There is obviously a power and a truth in action that doesn’t lie, which words easily can do.
I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand.
The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.
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’m a known reader. That’s what I do with my time.
Counterpoint is a component that gives real energy, and it is about optimism.
I’ve always believed that a dance evening energizes an audience, that an audience goes out feeling chemically stronger and more optimistic. This is what I understand about dance. And this is an important thing. We need this. Our culture needs it.
It’s always a problem, getting the curtain in at the end of the first act; having enough of a resolve so that you can bring the curtain in and then opening the show a second time is a little bizarre as a tradition. I’ve always preferred to go straight through.
When I started making dances in the ’60s, narrative dance was sort of off the radar screen. What was important at the time in the avant-garde was minimalism.
Walt Disney was a master of the human psychology. His sense of timing, sense of speed. In a sense, those cartoons are like Rorschach tests.
Critics should be looked at simply as commentators.
I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.
A dancer’s life is all about repetition.
The formal education that I received made little sense to me.
I work because I have issues and questions and feelings and thoughts that I want to have a look at. I’m not in need of, or wanting, particularly, to know what other folk are up to.
What I do remember is visualization of the sound of music, seeing bodies in movement in relation to how music sounded, because my mother practiced at the keyboard a lot and I also went to her lessons. As a two year old, three year old I remember seeing things in movement.
A commission is an invitation to fall in love.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
‘The Creative Habit’ is basically about how you work alone, how you survive as a solitary artist. ‘The Collaborative Habit’ is obviously about surviving with other people.
Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism.
I am fairly concise when I work and I work quickly because I think work is done better in a high gear than done our in a gear when everyone’s exhausted. Get focused, do it!
I’ve always found it necessity to strip away everything but the most fundamental ways to work – the rest is style.
Things change all the time, so why do people make such a philosophical to-do that things are constantly in transition?
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.
I think people want very much to simplify their lives enough so that they can control the things that make it possible to sleep at night.
The rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing.
My mother was a dominant force in my life. She had a very specific idea about education, which was: you should know everything about everything. It was quite simple. There was no exclusivity, and there really was no judgment.
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