People often say to me, 'I don't know anything about dance.' I say, 'Stop. You got up this morning, and you're walking. You are an expert.'
— Twyla Tharp
What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.
When I started thinking seriously about learning the rules of narrative, I thought, 'You've learned the rules of dancing from the ballet; what's the matter with learning the laws of theater from the people who know how to do it?'
I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.
I'm not satisfied sitting in just the world of abstract work.
I'm obviously always interested in the dancer who's an athlete and vice versa. I expect dancers to be in condition like an athlete is and to challenge themselves in the same way, to the same physical degree.
If a thing moves, it lives.
I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.
I've always believed that a dance evening energizes an audience, that an audience goes out feeling chemically stronger and more optimistic. This is what I understand about dance. And this is an important thing. We need this. Our culture needs it.
I realize that dancers have worked long and hard for standards. However, on occasion, I think that it's good to examine one's heart and ask why are we dancing.
Unfortunately, I think we've probably all had the experience that if we're in a relationship where one of the partners is doing it 'my' way, that relationship is not going to survive.
A dancer's life is all about repetition.
Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.
It's always a problem, getting the curtain in at the end of the first act; having enough of a resolve so that you can bring the curtain in and then opening the show a second time is a little bizarre as a tradition. I've always preferred to go straight through.
A commission is an invitation to fall in love.
We don't need to illustrate music; music illustrates itself.
I am fairly concise when I work and I work quickly because I think work is done better in a high gear than done our in a gear when everyone's exhausted. Get focused, do it!
In the not-for-profit world, there can be wastefulness because there's not the desperate urgency of when you're on a clock.
I've always felt compelled to explore range, because, as far as I know, we're only here once. So let's see how much we can encompass.
I feel I can handle the architecture of dance as well as anybody.
The ballet needs to tell its own story in such a way it can be received without having to be translated into language.
Everyone has a talent. It's simply a question of good discipline, of the good fortune to have an education that meshes with that talent, and a lot of luck.
'Bum's Rush' is a piece about timing, and everything that's in the piece needs to be with the piece. If people are missing, or marking, or unable to use their voices, the impulses that prompt the action are lost, and its logic crumbles.
Dance is the most fundamental of all art forms.
Critics should be looked at simply as commentators.
I'm not interested in seeing dance die. It's not to my advantage. Nor is it to our culture's advantage or anybody else's.
At the ballet classes I took when I first came to New York, I would see great dancers like Cynthia Gregory and Lupe Serrano. I would look at them and study what they could do, and what I couldn't do. And then I'd think maybe they should try what I could do.
These days, I think we could all agree that having a just-friend is not a bad thing.
Nothing is more terrifying to me, really, than the status quo. I'll make mistakes before I keep doing something the same way.
Walt Disney was a master of the human psychology. His sense of timing, sense of speed. In a sense, those cartoons are like Rorschach tests.
Broadway has some very tight expectations as to what a show is.
I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren.
In circuses, there is a lot of magic. Things become other things.
Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background.
Work is work; wherever I'm working, I do the best I can. If the actual dollars come from investors as opposed to taxpayers and patrons, what's the difference?
To survive, you've got to keep wheedling your way. You can't just sit there and fight against odds when it's not going to work. You have to turn a corner, dig a hole, go through a tunnel - and find a way to keep moving.
When I look at the people who are the guiding figures in modern dance, I think, 'This does not look to me like the way I want to spend my days.'
There's the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it's had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism.
I don't think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity.
I always tell students that you've got to be practical. You do not need a dream. You need a purpose, something you can wake up to in the morning when the dream is dissipated.
Dance is just like film in that it allows for thoughts in movement.
My favorite audience is everybody. I worked in a drive-in theater from the time I was 8 years old until I went to college, and I'm accustomed to everybody can buy a ticket and everybody should be taken into account.
I used to say to myself, 'Well, in the old days everybody danced because they loved to dance, and there was none of this professional garbage going on about how much can you get for this or that or the other, or any of the kinds of things that insecurity can sometimes promote. Sometimes it's for the wrong reasons.'
This is the strange thing: Dancers don't age.
You either entertain an audience or you don't.
Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language.
I do at least 75 push-ups a day.
You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.
The content and thematic materials of dance is, of itself, like boxing. You play tennis and baseball. But boxing is not a sport you play: you stand up and do it.
In dreams, anything can be anything, and everybody can do. We can fly, we can turn upside down, we can transform into anything.
