When you do one more 'Cinderella' or whatever, what is there to learn? Every part in the repertoire has a good side and a bad side, and the more often you do the same ballet, the more often the bad side comes out. If you want to give dance life, you must give it fresh food, not keep going back to the garbage to look for old scraps.
Interpretation
Repetition stifles creativity; fresh experiences fuel artistic growth.
Sylvie Guillem emphasizes the importance of variety and innovation in dance. She argues that repeatedly performing the same piece can highlight its flaws instead of its beauty, and to truly invigorate dance, one must seek new inspirations rather than reverting to old routines that may bring diminishing returns.
In practice
In a dance workshop, to inspire students to explore new styles.
There are some ballets you can do for a long time. With others, you have to know when to stop. Some are very destructive. Forsythe's choreography pushes dancers to the extreme. That's why it's best to vary. That way, you break your body a little bit in different places, but not a lot in one place.
Dancers should realise that they are really lucky. Dancing is not a job. It's people who are chosen. And you must realise that you are chosen. Sometimes I see a performance that makes me really angry - I think, 'Those people are lucky, and they don't realise it.'
I believe that as a writer and a director, you're only providing the skeleton of a character, and you're hiring actors to fill it out.
As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.
C'est véritablement utile puisque c'est joli. It is truly useful since it is beautiful.
Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.
Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It's a mysterious process.
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