You know when you are an artist when you evoke an emotional response – whether its love or hate.  It's when you evoke no response that you have to worry.

 ~ Bobby Ibrahim Farrar

 

 

As soon as I hear music, something in me starts to vibrate.
~ Suzanne Farrell
 

 

Even though I am a professional, and I know what the steps are,

I don't quite know how I'm going to do them, because I haven't lived that moment yet.

I always feel very insecure and I get very excited.
~ Suzanne Farrell
 

 

I think it was important that I learned to love to dance eventually for its own sake, as opposed to wanting to be a ballerina.
~ Suzanne Farrell
 

 

I was very happy that I was as normal as possible before I went into serious dance.
~ Suzanne Farrell

 

 

It's a wonderful thing to be able to dance, to tell your body what you want it to do.
~ Suzanne Farrell
 

 

Plié is the first thing you learn
and the last thing you master.
~ Suzanne Farrell
 

 

It takes an athlete to dance,
but an artist to be a dancer.
~ Shanna La Fleur
 

 

Dancing was something
to be taken very seriously when engaged in
and otherwise put out of mind.
~ Dame Margot Fonteyn
 

 

Genius is another word for magic,
and the whole point of magic
is that it is inexplicable.
~ Dame Margot Fonteyn
 

 

Great artists are people who find ways to be themselves in their art.
Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.
~ Dame Margot Fonteyn
 

 I explained it when I danced it.
~ Dame Margot Fonteyn
 

 

Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the first time.
~ Dame Margot Fonteyn
 

 

The one important thing I have learnt over the years
is the difference between taking one's work seriously
and taking oneself seriously.
The first is imperative and the second disastrous.
~ Dame Margot Fonteyn

 

 

The mechanics of epaulement are what gives ballet its inner transitions.

~ William Forsythe

 

 

I think Balanchine and Robbins talk to God and when I call, he's out to lunch.
~ Bob Fosse

 

We dance round in a ring and suppose.

~ Robert Frost

 

 

Live a balanced life – learn some and think some, and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

~ Robert Fulghum

 

 

There are three steps you have to complete
to become a professional dancer:
learn to dance, learn to perform
and learn how to cope with injuries.

~ D. Gere

 

 

 

I believe education in music, theater, dance, and the visual arts... is part of a well-rounded education and can provide so much joy, now and in the future.
~ Rudolph Giuliani, New York Mayor

 

 

Correction does much,
but encouragement does more.
Encouragement after censure
is as the sun after a shower.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 

 

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
~ Emma Goldman
  

 

A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths:
the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body
will no longer respond as you would wish.
After all, I choreographed for myself.
I never choreographed what I could not do.
I changed steps in Medea and other ballets to accommodate the change.
But I knew. And it haunted me.
I only wanted to dance.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

Dance is a song of the body.
Either of joy or pain.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal.
The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.
~ Martha Graham

 

 

Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful.
But the path to paradise of the achievement is not easier than any other.
There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep.
There are times of complete frustration, there are daily small deaths.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

Every dance is kind of a fever chart, a graph of the heart.
~ Martha Graham

 

 

Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

First we have to believe, and then we believe.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

Freedom to a dancer means discipline.
That is what technique is for – liberation.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave.

In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.
~ Martha Graham
 

     

It is difficult to see the great dance effects as they happen,
to see them accurately, catch them fast in memory.
It is even more difficult to verbalize them for critical discussion.
The particular essence of a performance, its human sweep
of articulate rhythm in space and in time
has no specific terminology to describe it by.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

It's what I always wanted to do:
to show the laughter, the fun – the joy of dance.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer.
 It takes ten years of handling the instrument,
 handling the material with which you are dealing,
 for you to know it completely.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

Learn by practice.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

Movement never lies:
it is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather
to all who can read it.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

No artist is ahead of his time. He is time;
the others are just behind the times.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.

Great dancers are not great because of their technique;
they are great because of their passion.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

Nothing is more revealing than movement.
~ Martha Graham
 

     

Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire.

Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

The body is a sacred garment.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

Theater is a verb before it is a noun...
~ Martha Graham

 

The next time you look into the mirror,
just look at the way the ears rest next to the head;
look at the way the hairline grows;
think of all the little bones in your wrist.
It is a miracle.
And the dance is a celebration of that miracle.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

The spine is the tree of life.  Respect it.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time,this expression is unique.
~ Martha Graham

 

 

Think of the magic of that foot...upon which your whole weight rests.

