The body says what words cannot.
Martha GrahamRead
Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place.
Interpretation
Theater is an action that embodies artistic expression before it is recognized as a physical space.
Martha Graham emphasizes that theater should be understood as a dynamic and active process rather than just a static institution. This perspective highlights the importance of performance, creativity, and the transformative power of the theatrical experience, underscoring that the essence of theater lies in the acts of creation and expression that precede any physical manifestation of it.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of the performing arts in education.
The body says what words cannot.
Nobody cares if you can't dance well.
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.
What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.
For me, style is about quality, integrity and timelessness. It is free of trends but always feels fresh and new.
Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.
Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.
First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you.
If you ask me, I alternate between truly bizarre, what you would call 'Hollywood' movies and truly bizarre, what you would call 'arthouse' movies.
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