Dance is just like film in that it allows for thoughts in movement.
Interpretation
Dance expresses thoughts and emotions through physical movement, similar to the way film conveys narratives visually.
In this quote, Twyla Tharp highlights the powerful connection between dance and film, suggesting that both art forms serve as mediums for storytelling and emotional expression. Just as a film can convey complex ideas through images and sequences, dance can embody thoughts and feelings through movement, allowing both the performer and the audience to experience a profound connection that transcends words.
In practice
A dance performance in a theater that illustrates the themes of love and conflict.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.
Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.
Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and attitudes, the stance they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.
The idea of old was to conform yourself to a style of cooking, it was not to create a style of cooking. Now the chef is so much into 'I want to sign that dish and say I am the one who made that dish.'
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
I write screenplays in the middle of the night.
Stories always have held conflicts and contrasts, highs and lows, life and death situations. And there can be much suffering in stories, but now we say the artist doesnβt have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand the human condition, understand the suffering.
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