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Quotes by Dancer
"Strong and convincing art has never arisen from theories."
"I can always remember the dances, even from shows I did 40 years ago."
"Oh yes, after the war, and we were all starving - we had no proper food or anything - no proper shoes."
"You can't stop what comes into a country, you can be influenced, but you can't stop it, you shouldn't, because it makes all the others interesting, we all get muddled up together, and produce something that belongs to everyone."
"Well, I mean, we are developing the other parts, and we can't give quite all our attention to the upper part, but soon the lower parts will be developed, and the upper part and the lower part will become partners, that will be wonderful."
"There's nothing in the world that isn't good, bad, and indifferent."
"There would never have been a British Ballet without Diaghilev. He had a wonderful influence."
"The best way to study is to go to the Cecchetti method for about a year and draw onto all the highest points and then put that into the general method."
"Oh yes, technique has definitely advanced. But you never advance without losing something en passant, and you lose it because you're paying so much attention to the new thing."
"As time goes on, all schools only get left alive if they have found something special themselves."
"And then you have the classical ballerinas, they're like sopranos. Applied to the dance."
"Also, if you have an accident, you can't start to dance again at the top, you're too weak; you start with the easy things - the way you did them when you were young, and come up up up, the way you did then."
"All the children in the school should learn the steps of everything, before they learn the thing, then they know which step they're doing better, because your voice is in certain steps and has to do most of the things that have been composed in those steps."
"First of all, the most important, that is to learn everything good that has survived from other times, and carefully to watch the bad - and throw it out."
"I've had this reoccurring dream for the last ten to fifteen years."
"Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that."
"I don't mean this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart."
"I don't think politicians should be allowed into power who are not familiar with their bodies, because that's where our bottom line is. And I know that they would make totally different decisions if they felt responsible simply for their own bodies."
"I have the wherewithal to challenge myself for my entire life. That's a great gift."
"I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching."
"I think that anyone who's pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It's a luxury."
"It was not until I had graduated from college that I made a professional commitment to it. Frankly, I didn't think it wise. I was my own interior parental force, and it's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer."
"Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism."
"The necessity to constantly turn in an excellent performance, to be absolutely wedded to this dedication and this ideal means that as a child you're going to pay for it personally."
"The rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing."
"There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything."
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