My father moved to Hawaii from Brooklyn and my mother came there as a child from the Philippines. They met at a show where my dad was playing percussion. My mom was a hula dancer.
I was a gymnast for many years before I was a dancer, so it comes in pretty handy when we do stunts.
I’ve done tons of Debbie Allen musicals. I was a dancer in ‘Glee,’ and I was a Laker girl for three months.
I also loved musicals because I was a dancer.
I just did a film in which I had to be a dancer and I was able to do all kinds of extraordinary things. A lot of people turn 50 and talk about what they’re not going to do anymore. I embarked on something that I’d wanted to do when I was 5.
One is born to be a great dancer.
As a little girl, I didn’t dream of being a ballet dancer; I dreamt of being a movie star like Ginger Rogers and dancing with Fred Astaire. I used to watch the Sunday double-bills on TV and Iong to be part of what seemed a perfect Disneyland world. Astaire was a genius.
From the time I was 2, I told my mom I was going to be a singer. And she’d say, ‘Sure, honey, and tomorrow you’ll want to be a dancer.’
When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.
To join or not to join films was the biggest choice I had to make. I’d done two years of biogenetic engineering, was an economics graduate and a gold medalist. I had also been a Bharatanatyam dancer from age five, always won the best actress award in school. Finally, I decided to do things for my soul, chose to act.
My first dance class was with Shiamak Davar when I was seven-eight years old. My mom insisted that I start learning to dance early because she’s a trained classical dancer.
I Iove a dancer who is willing to take risks with their body and go that extra mile to move the audience.
When I was younger ,I used to want to be, like, a back-up dancer, and my mom was like, ‘Well, you know, you can do that, but you might want to choose another career.’
I’m not a dancer. Never took a dance class.
I’m an excellent dancer. I keep up with whatever’s hot. I’ve been break-dancing and pop-locking since back in the day.
I was a go-go dancer at the Dom on East 10th Street in NYC. This was a glittering ballroom over Stanley’s Bar. 1965.
As a dancer, you go from one show to the next, and you never know where your next pound is coming from, and I think that’s what makes me say yes to so many things, because there’s always a fear that you won’t have a job.
I would never go on ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ because I’m not the greatest dancer in the world. But when I watch ‘The Apprentice’ sometimes I’m like, ‘I could do that task.’ The only reason I would not do that is that I could never call people for money and on that show you have to be willing to call people for money.
The ‘All My Children’ studio was near Lincoln Center, and I used to see all the ballerinas and the dancers, and I thought, I don’t want to bulk up; I want to have long, lean, toned muscles. And I found out that through Pilates, you can achieve those strong, lean dancer muscles.
I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ‘divine service.’
It’s not an easy task to match Charan. He is really a good dancer, and he comes straight to the sets without rehearsals.
It’s funny because a lot of people that know me as a dancer, don’t know that I’m a singer, and a lot of people that know I can sing don’t know I can dance. And so, I feel like at some point I have to show them both and really be able to display it and showcase it, and put that out there.
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
I want to be like Chris Brown meets Jay Z. Chris is a singer, a dancer, a complete powerhouse on stage and Jay Z is not just a popular musician, but also a lyrical genius, a business mogul, who knows how to be classy.
I know how to sew, knit, I’m a great chef, and a good dancer.
Performing, not rehearsing, is a dancer’s raison d’etre, and I’ve been lucky to ‘etre’ in some extraordinary places – Cuba, Paris, Mongolia. In particular, a two-week stint in Greece leaps to mind. We danced in the Acropolis’s Herodes Atticus amphitheater, once a venue for gladiator spectacles.
Good balance makes you a better dancer, musician, actor – anything.
My mother was a dancer, so I like to use the body as part of the instrument of acting.
I have proved myself as an actor and now I want to show my fans that I am a good dancer too by participating in a dance reality show.
