Top 287 Quotes & Sayings by Twyla Tharp
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American dancer Twyla Tharp.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
I have not wanted to intimidate audiences. I have not wanted my dancing to be an elitist form. That doesn't mean I haven't wanted it to be excellent.
These days, I think we could all agree that having a just-friend is not a bad thing.
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.
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 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.
In dreams, anything can be anything, and everybody can do. We can fly, we can turn upside down, we can transform into anything.
Any comic is a tragic soul. Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive. Particularly if one has been in the process of separating off the emotions, it's one place you can process them.
You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.
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.
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 never studied with Balanchine, but his work was very important to me.
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.
I think that anyone who's pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It's a luxury.
I'm a known reader. That's what I do with my time.
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.
The only way to know the truth of a movement is to do it on your own body.
I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching.
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.
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!
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.
Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that.
I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren.
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.
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.'
I see dance as glue for a community.
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
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 do at least 75 push-ups a day.
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.
In circuses, there is a lot of magic. Things become other things.
The formal education that I received made little sense to me.
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 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.
It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.
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.
Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background.
I have the wherewithal to challenge myself for my entire life. That's a great gift.
I often say that in making dances I can make a world where I think things are done morally, done democratically, done honestly.
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.
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.
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.
The content and thematic materials of dance is, of itself, like boxing. You play tennis and baseball. But boxing is not a sport you play: you stand up and do it.
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.
Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.
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.
Art is an investigation.
This is the strange thing: Dancers don't age.
I'm not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories. Either something works, or it doesn't.
The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.
I had always seen myself as a star; I wanted to be a galaxy.
The rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing.
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.
A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.
If a thing moves, it lives.
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.
Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.
'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.
Judgment is not my business. Existing is my business.
We don't need to illustrate music; music illustrates itself.
Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism.
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