wiggle my shoulders, I shake my legs, I walk up and down the stage, I hop around on one foot. But I never bump and grind. Why, that's vulgar. I'd never do anything vulgar before an audience. My mother would never allow it.

If I can not dance, I shall die!

Ah, if you could dance all that you've just said, then I'd understand.

If I'm home alone, I just dance... it's my own little secret.

I loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving, I could feel.

My method is to find a word with a gesture.

There are likewise three kinds of dancers: first, those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of impersonal and graceful arabesques; second, those who, by concentrating their minds, lead the body into the rhythm of a desired emotion, expressing a remembered feeling or experience. And finally, there are those who convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul.

I am more expressive when I dance.

An actor should take lessons from a painter and a sculptor.

The world of dance is a charmed place. Some people like to inhabit it, others to behold it; either way it is rewarding.

It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.

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

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.