Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Money is a never-ending problem.
My feelings about myself have been terrible.
I always want to have more dancers in my company.
In this business, life is one long fund-raising effort.
But the dance speaks to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn't work.
Sometimes you feel bad about yourself when there's no reason to.
Lena Horne is the sweetest and most adorable woman in the world.
No matter what you write or choreograph, you feel it's not enough.
No matter what you write or choreograph, you feel it is not enough.
I'm attracted to long-legged girls with long arms and a little head.
One of the worst things about racism is what it does to young people.
I wanted to explore black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation.
We still spend more time chasing funds than we do in the studio in creative work.
To be who you are and become what you are capable of is the only goal worth living.
Racism tears down your insides so that no matter what you achieve, you're not quite up to snuff.
If you live in the elite world of dance, you find yourself in a world rife with racism. Let's face it.
It will take very sophisticated marketing to achieve our aim of bringing more black people into the theater.
The creative process is not controlled by a switch you can simply turn on or off; it's with you all the time.
My lasting impression of Truman Capote is that he was a terribly gentle, terribly sensitive, and terribly sad man.
Choreography is mentally draining, but there's a pleasure in getting into the studio with the dancers and the music.
Everything in dancing is style, allusion, the essence of many thoughts and feelings. The abstraction of many moments.
One of the processes of your life is to constantly break down that inferiority, to constantly reaffirm that I Am Somebody.
Dance is for everybody. I believe that the dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people.
Making dances is an act of progress; it is an act of growth, an act of music, an act of teaching, an act of celebration, an act of joy.
I am trying to show the world that we are all human beings and that color is not important. What is important is the quality of our work.
Its roots are in American Negro culture, which is part of the whole country's heritage, but the dance speaks to everyone... Otherwise, it wouldn't work.
We talk too much of black art when we should be talking about art, just art. Black composers must be free to write rondos and fugues, not only protest songs.
I feel an obligation to use black dancers because there must be more opportunities for them, but not because I'm a black choreographer talking to black people.
I'm interested in putting something on stage that will have a very wide appeal without being condescending; that will reach an audience and make it part of the dance; that will get everybody in the theater.
From his roots as a slave, the American Negro - sometimes sorrowing, sometimes jubilant but always hopeful - has touched, illuminated, and influenced the most remote preserves of world civilisation. I and my dance theater celebrate this trembling beauty.
My dancers must be able to do anything, and I don't care if they are black or white or purple or green. I want to help show my people how beautiful they are. I want to hold up the mirror to my audience that says this is the way people can be, this is how open people can be.
DeFrantz's study...is not the first book about the protean Ailey, who was born in hardscrabble Texas in 1931 and died in 1989 after creating close to 80 works. But it is perhaps the most comprehensive, combining biography, criticism, the analysis of dance criticism, and a sort of corporate history, siting the now firmly established Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in the international cultural landscape.