Mohan Lal is my favorite actor, so if I am saying that Salman has performed better, you can believe how much he has done. Salman is better looking, so that’s his plus point. Lal is the more realistic actor, but Salman is a better dancer. So there are things you can’t compare. Both are good in their own way.
I was definitely a tyrant – ask any dancer I’ve worked with. They were surprised if I was ever nice to them. I had a terrible temper.
Bubbles was a very good dancer. Tremendous dancer. He was one of our leading dancers of the country at that time. And, of course, he didn’t have much of a voice.
HIL boasts of a high-class list of players and coaches like Ric Charlesworth, Barry Dancer, etc.
I grew up in New York, and I’ve always been surrounded by fashion. My grandmother used to write for ‘Vogue’ in the ’50s, and my mother was a dancer and a model.
I wasn’t a dancer learning to play Baby Houseman. I was Baby Houseman learning to play a dancer. I was someone who’d never done any Latin dance. I’d taken jazz classes and ballet growing up in New York, so I had dance in me, and I knew I loved it, but I’d never done a dance audition.
My mother was a dancer when she was a kid and I gather she was very good, but was never allowed to go into the profession.
Movies and media really can influence us. A few years ago, my daughter wanted to be a dancer; since Obama came into office, she now wants to be a lawyer and get into politics and maybe even be president.
When I left Michigan and I came to New York, that was my goal, to be a professional dancer. And I sort of fell into singing by accident in a way.
I want dance to emerge as a field where people can feel proud of being a dancer and they shouldn’t feel the need to be a Bollywood actor.
I was so comfortable with my ballet power, my dancer power, that to have a voice, the comfort with having a voice, is slower to come to me.
I wanted to be a male ballet dancer.
I had the benefit of there being no stigma attached to the arts. My brother’s a ballet dancer, and he never came up against anything.
I deal with more complex rhythmical patterns than a regular tap dancer. I even think in rhythms.
The relationship of the toastmaster to speaker should be the same as that of the fan to the fan dancer. It should call attention to the subject without making any particular effort to cover it.
Not only was I not a good dancer, I was one of the worst. I didn’t have the long thin legs, and I didn’t have natural turnout. The only thing I had was determination.
What makes characters so interesting when you’re an actor or a dancer is to watch and observe how people walk and move and speak. Are they cat-like? Are they walrus-like? Why does that person bother me, and why do I think they are the way they are?
Being a Kathak dancer, learning Bharathanatyam was a challenge as it was not that subtle, when compared to my natural form of dance.
Tap was against everything I had learned to do. I was pulled up as a ballet dancer, and I wasn’t used to pounding the floor with bent knees.
I grew up with classical music when I was a ballet dancer. Now when I have to prepare an emotional scene, to cry or whatever, I listen to sonatas. Vivaldi and stuff. It’s just beautiful to me.
The ‘All My Children’ studio was near Lincoln Center, and I used to see all the ballerinas and the dancers, and I thought, I don’t want to bulk up; I want to have long, lean, toned muscles. And I found out that through Pilates, you can achieve those strong, lean dancer muscles.
Well, it’s quite strange because there are three new Wiggles – Simon the red wiggle, Lachlan the purple wiggle and myself. We were already in the company doing different roles. Like, I was the fairy, the ballerina, and that kind of thing originally, and then I played Dorothy the Dinosaur and I was a Wiggles dancer.
I was a dancer first, which made me realize how much I loved performing.
I invented this wonderful death scene for Javert of going down on my knees and then leaning back like a limbo dancer to make it look as if I was falling off a bridge. I did it eight times a week for nearly a year and I’ve had trouble with my knees ever since – they don’t even allow me to jog these days.
I enjoy every role that I do. But I would love to do a dance-based film. It can even be the biopic of a great Indian classical dancer. I want to push boundaries.
I am a dancer first. That is why I don’t accept all roles that come my way.
I just knew that was what I wanted to do. I was going to perform as a singer; I was going to perform as a dancer, and I was, you know, going to do movies and be an actress. I was going to do it or die trying. That’s what my life was.
