Top 583 Pointe Dancers Quotes & Sayings - Page 10

I look around me and I don’t see any rock’n’roll at the moment. Instead it’s all choreography and stylists and wigs and stuff. It’s like they’re afraid to let the music breathe. No one has their own identity like the Ronettes did back in the day. We had the skirts with the slits up the side, sort of tough, sort of Spanish Harlem cool, but sweet too. We didn’t have no dancers, we didn’t have no goddamn wigs.

I've usually never felt comfortable shooting until things were kind of claustrophobic, but ballet dancers need a lot of space, so the sets that I designed had to be big. Normally, I'd design a kitchen that was half the size of a normal kitchen, just to make everything feel kind of womb-like, but the kitchen in a ballet would have to be like 100 feet wide and just as long.

You have to imagine - for those who are good dancers, maybe they don't have to train as much - but for me at least, not being a very good dancer you have to hit the reset button every week and come in on Tuesday, the day after the live show, and start all over and learn a whole new dance with a whole new set of emphasis. Some weeks, you want to have body doing one thing. The next week, it's a totally different thing. You always have to relearn everything on a weekly basis and it takes a lot of work mentally and physically.

I don't just work with these kids to make them good tumblers or good dancers. I'm working with them to make them good citizens - to become taxpayers, not tax-eaters. I teach them to say please and thank you. I show them how to use a knife and fork and how to fold a napkin.

In high school I went to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. And this is like Fame. It's like that sort of prototypical, dancers in the hallway, theater students, musical students, art geeks. And it was a kindergarten in the truest sense of the world: a children's garden where I was able to sort of really come into myself as an artist, as a person, sexuality issues - like, all of this became something where there was a firming-up and a knowing that went on.

When you train as a dancer, you understand you have to work exceptionally hard. I think dancers are the hardest - working people in show business. You have to push your body beyond where you thought it could go. It's athleticism. Perfection doesn't exist, but with classical ballet, there is an ideal, and I got obsessed with that ideal. In some ways, it was problematic because I don't have an ideal ballet body, but the discipline is what I carry with me to this day. That's my park, the discipline of dancing.

My investigation of movement has led me to choices which vary from traditional norms. My dancers and I see the rehearsal as a laboratory for testing scientific principles on the body. We invent action ideas which we think are archetypal, noticeable, understandable. The outcome is a mixture of slam dancing, exquisite and amazing human flight and a wild action sport which captures kids, older people and the general public’s hearts and minds and bodies.

I had been DJing a dance night in Brooklyn and witnessed the response people had to "The Devil's Dancers" - Oppenheimer's one hit song. All these young people were dancing to this amazing song, completely unaware of whether it was current or not. It was from 1982, but sounded very current. It made sense that a physical record should exist for this song again. It seemed the obvious choice to represent what Minimal Wave was going to be.

The defect in wisdom and taste which exists among the majority of dancers is due to the bad education which they generally receive. They apply themselves only to the material side of their art, they learn to jump more or less high, they strive mechanically to execute a number of steps, and like children, who utter a great many words devoid of sense and relation, they execute many phrases of steps devoid of taste and grace.

All of my friends are really good dancers, which was initially why I never danced - we'd go out and they would kill it and I'd be like, "Yeah, I'm just gonna sit at the bar." I broke my foot, and I couldn't run for a year, but I realized I could kind of dance. It reminded me how amazing dance is; it's so in tune with music - it is music. It's a physical expression of whatever music is. On stage, you're interacting with things - physical things. So I've really started to like and notice the way people move with music.

Duffy is go hard or go home. It's just a concept that I wanted to have when we're doing different things. When me and my dancers go in, we usually go hard or we go home. We're not here to play. We go duffy.

I went to a public high school and most of the comedy was coming from the black kids and the Asian kids and the Hispanic kids. And, the coolest kids to me where always the black kids. They were always fashion forward and they always dressed the coolest. They were always the best dancers, and just the coolest people.

