Top 112 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Choreographers

Dance training can't be separate from life training. Everything that comes into our lives is training. The qualities we admire in great dancing are the same qualities we admire in human beings: honesty, courage, fearlessness, generosity, wisdom, depth, compassion,and humanity.

I use geometric and mathematical ideas to organize material, but those are tools. The purpose of the work is not to expose that at all, but to arrive at some kind of expressiveness.

It is not so much upon the number of exercises, as the care with which they are done, that progreses and skill depend.

Stay hungry to become the best that you can be. Never be satisfied with the level of artistry you've attained. You can always be better.

I am always looking for inspiration. I always live in big cities where I can go every day to a museum, see a lecture, meet people that are artists, go to the cinema. For me, it's like food. It is necessary for my personal growth as a person to grow as an artist, I go basically every week to three or four things. But it's real life that inspires me - when I meet somebody, when I see something.

When I'm taking my last breath, I want to look at how I used up the best of myself. How much did I sweat, push, pull, rip, fall, hit, crash, explode?...My dream is to be so well-used that in my last-half second, I just burst into dust.

When preparing for the fight choreography, the first thing I have to think about is what fits in the script. Whatever goes along with the story line and the character's personality; they have to be matched.

What does dance give you? The freedom to be who you are and do what you want to do.

The overhead bins - this is not a real passenger plane. We wanted it to look like a real passenger plane. But we're actually inside a very heavy-duty, industrial, like, cargo plane. And we built this set inside of it.

Dancing on the edge is the only place to be.

Movement should be approached like life - with enthusiasm, joy and gratitude - for movement is life, and life is movement, and we get out of it what we put into it.

I think most dancers would agree that the art of ballet chooses the dancer, not the other way around.

You have to believe in what you are saying. Maybe they will like it or not but they cannot contest that what you are saying is true.

I had to learn that slower is faster. If you practice every day with patience and correctness, you will get there. It's like preparing for a jump. You can't rush. You must summon the appropriate energy with split-second timing and have an understanding of purpose to get up in the air. It requires training, confidence and mental effort. You can't have a vocabulary without the alphabet. Balanchine used to say, "Do you want to be a poet of gesture or do you want to be a physical entity?"

Basic dance--and I should qualify the word basic--is primarily concerned with motion. So immediately you will say but the basketball player is concerned with motion. That is so--but he is not concerned with it primarily. His action is a means towards an end beyond motion. In basic dance the motion is its own end--that is, it is concerned with nothing beyond itself.

Ballet is pure and demands that you serve something larger than yourself, whether it be beauty or art, or a combination of both. It requires discipline, taking care of yourself, taking care of your own body first. Then it allows you to give of that beauty, the beauty that you acquire by sculpting your own body all your life.

The Dance: A minimum of explanation, a minimum of anecdotes - and a maximum of sensations.

Every morning I am a beginner.

The dancer gradually introduces all that his art comprises.

What you practice, is what you’ll do

Everybody has their own path. I just believe that with conviction and discipline you can make anything happen.

How do you know a partner is right for you? That has everything to do with knowing each other and practicing together until you work as one, until you begin to synchronise your movements and your thoughts and your rhythmical feel for the music with your partner.

Dance is a life, everyday. don't miss it. You're in bodies, you can move... Where is your joy?

I can state that I created a ballet company of which everyone said: St. Petersburg has the greatest ballet in all Europe.

Every teacher will tell you that you cannot dance classical technique with perfection, there is no such thing, there is no way. So you have to adapt the technique to your abilities or to your deficiencies. Learn to cheat!

The choreographer cannot deliberately make a ballet to appeal to an audience, he has to start from personal inspirations. He has to trust the ballet, to let it stand on its own strengths or fall on its weaknesses. If it reaches the audience, then he is lucky that round!

Afro-Caribbean influences are in me as a creative being the same way Spanish influences were in Picasso's work. I think the notion of labels - "black dancer, black choreographer" -is a ploy to divide and conquer, and to limit.

Dance gave me a focus so I could survive, and energy so I could have confidence in myself.

My hope is to shed light, provoke thought, entertain, and move through dance.

Come on, somebody be brave.

So many dancers rely on some sort of magic happening on the stage. They never, for various reasons, work full out in rehearsal. That's very uncreative. They don't discover the kinds of things that add up to a remarkable performance.

Dance is like wine; it matures with every performance.

Dancing is a feeling expressed from the inside out.

Art is the inheritance of every individual, it activates evolutionary growth, it is an intellectual virtue, and the fostering principle for all that is made, done, or known.

Fear is the foundation of all human limitations.

I had to learn that slower is faster If you practice every day with patience and correctness, you will get there. It's like preparing for a jump. You can't rush. You must summon the appropriate energy.

Fear, safety, and conformity make you mediocre and average

What’s interesting about you is you.

The relationship between the audience and the dancers goes through many different stages. Someone seeing my work for the first time may or may not pick up on that.

Bravura has nothing to do with technique. It's all about timing and oozing life.

If you dance with your heart, your body will follow.

It's basic research: shoot an arrow in the air. Where it lands, paint a bullseye.

The Dance is an art because it demands vocation, knowledge, and ability.

Opening cans of chili in zero gravity to see how it looks, that's something that went wrong.

Do you know what it took for Balanchine to put me, a black man, on stage with a white woman? This was 1957, before civil rights. He showed me how to take her [holding her delicately by the wrist]. He said, ‘put your hand on top.’ The skin colors were part of the choreography. He saw what was going to happen in the world and put it on stage.

In the place where you feel completely uncomfortable, is the place where you find your genius.

Always the question for dancers is: Can we fly?

I do not like a haphazard connection between the dances and the music.

If you feel someone suspicious is following you, the best thing to do is to talk on your cell phone, Even if you just act as if someone is on the other end, it will make them think twice.

I disagree with the idea that modern dancers are cold or unemotional.

The deep art... That's the part that has to be guarded like a miser would his money... Like a dope addict would his dope... Like a lover with their love.

Do my movement and my thinking have an intimate connection? First of all, I don't think my body doesn't think.

Dancing is like making love. It has to be a harmony; it has to be about two bodies. When one is like, "I am the good one," it doesn't work.

I do not like to be thought of as avant-garde or some kind of didactic artist.

A cat is never a presentation, but an innocent happening.

The noble entitlement bespeaks an élan, a certain type of relationship with your partner. It means formidable technique not displayed lightly. The excitement comes from elegance.

The art of Mime encompasses all the feelings of the soul. The Dance, on the other hand, is essentially an expression of joy, a desire to follow the rhythms of the music.

It is a fine art because it strives for an ideal, not only in plastic but also in lyrical respect.

...I loved to dance in studios, but not necessarily on stage. What I loved was to sweat and to feel every single pore open up

I think dancing is an emotional experience.