It’s a miracle and the dance…is a celebration of that miracle.

~ Martha Graham

 

 

To learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same.

~ Martha Graham

 

 

We learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same.

One becomes in some area an athlete of God.
~ Martha Graham

 

 

We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.
~ Martha Graham

 

 

 

Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.
~ Martha Graham
 

 

You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost.
~ Martha Graham

 

 

You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out.
~ Martha Graham

 

 

I just know that when I go on stage, I give everything I have,
not only my legs, not only my feet, not only my body.
I try to tell a story.
Sometimes I'm able to cry because I feel like it.
Sometimes I'm able to love because I feel like it.
~ Sylvie Guillem
 

 

Technical perfection is insufficient.
It is an orphan without the true soul of the dancer.
~ Sylvie Guillem

 

 

I’m very excited about dance and love it with a deep passion.

I also struggle, tire and become discouraged.

But what has always revived me... has been the rebirth of energy each time the creative process is awakened and artistic activity begins to unfold – even in some infinitesimal measure.

~ Ann Halprin

 

 

To me, boxing is like a ballet,
except there's no music, no choreography,
and the dancers hit each other.
~ Jack Handey
 

 

To dance with a man is to concentrate a  twelvemonth's regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour.

To pass to courtship without acquaintance, to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road.

~ Thomas Hardy

 

 

The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.
~ Mata Hari

 

 

 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.
~ Benjamin Harkarvy

 

 

 

 

Learning to walk set you free.
Learning to dance gives you the greatest freedom of all:
 to express with your whole self the person you are.
~ Melissa Hayden
 

 

 

It is more important who they are as people
and only then is it important who they are as dancers.
~ Marcia Haydee
 

 

Aren't all ballets sexy?  I think they should be.
I can think of nothing more kinky
than a prince chasing a swan around all night.
~ Sir Robert Murray Helpman
 

     

I grew up with six brothers.
That's how I learned to dance – waiting for the bathroom.
~ Bob Hope

 

 

Dancing's just a conversation between two people.

~ Steven Rogers, "Hope Floats"
 

 

To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak

~ Hopi Indian Saying

 

 

Dance for yourself.
If someone else understands, good.

If not, then no matter – go right on doing what you love.
~ Louis Horst 
 

 

 

Nothing so clearly and inevitably reveals the inner man than movement and gesture.
It is quite possible, if one chooses, to conceal and dissimulate behind words
or paintings or statues or other forms of human expression,
but the moment you move you stand revealed, for good or ill, for what you are.
~ Doris Humphrey

 

 

Remember that dance has a dimension beyond the physical.

The body-as imperfect as it always is – is only part of the picture.

Your energy, the quality of your movement, your feeling about the world, your dance spirit – that is what we see under the lights.

~ Mary Ellen Hunt

 

 

The physical language of the body
is so much more powerful than words.
~ Bill Irwin
 

 

 People tend to look at dancers like we are
these little jewels, little cardboard cut-outs,
and yet we have blood and guts and go through hell.
~ Susan Jaffe
 

 

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing,
moving at different speeds.
A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
~ Clive James
 

 

Dance is about never-ending aspiration.

~ Judith Jamison

 

 

Dance is bigger than the physical body.
Think bigger than that.
When you extend your arm,
it doesn't stop at the end of your fingers,
because you're dancing bigger than that:
you're dancing spirit.
~ Judith Jamison
 

 

People come to see beauty,

and I dance to give it to them.

~ Judith Jamison

 

 

 'Tis not enough that ev'ry Stander-by
No glaring Errors in your Steps can 'spy;
The Dance and Music must so nicely meet,
Each Note must seem an Echo to your Feet;
A nameless Grace must in each Movement dwell,
Which words can ne'er express, nor Precepts tell; . . .
~ Soame Jenyns
 

     

The trained dancer must not only have grace and elegance,
but also the leap of an Olympic hurdler,
the balance of a tight-rope walker
and panther-like strength and agility.
~ Camilla Jessel
 

 

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must first learn to do with diligence.
~ Samuel Johnson
 

 

We are part of each other and part of something bigger than our own egos.