I dream dark dreams. I dream of a figure moving through the forest, of children flying from his path, of young women crying at his coming. I dream of snow and ice, of bare branches and moon-cast shadows. I dream of dancers floating in the air, stepping lightly even in death, and my own pain is but a faint echo of their suffering as I run. My blood is black on the snow, and the edges of the world are silvered with moonlight. I run into the darkness, and he is waiting. I dream in black and white, and I dream of him. I dream of Caleb, who does not exist, and I am afraid.

Dancers know how to move their arms and their hands. But I don't know the first thing about how to move my arms and hands gracefully.

Mr. Balanchine wanted me to be myself. He didn't want me to look like anyone else. I love teaching our company dancers the Balanchine ballets. I try to give them what was passed down to me and what I learned from him. They dance it so beautifully. It also keeps me close to Mr. Balanchine. He's with me every single day.

I have a picture of all of us going to a club with my friends from 'Soul Train.' All the girls just going out to a nightclub, and we're all dressed like we were dressed on 'Soul Train.' It was the most surreal experience for me because I walk into the club with them, and people started screaming. 'Oh my God! It's the 'Soul Train' dancers.'

I have known know many therapists who come out of Pacifica Graduate Institute and love being both artists and therapists at the same time, like Maureen Murdock. They are photographers and dancers and other kinds of things and therapists at the same time. I think it really makes them a much more interesting therapist because they're so engaged with the imagination and the creativity and the depths of who they are.

The way to heaven is too steep, too narrow for men to dance in and keep revel rout. No way is large or smooth enough for capering rousters, for jumping, skipping, dancing dames but that broad, beaten, pleasant road that leads to hell. The gate of heaven is too narrow for whole rounds, whole troops of dancers to march in together.

On the brilliance of James Brown's dancing ? and the frustrations of bad camera-work on dancers:cers: I think James Brown is a genius you know when he's with the Famous Flames, unbelievable. I used to watch him on television and I used to get angry at the camera-man because whenever he would really start to dance they would be on a close-up so I couldn't see his feet. I'd shout "Show him! Show him!", so I could watch and learn.

Artists have been used over and over again since the early 1980s as the legitimizers of a neighborhood in New York. And entrepreneurial artists, meaning people who themselves start out as painters, musicians, dancers, and who open a café, a bar, a restaurant, or even a co-op art gallery - they unintentionally develop the kinds of attractions that bring the middle class with some kind of cultural ambition.

Lemurs are extraordinarily leapers. I mean they are just really going from tree to tree and then if there is not a tree, they just come down to the ground very gracefully. But it is the music that makes them seem to be dancing. They are basically getting from one place to another and that's just natural for them. They are just natural acrobatic dancers, just the way they move. It's beautiful!

Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.

I remember watching Swan Lake and everybody looking exactly the same, but being able to relate because they were the only company I had ever seen even on video that had Asian dancers. The Asian community in Hawaii is actually almost as dominant as the Caucasian community. I thought "I can relate to that company because they look like people that I see every day." They weren't all little stick-thin Russian ballerinas.

When everything is added up, the frequent blows weighted against the sporadic triumphs, this is I have to say not just a vocation, it's a great gift. But you also know this, for your work, for your passion, every day is a rededication. Painters, dancers, actors, writers, filmmakers. It's the same for all of you, all of us. Every step is a first step. Every brush stroke is a test. Every scene is a lesson. Every shot is a school. So, let the learning continue.

Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great deal of effort. Dancers practice every day, musicians practice every day, even when they are at the peak of their careers – especially then. Somehow, we don’t take writing as seriously. But writing – writing wonderfully – takes just as much dedication.

More than anything, rave was an intentionally designed experience. The music, lighting, and ambience were all fine-tuned to elicit and augment altered states of consciousness. The rhythm of the music was precisely 120 beats per minute, the frequency of the fetal heart rate, and the same beat believed to be used by South American shamans to bring their tribes into a trance state. Through dancing together, without prescribed movements, or even partners, rave dancers sought to reach group consciousness on a level they had never experienced before.

