Dancers are both athletes and artists.
Baseball is beautiful....the supreme performing art. It combines in perfect harmony the magnificent features of ballet, drama, art, and ingenuity.
I've always been excited by the strangeness of ballet, but I can't bear it when people just come forward and do a turn in the air for no reason.
What we accepted as great art - whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony - is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.
Tennis is more than just a sport. It's an art, like the ballet. Or like a performance in the theater. When I step on the court I feel like Anna Pavlova. Or like Adelina Patti. Or even like Sarah Bernhardt. I see the footlights in front of me. I hear the whisperings of the audience. I feel an icy shudder. Win or die! Now or never! It's the crisis of my life.
I see [my pen] as an extension of my musculature. It's like being a painter. It's the closest I can get to my breath.
The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body. I don't leap and jump anymore. I look at young dancers, and I am envious, more aware of what glories the body contains. But sensitivity is not made dull by age.
I am very obsessed with ballet now because it is a very difficult sport and a beautiful one because it is not about money. It's not like playing football or tennis - dance has no sponsors, it's just for the beauty. Maybe it is the only last pure sport.
I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
Wrestling is different to me. As I talk to other wrestlers, wrestling seems a little different to me than it does to a lot of them. To me, it's about an artistic performance and about honing my artistic performance in pursuit of these minute moments of perfection. These little encapsulations. And none of them are ever perfect.
I wasn't artistic in drawing or painting, but I think I am artistic in sport. I think I'm always looking for the ultimate, the maximum. It's a challenge that excites me.
My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.
I'm a little greedy for action scenes. I'm a martial artist, and any time I get to show off some of that art is great.
In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.
I'm just kind of really interested in athletes as artists of a pretty serious variety and people who devote themselves to what they do in a really incredible way.
