Quotes on Dance

Dance is just like film in that it allows for thoughts in movement.

Dance is not endangered - it will always find a way to express itself.

After the horse dance was over, it seemed that I was above the ground and did not touch it when I walked.

Dance is bigger than the physical body. When you extend your arm, it doesn't stop at the end of your fingers, because you're dancing bigger than that; you're dancing spirit.

The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.

Lose yourself in the music, the moment - you own it.

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.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there's any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

A dancer must listen to his body and pay homage to it. Behind the movement lies this terrible, driving passion, this necessity. I won't settle for anything less.

There are likewise three kinds of dancers: first, those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of impersonal and graceful arabesques; second, those who, by concentrating their minds, lead the body into the rhythm of a desired emotion, expressing a remembered feeling or experience. And finally, there are those who convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul.

Usually kids who are talented have the brashness to think they can do anything, but they don't often get the chance to see how close they can come.

I'm not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories. Either something works, or it doesn't.

And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

If I can't dance, I don't care if my dances are ever done again!

To me, this acquirement of nervous, physical, and emotional concentration is the one element possessed to the highest degree by the truly great dancers of the world. Its acquirement is the result of discipline, of energy in the deep sense. That is why there are so few great dancers.

It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely.

Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.

Think of the magic of that foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests. It's a miracle, and the dance is a celebration of that miracle.

Dancing is very important to people who play music with a beat. I think that people who don't dance, or who never did dance, don't really understand the beat... I know musicians who don't and never did dance, and they have difficulty communicating.

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.