My father always said, 'I don't care if you're a ditch digger, as long as you're the best ditch digger in the world.'
— Twyla Tharp
Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.
I don't judge. Judgment is not my business. Existing is my business.
I don't hate language. I have my own language, but I also enjoy the English language. Obviously, you don't read a lot of literature and not care about language.
When I started making dances in the '60s, narrative dance was sort of off the radar screen. What was important at the time in the avant-garde was minimalism.
I have a sort of tactility about music. I go into record stores and just run my fingers over it, the spines.
Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That's the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart.
My dancers expect me to deliver because my choreography represents their livelihood.
I've read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy - the novels and letters - and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.
Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody's present pops out of nowhere.
Counterpoint is a component that gives real energy, and it is about optimism.
'The Creative Habit' is basically about how you work alone, how you survive as a solitary artist. 'The Collaborative Habit' is obviously about surviving with other people.
No artist is well served in thinking what will happen to their works. The best one can hope is that they'll enter the mainstream, and people will pull bits and pieces from them.
I've always found it necessity to strip away everything but the most fundamental ways to work - the rest is style.
Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut.
When I say I can see through clothes, sometimes I try to use it as an X-ray vision to look into the dancer and see who this dancer is right now, at this exact moment in time. I live inside them in a way.
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.
Kids should be encouraged to compete.
The artist doesn't really think about consequences - he or she does the work, stands back and looks at and thinks, 'Hmm, that could have worked better like this.' But as a person who needs to sell tickets to do the next work, one needs to analyze how it does or does not hit its mark.
I always find that the best collaborations are when you work with people that know what they're doing, and you leave them alone to do it.
There is obviously a power and a truth in action that doesn't lie, which words easily can do.
To make real change, you have to be well anchored - not only in the belief that it can be done, but also in some pretty real ways about who you are and what you can do.
Dance should not just divide people into audience and performers. Everyone should be a participant, whether going to classes or attending special events or rehearsals.
Creativity is not just for artists. It's for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it's for engineers trying to solve a problem; it's for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.
Balzac loved courtesans. They were independent women, and in the 19th century, that was a breed that was just evolving.
I find that dancers are only well trained in ballet these days.
Things change all the time, so why do people make such a philosophical to-do that things are constantly in transition?
My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.
When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.
The only way to know the truth of a movement is to do it on your own body.
I've survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.
What we want from modern dance is courage and audacity.
Who a dancer is physically feeds into character for me. Always has.
There is a moral dimension, for me, in anything that's any good.
When I was a kid, the avant-garde to me was boring because it was just the flip side of being really successful.
Schubert had arguably the same melodic gift as Mozart, but even less support. He didn't have the early exposure, never got to travel anywhere, and yet generated and amassed a body of work that grew and developed and is very profound.
There are very few critics who have historical context or authority.
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.
Let me put it this way: I would like to direct a successful film. An unsuccessful film I would not like to direct. Films are very difficult.
I see dance as glue for a community.
After so many years, I've learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That's why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves.
I think Tolstoy had an unbelievably complicated relationship with women.
It's very difficult for me to do fund raising for my own organization if I'm working for other companies because sponsors will say, 'Well, hey, man, if she's doing a ballet for Ballet Theatre, we'll give money to Ballet Theatre.'
The ultimate point of a piece for me is that it drives the next one. Does it open new doors? That's the success of a piece.
If I didn't believe in myself as a dancer, I wouldn't choreograph.
If you're speaking of love, you really must include the element of uncertainty - and perhaps it's best approached as the art of constant maintenance.
It's very important to work myself physically as hard as I can.
Desire is the first thing a modern dancer should have. Skill can be developed. But if you don't have desire as a modern dancer, forget it.
I look for dancers who have all the technique in the world. But they must be dancers who are open-minded, who are willing to forget that they know anything. They also have to be gorgeous; they must have a clear image of themselves and strong personalities.
I do not watch television, never have.
