My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of personal experience and physical embodiment in the creative process of choreography.
Twyla Tharp's quote highlights the integral role that her own body and personal experiences play in her artistry as a choreographer. Rather than relying solely on concepts or theories, she asserts that her physicality and lived experiences are essential to her creative expression, suggesting that true art emerges from an authentic connection between the artist and their medium.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of physical expression in dance, one could use this quote to illustrate the significance of personal experience.
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 you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.
Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.
To get to play someone who was in some capacity the King of Harlem, that meant something to me. Deep within my bones. I was inspired by the energy that I knew to be a real thing.
No story lives unless someone wants to listen. So thank you, all of you.
When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.
I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.