Top 95 Twyla Tharp Quotes

With each piece I’ve completed I have worked to make it intact, and each of them has been an equal high. It’s like children. A mother refuses to pick out one as a favorite, and I can’t do any better with the dances.

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

I would have to challenge the term, modern dance. I don’t really use that term in relation to my work. I simply think of it as dancing. I think of it as moving.

I have the wherewithal to challenge myself for my entire life. That’s a great gift.

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 thought I had to make an impact on history. I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission. Posterity deals with us however it sees fit. But I gave it 20 years of my best shot.

Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that.

I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.

After so many years, I’ve learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That’s why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves.

In circuses, there is a lot of magic. Things become other things.

I have a sort of tactility about music. I go into record stores and just run my fingers over it, the spines.

If a thing moves, it lives.

This is the strange thing: Dancers don’t age.

Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.

In dreams, anything can be anything, and everybody can do. We can fly, we can turn upside down, we can transform into anything.

When I say I can see through clothes, sometimes I try to use it as an X-ray vision to look into the dancer and see who this dancer is right now, at this exact moment in time. I live inside them in a way.

There’s the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it’s had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism.

Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut.

I learned very early that an audience would relax and look at things differently if they felt they could laugh with you from time to time. There’s an energy that comes through the release of tension that is laughter.

My father always said, ‘I don’t care if you’re a ditch digger, as long as you’re the best ditch digger in the world.’

I’m obviously always interested in the dancer who’s an athlete and vice versa. I expect dancers to be in condition like an athlete is and to challenge themselves in the same way, to the same physical degree.

I do not watch television, never have.

I’m not interested in seeing dance die. It’s not to my advantage. Nor is it to our culture’s advantage or anybody else’s.

In terms of individuals who actually inspired me, very few of the academic people that I had access to had that power over me. Maybe it’s simply because I wasn’t that committed to geometry.

To survive, you’ve got to keep wheedling your way. You can’t just sit there and fight against odds when it’s not going to work. You have to turn a corner, dig a hole, go through a tunnel – and find a way to keep moving.

When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.

These days, I think we could all agree that having a just-friend is not a bad thing.

People often say to me, ‘I don’t know anything about dance.’ I say, ‘Stop. You got up this morning, and you’re walking. You are an expert.’

The only way to know the truth of a movement is to do it on your own body.

Broadway has some very tight expectations as to what a show is.

Balzac loved courtesans. They were independent women, and in the 19th century, that was a breed that was just evolving.

I had always seen myself as a star; I wanted to be a galaxy.

I’m not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories. Either something works, or it doesn’t.

I often say that in making dances I can make a world where I think things are done morally, done democratically, done honestly.

No artist is well served in thinking what will happen to their works. The best one can hope is that they’ll enter the mainstream, and people will pull bits and pieces from them.

The artist doesn’t really think about consequences – he or she does the work, stands back and looks at and thinks, ‘Hmm, that could have worked better like this.’ But as a person who needs to sell tickets to do the next work, one needs to analyze how it does or does not hit its mark.

Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody’s present pops out of nowhere.

Art is an investigation.

Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.

You either entertain an audience or you don’t.

I see dance as glue for a community.

My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born, in Jay County, to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize, but when the war came she was married, had a family, so she started teaching.

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.

Work is work; wherever I’m working, I do the best I can. If the actual dollars come from investors as opposed to taxpayers and patrons, what’s the difference?

When I started thinking seriously about learning the rules of narrative, I thought, ‘You’ve learned the rules of dancing from the ballet; what’s the matter with learning the laws of theater from the people who know how to do it?’

In the not-for-profit world, there can be wastefulness because there’s not the desperate urgency of when you’re on a clock.

I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching.

Creativity is not just for artists. It’s for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it’s for engineers trying to solve a problem; it’s for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.

At the ballet classes I took when I first came to New York, I would see great dancers like Cynthia Gregory and Lupe Serrano. I would look at them and study what they could do, and what I couldn’t do. And then I’d think maybe they should try what I could do.

I always tell students that you’ve got to be practical. You do not need a dream. You need a purpose, something you can wake up to in the morning when the dream is dissipated.

To make real change, you have to be well anchored – not only in the belief that it can be done, but also in some pretty real ways about who you are and what you can do.

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.

A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I’m beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.

It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.

I’ve survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.

Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That’s the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart.

Desire is the first thing a modern dancer should have. Skill can be developed. But if you don’t have desire as a modern dancer, forget it.

Unfortunately, I think we’ve probably all had the experience that if we’re in a relationship where one of the partners is doing it ‘my’ way, that relationship is not going to survive.

You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas… when you actually do something physical.

I don’t think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity.

‘Bum’s Rush’ is a piece about timing, and everything that’s in the piece needs to be with the piece. If people are missing, or marking, or unable to use their voices, the impulses that prompt the action are lost, and its logic crumbles.

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.

There is a moral dimension, for me, in anything that’s any good.

My dancers expect me to deliver because my choreography represents their livelihood.

My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.

I don’t hate language. I have my own language, but I also enjoy the English language. Obviously, you don’t read a lot of literature and not care about language.

I feel I can handle the architecture of dance as well as anybody.

It’s very important to work myself physically as hard as I can.