A Quote by Mikhail Baryshnikov

You open a section of 'The New York Times,' and there's a review or a story on a choreographer or a dancer, and there's an informative, clear image of a dancer. This is, in my view, not an interesting photograph.
As a dancer, you really try to stay true to whatever the choreographer/artistic director is giving you. So, now the shoe is on the other foot and I have to trust everyone else - I have to trust the dancer. As I was trusted as a dancer, I trust my dancers.
I work as a dancer, but I also work as a choreographer with couples that have a lot of tension between them, and as dancer and as a choreographer, being in this situation is very difficult. You see the energy doesn't flow, and it's very tense.
People misconstrue when I say I was a dancer. I was not classically trained. I was a street dancer, and I got to do what I did in the nightclubs of New York City.
My whole family is in the arts some way or the other. My father was a cellist in a symphony outside Chicago that was a side-job, he was a scientist. My mother was a dancer in New York. She was next-door neighbors with Dorothy Loudon and they moved to New York together. Mom was a dancer in New York for several years before she got married. My sister was a classical pianist. And my brother was a partier. So it all just seemed to work.
I get the 'The New York Times' and 'Los Angeles Times' thrown at my door every morning. I'll read the front page of 'The New York Times,' then the op-eds, then scan the arts section and then the sports section. Then I do the same with the 'L.A. Times.'
You are not a female or a male - you are a dancer. And when I started going into choreography I became part of a team of people making movies. I wasn't a woman choreographer. I was a choreographer.
When Paul Beatty's 'The Sellout' was first published in America in 2015, it was a small release. It got a rave review in the daily 'New York Times' and one in the weekly 'New York Times Book Review,' too, for good measure. But by and large, it was not a conversation-generating book.
Forget the dancer, the center of the ego. Become the dance. Then the dancer disappears and only the dance remains. Then the dancer is the dance. There is no dancer separate from dance, no dance separate from the dancer.
I consider myself an actress first, a dancer second, and a singer third. Why? Because the dancer needs a reason to move-that's the actor informing the dancer. So I worked on my acting and gradually developed a singing voice.
A good dancer is not necessarily defined by great technique, skill, or ability to pick up choreography but by confidence. When you feel the music, it penetrates to your soul. Everybody's a dancer. The greatest dancer is someone who is willing to dance, not afraid.
Some Sundays, I read it quickly - other Sundays, I savor it. I generally spend most of my time in 'The New York Times Book Review,' 'Sunday Business,' 'Sunday Review,' and 'The New York Times Magazine.' I turn all the other pages, only stopping when I find a headline that interests me.
Growing up, I was a dancer. I wanted to be a choreographer.
I taught and studied dance in college, and for over a decade, I thought that would be my career: tap dancer, ballet dancer, modern dancer. I still find myself doing some tumbling or interpretive dancing in the grocery store every now and then.
I think I just have this need to be a storyteller. That's why I wasn't a great dancer - I couldn't articulate a story. I was a better choreographer. I have the need to to just express myself in that way. I can't explain it.
What I found interesting in dance is the idea that my work has always been dealing with the nervousness between the human subject as a subject and the human subject as a form. And if you look at my dance films, there are always these cuts between the dancer as a form, the dancer as a subject, and this kind of very harsh treatment of the dancer as someone who's actually drawing with their body.
Whether you are a skater or a dancer, without sounding narcissistic, it is all about looking in the mirror. Where I used to practice in New York City, there was a mirror so you could actually watch yourself skate. And nowadays my golf teacher will film me swinging so I can see what I am doing. Having looked first at myself and my own body for so long as one does as a dancer and a skater, it was so natural to do fashion.
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