Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.
Interpretation
Dance is a fleeting art form that cannot be permanently captured like other art forms.
Twyla Tharp's quote highlights the unique nature of dance as an art form that stands apart from others such as writing, music, and visual arts. Unlike playwrights and composers who create lasting texts and scores, or painters and sculptors who produce tangible works that endure through time, dance is characterized by its transitory essence; it exists in the moment and then dissipates, making it both beautiful and elusive. This ephemerality underscores the unique experience of live performance and the emotional connection it fosters, even though it can't be preserved in the same way as other art forms.
In practice
In a lecture on the importance of live performance, one might cite this quote to illustrate the unique qualities of dance.
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.
Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
It's easy to assume that just because you make something in small volumes, not using many tools, that there is integrity and care - that is a false assumption.
Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.
People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.
There is this aura that the three-act play is the important one: it's the one that you do to win the Pulitzer. Some part of you falls for that, and then after a while, you don't fall for that.
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