Top 1200 Tap Dancers Quotes & Sayings

How big are souls anyway?" asked Coraline. The other mother sat down at the kitchen table and leaned against the back wall, saying nothing. She picked at her teeth with a long crimson-varnished fingernail, then she tapped the finger, gently, tap-tap-tap against the polished black surface of her black button eyes.

A producer wouldn't think of making a film about ballet dancers without using real dancers, but they will cast actors who have never held a bat in baseball films.

The Royal Ballet is the best paid company, but the dancers get nothing. The stage crew get paid three times more than the dancers, and they have a job for life - dancers only have 10 years.

On Saturday afternoons, there was a film, of course, and then we did about four shows between the films. And I would do a tap dance, a little military tap.

It's kind of become a journey about the dancers, but dancers are the reason why this show is so successful. They are the choreographers, they are the teachers and if not for their hard work, there would be no 'Dancing With the Stars.'

I feel like people used to leave their homes and go to their local theatre, and they used to watch ballet dancers and musical theatre performers and tap dancers and orchestras and dog acts. You had to leave your home, be in the presence of other people, know how to behave, and enjoy the human being whose beating heart was in front of you.

Lovingly crafted and super-creative cupcakes are not exactly on tap in my household after a full day at work, and I do not blame my mother for a second that they were not on tap in hers, either.

My brother became so enamored with that film [West Side Story], that he started taking tap-dancing lessons, and I followed him and started tap dancing, and my mother and father started tap dancing - I was in a class with my family, tap dancing!

On February 7, 2.2 million Haitians went to the polls and exercised their constitutional right to select a leader. They went by foot, by tap tap and other forms of transportation, traveling hours and standing in line for almost a day to get to their polling places.

No one around me was obsessed with Fred Astaire except for me. It just snowballed, really. I started with tap lessons. When I didn't have tap shoes, I taped nickels on the bottom of my penny loafers.

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.

I grew up watching Gregory Hines banging out rhythms like drum beats, and Jimmy Slyde dancing these melodies, you know, bop-bah-be-do-bap, not just tap-tap-tap. Everyone else was dancing in monotone, but I could hear the hoofers in stereo, and they influenced me to have this musical approach towards tap.

Dancers can get to see almost everything now. When I used to go into companies to make a piece, the dancers had hardly ever seen my work. Now they can watch it on YouTube. It means they're much faster at picking up material.

I was a working-class kid in a middle-class environment. Fashion was my way of saying, 'You can tap me for this and tap me for that, but you can't deny I look good.'

Dancers, many dancers today can do so much technically. You can give them steps that are complicated, then more complicated, pyrotechnical - and they can execute these steps to perfection. But to do simple steps with a pure classical line, that is truly difficult.

For 20 years, I've been running an institute in Chennai where serious dancers from Kerala come with aspirations of becoming professional dancers.

I don't tap dance, and I don't think you can learn to tap dance in three weeks at my ripe old age.

I don't have many actors in my family, but I do have a Great Uncle that is a film-maker in Philadelphia, and my great-great-grandparents were Flamenco dancers in the 30's in New York, they were Spanish dancers.

They just tested the tap water in Los Angeles and they found traces of estrogen and antidepressants in the tap water. So it's nice to know my son's going to grow up and have huge breasts but it's not going to bother him that much.

I am realizing and accepting my role as a tap dancer in this world is not only to tap dance for the sake of performance, but through tap dance be able to share and spread a message and congregate with people I would not necessarily be with had it not been for dance.

There are many different styles of, and approaches to, tap. My own leans towards a more intellectual view: tap dancing not just for the sake of entertainment but to educate and spark emotion.

I booked my first national tour of a Broadway show right out of college. It was the tap show, '42nd Street.' I had only been tap dancing for three years when I booked that show.

When I was 12, I was doing competitive jazz, tap and ballet in Michigan. The studio put the best dancers together, and I joined that. We always did really, really well in local competitions.

I'm a tap dancer. Once you're a tap dancer, you're always a tap dancer. In 'After Midnight,' I get to dance, but I don't do a full tap number.

It's going to take a while before we see a real shift in the students and the dancers that are going into professional companies because it takes so many years of training, but I do think that there's a new crop of dancers, of minority dancers that are entering into the ballet world.

The Nicholas Brothers were the best tap-dancers. I'm not talking about their flash-dancing, I'm talking about tap-dancing. They were really saying something with their feet.

Dancers are a great breed of people. And they really want to dance so you don't have to beg them to work. However, dancers sometimes build walls around themselves because they are presenting themselves all the time: dancing is very much a confession.

It's important to get well-rounded right off the bat. A lot of experienced dancers can get pigeonholed into one thing. I've been hired for a lot of different gigs simply because I can do a lot of different things with different levels of dancers. And it's sad to me that some dancers don't do more.

