I used to rely too much on arrangements and production, things like dancers and explosions.
I still can’t believe I danced with Gene Kelly. How lucky am I that I’ve been in movies where I’ve danced with two of the greatest dancers of all time – with Gene Kelly and John Travolta.
I would love to do a live show with dancers and fashion and scenic elements – definitely bring my love of the theater to a concert-style performance.
Shashi Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan were good dancers.
I don’t just work with these kids to make them good tumblers or good dancers. I’m working with them to make them good citizens – to become taxpayers, not tax-eaters. I teach them to say please and thank you. I show them how to use a knife and fork and how to fold a napkin.
Dancers are a work of art – they are the canvas on which their work is painted.
Duffy is go hard or go home. It’s just a concept that I wanted to have when we’re doing different things. When me and my dancers go in, we usually go hard or we go home. We’re not here to play. We go duffy.
You see, dancers are quite mature people because they start performing so early. They become professionals when they start to take everyday classes.
Yes, bad or mediocre ballets can be useful to the dancers and temporarily fun for the audience, but in the long run, the lowering of standards can only erode the art form we all love.
I wouldn’t say that I am one of the greatest dancers, but I am really quite good at what I do.
In those days, male dancers were a rarer breed than women. as they are still today, A good male dancer, one as strong as we were, was very difficult to come by if you couldn’t afford to pay them.
I had danced with Janet Jackson and P. Diddy so I had done a bunch of hip hop. Really and truly my roots are in modern and ballet but, professionally, that’s not really out there any more, unfortunately, so these artists aren’t really having a lot of ballet dancers behind them so I had to learn hip hop really quick.
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.
At intervals between the songs, more especially after the trances have begun, the dancers unclasp hands and sit down to smoke or talk for a few minutes.
It’s great that ballroom dancing is being recognised. For many years ballroom dancers were misunderstood and other dance forms didn’t want anything to do with us.
All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. All that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed.
Actors are born, good actors are trained. Dancers are born, good dancers are trained.
I am into belly dancing. I used to only hang with comics. Now I have friends who are dancers, and my whole house has a harem feel.
I haven’t had a family, but I don’t think of that as a sacrifice: my dancers are my family.
Tap dancers find it very difficult to do anything other than tap if that is all they have been trained in because, again, it’s a whole different ballgame that you’re constantly working on – bent legs, loose ankles – which you cannot afford to do when you’re doing jumps or anything else.
My sisters and my brother were all very much into music. A couple of them were dancers.
As long as there are dancers around who love to dance, there will be an Alvin Ailey American Dance Company. We miss him so much, but he’s alive as soon as you see a dancer hit the stage.
I’m very close to a lot of people from my time in the band, like our hair and make-up people and the dancers, but you gravitate towards the people that you have stuff in common with.
Yes, I love going to fittings and talking about the history of a costume. For ‘Versailles,’ a play set in 1919, the costume designer told me that pocket squares had just been introduced. The tango was becoming fashionable in London, and dancers used them to mop their brows. I love to learn fascinating stuff like that.
Latino patriots have served and fought in every war. They are artists, dancers, singers, poets and journalists, teachers and scientists. More and more Latinos are becoming entrepreneurs and businesspeople, contributing to the wealth and economic well-being of the nation.
All of my friends are really good dancers, which was initially why I never danced – we’d go out, and they would kill it, and I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I’m just gonna sit at the bar.’
Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words.
It’s important to get well-rounded right off the bat. A lot of experienced dancers can get pigeonholed into one thing. I’ve been hired for a lot of different gigs simply because I can do a lot of different things with different levels of dancers. And it’s sad to me that some dancers don’t do more.
There were ten dancers – four guys and six girls – including me, on the Beyonce tour. Sometimes we would go out with her, to events. She was really normal – just like everybody else!
I know that a large part of my fan base is gay. They’ve shown me love from the start. I mean in this industry, everyone from my glam people to my dancers are gay. You can’t be homophobic in this line of work – I’m a pop star!
Dancers are kept in a perpetual state of pre-puberty, and for young girls in particular, that type of pressure breeds insecurities.
I went to a public high school and most of the comedy was coming from the black kids and the Asian kids and the Hispanic kids. And, the coolest kids to me where always the black kids. They were always fashion forward and they always dressed the coolest. They were always the best dancers, and just the coolest people.
I say over and over again that I am just standing on the shoulders of so many who have set this path for me, and they may not be seen or recognized or have been given an opportunity to have a voice, but I’m here representing all of those dancers. Dance Theatre of Harlem Virginia Johnson, Tai Jimenez, Lauren Anderson.
I’ve always been a bit of an orphan, because actors say, ‘Well, he’s more of a dancer.’ And dancers say, ‘No. He’s really a singer.’ And singers say, ‘No. He’s an actor.’
Both my brother and mother are actors and dancers. Of course my mom, who is a Kathak exponent, is the most established dancer amongst the three of us.
Initially, dancing for me was just for pocket money. The dancers are paid well and you get paid on a daily basis. Eventually when I got promoted as an assistant choreographer I was getting paid more. This was during my college days.
I like to express myself inside of the work that is given, and I let the dancers do the same.
I love writing for dancers. You don’t have to worry about the lyrics. I think to write words without music must be so frustrating. It must be always be so good, so perfect.
The Carnival dancers are such a vital part of any carnival, whether it’s in Rio, Mardi Gras or even Notting Hill Carnival in my home town of London. Once you see them, you know it’s time to party.
Well, I swim quite a bit, and ride horseback. That’s supposed to be bad for dancers, but I don’t care – I like it. And then I collect dolls. I have them from lots of foreign countries.
My brother had a house in Paris. To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: ‘Indian music,’ they said, ‘is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own, it is repetitious and monotonous.’
Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives, through adolescence, and while they are trying to work out who they are as people, never mind as a dancer. So train the whole person, not just the dancer.
I sent 200, 300 of the clothes that I had made, and the dancers chose what they liked.
When I’m making a new ballet, I usually read through the score a little bit, and then I have to go back and translate or transcribe all the counts for dancers because the way that you hear it is completely different from the way the musicians read and play it.
God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it – from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do.
Ballet Hispanico is far from Irish, and, though it has strong dancers, its Spanishness has always left me unconvinced.
I don’t ever use dancers, and when I do, it’s literally, like, four break dancers.
Dancehall has always had a homophobic problem, but you go to dance parties in Jamaica, and some of the biggest dancers are kinda gay, just not outspoken about it. Dancehall was the first kind of music I was DJing, and it was always more about the rhythm.
Compared to professional dancers, I’m obviously not professional but I do love to dance so much.
I don’t date dancers, but I’ve always wanted to teach guys how to dance.
I love the noise of my wooden clogs on my wooden floor. Dancers wear clogs. They’re good for you.
I still go on YouTube and watch the old performances and the ‘Soul Train’ lines. I’m still amazed by how much soul and funk the music and dancers had.