I did do a little research. I went to a couple really fantastic strip clubs with really talented dancers, just in terms of their physical prowess. For the scene, there was a whole dance routine that I had to do, so I worked with a pole dance instructor who helped me choreograph a number for that scene. We broke down the principles of pole dancing, for three days, for an hour a day.

A lot of professional dancers become professional when they turn 15 or 16 years old, when they're still children. So you've trained every single waking moment up until that point for a career that could maybe only last 10 years, maybe longer if your body holds up, if your injuries are kept at bay.

I would definitely want kids. Would they be dancers? I dunno. That's up to them. If they show interest, I will push them do the best. I was not brought up in a dancer's family. I was brought up in a family where the mentality was whatever you do, you gotta try to be the best at it.

How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sages philosophers blushing in red-hot fires with their deluded pupils; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish then ever before from applause.

When I left the theater… I was thinking that I’d seen a classic of American dance. It confers a mythic dimension on ordinary aspects of our daily lives – it’s unfaked folk art. The dancers, crashing wave upon wave into those falls, have a happy insane spirit that recalls a unique moment in American life – the time we did the school play or we were ready to drown at a swimming meet. The last time most of us were happy in that way.

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

...and our footsteps rang and echoed till it sounded like the room was full of dancers, the house calling up all the people who had danced here across centuries of spring evenings, gallant girls seeing gallant boys off to war, old men and women straight-backed while outside their world disintegrated and the new one battered at their doors, all of them bruised and all of them laughing, welcoming us into their long lineage.

With Michael Jackson, when he moved, it looked like a martial artist to me. He was quicker than other dancers, but he didn't have muscles; he was just quicker and looked more in control of gravity. He looked like a martial arts master, so I tried to steal body movement from him; that's why I imitate Michael Jackson a little bit.

I like to always remind my dancers about ways to avoid injury. One of the basic ways to avoid injury is to always make sure to stretch and warm up your body. This will loosen up your muscles, which will help to avoid common strain injuries such as shin splints and ankle strains.

Conversations are like dances. Two people effortlessly move in step with one another, usually anticipating the other person's next move. If one of the dancers moves in an unexpected direction, the other typically adapts and builds on the new approach. As with dancing, it is often difficult to tell who is leading and who is following in that the two people are constantly affecting each other. And once the dance begins, it is almost impossible for one person to singly dictate the couple's movement.

When a dancer comes onstage, he is not just a blank slate that the choreographer has written on. Behind him he has all the decisions he has made in life. Each time, he has chosen, and in what he is onstage, you see the result of those choices. You are looking at the person he is, and the person who, at this point, he cannot help but be Exceptional dancers, in my experience, are also exceptional people, people with an attitude toward life, a kind of quest, and an internal quality. They know who they are, and they show this to you, willingly.

There have been many poets who have lived at the fifth center of creativity and never gone ahead - many painters, many dancers, many singers who created great art, but never moved to the third eye. And there have been mystics who have remained with the third eye, knowing their own inner beauty; it is so fulfilling that they thought they had arrived. Somebody is needed to tell you that there is still something more ahead; otherwise, in your ignorance, what you will do is almost unpredictable.

I had danced with Janet Jackson and P. Diddy so I had done a bunch of hip hop. Really and truly my roots are in modern and ballet but, professionally, that's not really out there any more, unfortunately, so these artists aren't really having a lot of ballet dancers behind them so I had to learn hip hop really quick.

They walked to school, talking about how much they were longing for the summer holidays. "Oh, I am planning things," said Jamie. "Great, great things. I could join a band." "You gave up the guitar after two lessons." "Well," he said, "I could be a backup dancer." "Backup dancers have to wear belly shirts and glitter," said Mae. "So obviously, I support this plan.

Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of "Kill! kill! kill!" and "Blood! blood! blood!

He stared up at the stars, and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.

Turn around, and the people you thought you knew might change. Your little boy might now live half a world away. Your beautiful daughter might be sneaking out at night. Your ex-husband might by dying by degrees. This is the reason that dancers learn, early on, how to spot while doing pirouettes: we all want to be able to find the place where we started.