Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Everyone is always telling me that I must be exhausted, but I've learned how to use my time well, and that includes holidays to recharge. I always try to give myself big chunks of time to think about what the next project is going to be.
The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to the head; look at the way the hairline grows; think of all the little bones in your wrist. It is a miracle. And the dance is a celebration of that miracle.
In 1980, a well-meaning fundraiser came to see me and said, "Miss Graham, the most powerful thing you have going for you to raise money is your respectability." I wanted to spit. Respectable! Show me any artist who wants to be respectable.
'The Dance Scene' is just a real look at what it takes. You see the award shows. You see the videos and you never realize what goes on behind the scenes. The reality and the preparation. The motivation I have to give each dancer on that set.
You invest into the future, and that's how young people become human in best sense of it - through the great experience of listening a Müller symphony or to see a great play by Tennessee Williams, experience something in a ballet, in a film.
I listen to music all the time, and I just choose things I like, or things that I've not used before. Sometimes I work with music that's very difficult - that I don't even particularly like, per se, but that is really complex or interesting.
I never thought of myself as being a genius. I don't know what genius is. I think a far better expression is a retriever, a lovely strong golden retriever that brings things back from the past, or retrieves things from our common blood memory
I fell in love with New York. It was like every human being, like any relationship. When I was a young New Yorker, it was one city. When I was a grown man, it was another city. I worked with many dance organizations and many wonderful people.
I work as a dancer, but I also work as a choreographer with couples that have a lot of tension between them, and as dancer and as a choreographer, being in this situation is very difficult. You see the energy doesn't flow, and it's very tense.
Dancing has been in us, in people, since the Neanderthal age. There's something about moving, something about interpreting yourself to the music, that's attractive, that's interesting, that's intriguing, and everyone wishes they could do that.
Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.
I want to be able to say, 'you think you're odd, I'm even odder and I made it - you can too!' I want to direct, do more with 'The Dance Scene,' sign artists and just provide opportunities. I'm just getting started and having the time of my life!
My father was a Party member and he was a pretty high rank military officer under the colonel, junior colonel, I don't know the term. He was a total Stalinist. A bit with a streak of anti-Semitism and very shrewd man, a very kind of nervous man.
The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body. I don't leap and jump anymore. I look at young dancers, and I am envious, more aware of what glories the body contains. But sensitivity is not made dull by age.
I think professional cosmonaut trainer in fact said that we are the only two [with Damian Kulash ] he found fit to be astronauts, which is ridiculous because we are far from fit from being astronauts. So you can imagine what was going on up there.
We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.
What people are feeling is the similarity in what I do and how I'm capable of breaking a new artist into a competitive field. People can't wrap their head around the fact that Gaga did not do that on her own. She didn't. There was a Laurieann Gibson.
[Show] business is tough. You never know who or what's real. It's tough when you get in this business, if you have no grounded foundation other than Hollywood, because this business isn't real. We're getting paid to do what we love, but it isn't real.
I always try to keep a little bit of space in the year to work with other people. Because I love doing musicals, films and plays - projects where I'm not in charge, where I've got somebody else telling me what to do and I have to work with their vision.
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.
There's no better exercise than dancing. 'Dancing with the Stars' is amazing. I used to take it for granted, but the three months you spend on the show, with that grueling regimen, you just shed weight. You can eat anything you want and it doesn't stick.
I look for someone whose upbringing was somewhat similar to mine because they can understand me - love for the family and everything else. You see someone's relationship with their parents, and you realize what that person's going to be like as a parent.
I can always invent movement, and sometimes it can be fitted into the right place, but that is not choreography. It is the music that dictates the whole shape of the work. I do not believe in the permanence of anything in ballet save the purely classical.
Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to paradise of the achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration, there are daily small deaths.
I had daydreamed through many performances of Swan Lake, thinking the dancing tutus only ever conveyed one aspect of swans: their beauty gliding on water. I wondered what it would be like to use male dancers and bring out swans' aggressive, muscular side.
'Gypsy' is the ultimate stage-mother story: Mama Rose is the one who should have been a star; she's the one with the talent. But she chose to have kids and put her dreams into them. The musical shows the power of showbiz and how much it can mean to someone.
