Dancing is bigger than the physical body. Think bigger than that. When you extend your arm, it doesn't stop at the end of your fingers, because you're dancing bigger than that. You're dancing spirit.
Interpretation
Dance transcends the physical; it embodies a deeper spiritual expression.
Judith Jamison's quote emphasizes that dance is not limited to mere physical movements but is an expression that connects to our spirit and broader human experience. When we dance, we are not just moving our bodies; we are channeling emotions, energy, and a sense of connection that extends beyond our physical form.
In practice
In a motivational speech about creative expression and the arts.
As a dancer, you really try to stay true to whatever the choreographer/artistic director is giving you. So, now the shoe is on the other foot and I have to trust everyone else - I have to trust the dancer. As I was trusted as a dancer, I trust my dancers.
It's never too early to teach your children about the tool of money. Teach them how to work for it and they learn pride and self-respect. Teach them how to save it and they learn security and self-worth. Teach them how to be generous with it and they learn love.
We can go on talking about racism and who treated whom badly, but what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wallow in that or are you going to create your own agenda?
I've always felt that complement of opposites: body and soul, solitude and companionship, and in the dance studio, contraction and release, rise and fall.
You wake up white, and you think about certain things every day. You wake up black, and you think about certain things. You wake up Chinese, and you think certain things - but those things aren't major. What's major is that you are good at your craft.
You don't enter a dance studio and say "I can't do that." If you do, then why are you in the studio in the first place?
Vinyl survived, we managed not to kill it. Knowing that you’ve taken part in this fight... You can’t imagine the happiness it brings. Every time I see a kid going out of the store with a vinyl record under the arms, my heart beats faster. Music should only be this. An intense emotion.
You can't read to yourself. It's your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work, it becomes very exciting. The melody is a great part of it.
Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.
The world around us is in a sea change, and I think the glory of art is that it cannot only survive change, it can lead it
Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.
Bop began with Jazz but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking past a men's clothing store on 42nd Street or South Main in L.A. and from a loudspeaker they suddenly heard a wild impossible mistake in jazz that could only have been heard inside their own imaginary head, and that is a new art. Bop.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.