A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.
Interpretation
Twyla Tharp suggests that artificial barriers between different forms of artistic expression can limit creativity and growth.
In this quote, Twyla Tharp challenges the notion of strict boundaries within the arts, specifically between modern dance and ballet. She implies that such divisions can be detrimental, preventing artists from exploring and merging different styles, ultimately leading to a richer, more innovative creative landscape. By advocating for the removal of these 'walls', Tharp calls for greater openness and collaboration in the arts.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of artistic collaboration, I would quote Tharp to illustrate my point.
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.
When everything goes right a mobile is a piece of poetry that dances with the joy of life and surprise!
There's a steady forward march of a creative process that some of us stay with and don't give up - that should be an admirable thing - from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker to Miles to Ornette and some people who are not even known today - some kids coming up - people who are out to change the world.
I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.
... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
Music must awaken people to do their duty as citizens and act.
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