My family home was a rented house in the East End of London. My parents could have bought it at one point, but they preferred to spend their money on holidays and theatre tickets. It was strange to see it handed on to someone else when my father passed away.
The invention progress is tough sometimes. When I first choreographed the Drunken Master in the past with Jackie Chan, I spent months to create the whole sequence. There were no fight sequences before; it's just a name. I have to choreograph it all by myself.
I realized that, for me, great records always moved me with the lyrics and the melodies. And so I said, 'I think I can do it now,' 'cause I found a team of people who understand I didn't want a record that was 'drop it, pop it, shake it' just 'cause I can dance.
I spent my entire childhood with my father. I started my first business at 16, and we became business partners. He's not just a mentor and somebody that I look up to, but he's also someone whom I took work ethic and determination and all of those qualities from.
How do you know a partner is right for you? That has everything to do with knowing each other and practicing together until you work as one, until you begin to synchronise your movements and your thoughts and your rhythmical feel for the music with your partner.
I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people's participation and young faces in the audience.
I never wanted to be a dancer. I was too big, I was too slow. I remember not liking it. Later on, when I came to the United States, I realized I had a skill, and when you come to this country, you realize if you have a skill and a determination, you can do anything.
I cannot draw to save my life, and I'm not a big art scholar, but I worked with many designers throughout my career - in theater, in dance, costume designers, set designers, and I have a lot of artist friends and I do photography, and I think it's kind of in my life.
She's like a Barbie, then she wants to be a superhero, or coming out of a spaceship and everything's pink. She makes a certain move that's ghetto hood mixed with a little robot so its like I'm evolving Nicki Minaj and developing her style. She's fearless, and I love her.
I've relaxed my feelings about other companies performing my works. I have never in principle been against my ballets being danced by other companies. Rather, it is that we lack the time, space and money to insure that they are done well. To me, the only sin is mediocrity.
I had my first kiss under a tree near the school. It was with a boy named Michael who rarely spoke, but he would sometimes give me one of the cookies from his lunch. Maybe it was the gifts that made me feel special? I don't know, but when our lips touched, it felt magical.
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.
I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.
My first job was at the BBC but was really dull. I was working in the BBC's reference department, where I did a lot of filing. I had always been interested in films and theatre, so I thought that getting a job at the BBC would be a good idea, but the job was really mundane.
First of all, God inspires me, where he's brought me, it blows my mind. To know that He brought me this far, it could not have been an accident, to go forward, I'm excited to leap into the void, I'm excited about tomorrow, the unknown, excited to see what else He has for me.
There's a myriad of things that go into why movies don't happen right when you make them. If you make a movie in 2010, sometimes it takes up to a year for post-production, and that puts you into 2011, then you have to figure out what your product is, and that takes some time.
Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.
I'm born originally in Toronto, and I have what I call my 'Fame' story. I took a Greyhound bus and went to Alvin Ailey and received Dunham, Horton, Graham technique there, but I could never take my eyes off of Balanchine doing 'Nutcracker'; to me he's the best who ever did it.
I was very restless. I really wanted to be a part of a kind of a progressive society. I was fed up with these Communist doctrines and you were hassled all the time with members of the Party committee who were KGB, what you have to do, where in the West you can go or not to go.
It's like the time capsule with everything in it. Or like the seed that when you plant it, becomes the enormous tree with leaves and fruit. Everybody was in that little seed, and so everything can open. The tree of dance is like that. It just takes a long, long time to blossom.
I like to always remind my dancers about ways to avoid injury. One of the basic ways to avoid injury is to always make sure to stretch and warm up your body. This will loosen up your muscles, which will help to avoid common strain injuries such as shin splints and ankle strains.
Ours is an upbeat, a hurried, hasty beat. It keeps pressing us to go farther, to include everything so that we can savor everything, so that we can know everything, so that we will miss nothing. Partly it's greed, but mainly its curiosity. We just want to experience it. And we do.
I would definitely want kids. Would they be dancers? I dunno. That's up to them. If they show interest, I will push them do the best. I was not brought up in a dancer's family. I was brought up in a family where the mentality was whatever you do, you gotta try to be the best at it.
A choreographer deals with the movement that you create, and with a creative director it's about the story, the stage, the lighting, the costuming, executing someone's idea, choosing how far to go or how little to go, and blending it so that you feel it, you're emotionally effected.