You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams.
Gene KellyRead
I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn't catch on right away - but I had some good mentors in New York who encouraged me.
Interpretation
Gene Kelly reflects on his desire to create a unique American dance style influenced by his musical upbringing.
This quote captures Gene Kelly's passion for innovation in dance, inspired by the musical legends of his youth. Despite initial challenges in gaining recognition for his distinctive style, he attributes his perseverance and growth to the support of mentors who believed in his vision, highlighting the importance of encouragement in the creative process.
In practice
This quote can inspire young dancers who are trying to find their unique style.
You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams.
At 14 I discovered girls. At that time dancing was the only way you could put your arm around the girl. Dancing was courtship.
My mother had gotten a job as a receptionist at a dancing school and had the idea that we should open our own dancing school; we did, and it prospered.
Things danced on the screen do not look the way they do on the stage. On the stage, dancing is three-dimensional, but a motion picture is two-dimensional.
There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas. It's a form of snobbism, the same sort that perpetuates the idea that drama is more deserving of Awards than comedy.
There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.
You can't trust an artist that just makes good records.
And I don't consider Broadway the acropolis of theatrical art. I mean Broadway is commercial - that's what it is. It's expensive seats and a lot of them that have to be filled every night. Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway, as far as I'm concerned, is in New York the pride of New York theater.
Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.
The curves of your lips rewrite history.
I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.