People don't remember me for how high my legs went, even though they went up very high, and how many pirouettes I did. They don't remember me for that. They remember me and any other dancer because something touched them inside. It's an indelible memory on the heart and in the mind.
Interpretation
People are remembered for the emotions they evoke rather than their technical skills.
Judith Jamison emphasizes that the true impact of a dancer transcends physical prowess, such as the height of leg movements or the number of pirouettes. Instead, it is the emotional connection and the lasting impression left on the audience that etches a dancer's memory into the hearts and minds of people, signifying the importance of art as a means of emotional expression.
In practice
In a speech at a dance school graduation, this quote can inspire future dancers to focus on emotional expression.
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?
When a book is alive, really alive, you feel it. You put it to your ear here, and you feel it breathe, sometimes laugh, sometimes cry, just like a person, a little person.
When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed.
I'm not about either entertaining or instructing. The entertaining and instructing are secondary fallout from the fundamental thing, which is basically to create an aesthetic object.
Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.
Whatever I do with music, I try to make it align deeply with the values and principles of who I am and what I believe the purpose of my life is.
Their task [creative artists], therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.
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