I'm still trying to change the way people see black dancers that we can become delicate dancers, that we can be a ballerina.

In vocal choreography you had to give a lot of consideration to the fact that you were working with singers and not dancers. But you had to make singers look like they were dancers, and to make the movements as natural as possible, and there to be an association with the movement, uh, somewhat to what the lyric was saying.

I know that dancers, especially ballet dancers, can't do it forever.

I used to think I could save tap. But tap was here way before I was, and it's going to be here after I'm gone.

To me, this acquirement of nervous, physical, and emotional concentration is the one element possessed to the highest degree by the truly great dancers of the world. Its acquirement is the result of discipline, of energy in the deep sense. That is why there are so few great dancers.

Tap's foundation is jazz, just like hip-hop, so relating tap-dancing to rap is natural for me.

Some people seem to think that good dancers are born, but all the good dancers I have known are taught or trained.

Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.

Dancers are working their bodies just like a marathon runner would, and you have to eat to make it through a three-hour performance. Dancers put their bodies through incredible strain.

I've been dancing my entire life. Jazz, hip hop, ballet. And then there's tap dancing. I love to tap.

When World of Dance came around, what I really liked about it was it's from dancers for dancers. For me growing up as a dancer and becoming an actress, Jennifer Lopez really was this icon in that world to me.

Tap into what you don't want to say. Tap into that secret place, despite the agony, despite the personal pain, over and above the fatigue.

I will say a lot of dancers do such beautiful things for their body and then they smoke a cigarette. I've never been a smoker, but I realized after taking yoga . . . in ballet you're not encouraged to do a lot of breathing. I think in a weird way, a lot of dancers find relief in actually breathing.

I`m basically a hoofer, a tap dancer. I was always very good from the waist down, moving with the feet... I became what`s known as a total dancer, using the entire body in order to express what you want to express in tap dancing and line.

My idea for the Jamison Project was rather like a pickup company. The idea was to give the dancers a taste of the menu. Today, dancers need to try as many companies as possible without having a drop-dead loyalty to me or anyone else. They like to have the leeway to go their own way.

We were tap-dancers but we put more style into it, more bodywork, instead of just footwork.

The sound of tap is not 'clickety clickety tap tap,' this monotone thing. The sound of tap has depth. We want you to hear the different highs and lows, the bass, the trebles and the melodies, if you can.

I would love for dancers to be treated better and for dancers to have support, for dancers to have managers, agents. This is the only art form that does not have a proper support system.

I look for dancers who have all the technique in the world. But they must be dancers who are open-minded, who are willing to forget that they know anything. They also have to be gorgeous; they must have a clear image of themselves and strong personalities.

Compassion is like springwater under the ground. Your life is like a pipe that can tap into that underground spring. When you tap into it, water immediately comes up. So drive your pipe into the ground. Tap into the water of compassion.

In the earliest cultures any tie between the dancers is slight. In a higher level the choral dancers almost always touch one another and thus force themselves into the same stride and the same movement. The closer the contact, the stronger is the social character of the choral.

I don't ever use dancers, and when I do, it's literally, like, four break dancers.

There are people who take tap class, do a tap dance. And then there are people who know the dance, who know why they take tap classes. Who know why they do 20 shuffles, or 50 shuffles, before they go on.

Tap into people's emotions. We've all been put to sleep by a speaker who just gives the facts. You must tap into people's feelings.

Certain, when I was born, so long ago, Death drew the tap of life and let it flow; And ever since the tap has done its task, And now there's little but an empty cask.

Some dancers dream about successful careers...and some dancers wake up and do the hard work that's necessary to achieve them.

It fit into my scheme of things for many reasons. At the time it was true that male dancers were looked down upon, and it was true that a lot of the male dancers were effeminate. But what I was really trying to do was develop something that would be American.

Tap dancers find it very difficult to do anything other than tap if that is all they have been trained in because, again, it's a whole different ballgame that you're constantly working on - bent legs, loose ankles - which you cannot afford to do when you're doing jumps or anything else.

When you find real jazz on the radio dial, it comes in all static-y. It's just like tap dancers. You have to go uptown to find the real hoofers. We only come to midtown if we're called upon.

Talking with other artists is an incredible process. You engage with the work very differently...a nd different relationships between different works start to emerge. To tap into that energy-to tap into that moment-is great for me as an exercise.

It's all about you, Colie." She touched one finger to her temple, tap tap tap. "Believe in yourself up here and it will make you stronger than you could ever imagine." There is something infectious about confidence. And for that one moment, with my eyebrows burning and my eyes watering, I believed. "And good hair never hurt either.

For 'Chicago,' the dancers need to demonstrate an affinity for the Fosse style. Sometimes dancers come in with brilliant technique, but if the Fosse style isn't easy for them, or it's awkward for them, they won't be right for this show.