An artist should... bring into the world some vision. Dancers should ask,

"What is their work in the service of?"

~ Bill T. Jones

 

 

If you want to dance seriously, do.
You must think about it day and night,
dream about it – desire it.
~ Christa Justus
 

 

I'd studied dance in Chicago every summer and taught it all winter, and I was well rounded.

I wasn't worried about getting a job on Broadway.

In fact, I got one the first week.
~ Gene Kelly
 

 

I got started dancing because I knew it was one way to meet girls.
~ Gene Kelly
 

 

I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music
that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin.
So I evolved a style that certainly didn't catch on right away –
but I had some good mentors in New York who encouraged me.
~ Gene Kelly
 

 

When Ginger Rogers danced with Astaire,
it was the only time in the movies when you looked at the man, not the woman.
~ Gene Kelly

 

 

When it comes to the requirements for pleasing an audience, all the knowledge and instruction and apparatus in the world is worth less than one ounce of soul.

~ Ottawa Keyes

 

 

I danced with passion to spite the music.
~ Gelsey Kirkland
 

 

The dance goes on forever. So shall I. So shall we.

~ Gelsey Kirkland
 

 

When you are on stage
you are having an affair with three thousand people.
~ Gelsey Kirkland
 

 

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.

~ Lincoln Kirstein

 

 

Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist.

As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary -- are the stuff of stage dancing.

~ Lincoln Kirstein

 

 

Many dances leave me untouched, unmoved.
A dancer should be able to raise an arm and
make someone cry – in the way Isadora Duncan did.
It is a necessity for any art to move you.
~ Pauline Koner
 

 

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it.

That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.

~ Krishnamurti

 

 

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!

~ Jiri Kylian
 

 

He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth,
he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May.
~ William Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor
 

 

She is your treasure, she must have a husband;
 I must dance barefoot on her wedding day . . .

~ William Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew
 

 

There was a star danced, and under that was I born.

~ William Shakespeare, “Much Ado About Nothing”

 

 

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.
~ Ted Shawn
 

     

I believe that dance communicates man's deepest, highest and most truly spiritual thoughts and emotions far better than words, spoken or written.
~ Ted Shawn

 

I wanted to see if the American man in plain brown pants and a bare torso could speak profound things.
~ Ted Shawn
 

 

Classical language and musicality are not
simply effete traditions belonging to the bygone upper classes.
The vocabulary and manner of classical ballet
express a high order of discipline and restraint,
a sense of harmony with forces larger and more lasting
than the individual.
~ Marsha B. Siegel
 

 

 

It's extremely arrogant and foolish to think you can ever outwit your audience.
~ Twyla Tharp
 

 

It's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.
~ Twyla Tharp
 

 

The only thing I fear more than change is no change.
~ Twyla Tharp
 

 

This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider.

You have to be either hopelessly passionate, or very stupid.
~ Twyla Tharp
 

 

Usually kids who are talented have the brashness to think they can do anything, but they don't often get the chance to see how close they can come.
~ Twyla Tharp

 

What is modern about modern dance is its resistance to the past,
its response to the present, its constant redefining if the idea of dance.
~ Marcia B. Siegel

 

 

The way people move
is their autobiography in motion.
~ Gerry Spence

 

 

But oh, she dances such a way!
 No sun upon an Easter-day
 Is half so fine a sight
~ Sir John Suckling
 

 

Man must create - or destory.

~ David Suggs 
 

 

These sort of boobies think that people come to balls
to do nothing but dance;
whereas everyone knows that the real business of a ball
is either to look out for a wife,
to look after a wife,
or to look after somebody else's wife.
~ Robert Smith Surtees
 

 

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

 

 

I don't mind being listed alphabetically.

I do mind being treated alphabetically.
~ Maria Tallchief

 

 

Dancing was It. Dancing was what life was all about.

If you wanted to be a dancer, you didn't just want it, you felt chosen to be one...
~ Paul Taylor
 

 

For a dancer, to be able to perform well, most of his waking hours must be devoted to preparing for the holy white instant of performance.
~ Paul Taylor
 

     

I would like to make it clear from the start that these dances are primarily meant to be a kind of food for the eye.

If they evoke dramatic images and riddles, the key to their solution lies not so much in the brain, but in the senses and the eye of the spectator.
~ Paul Taylor

It's a religion, a monstrous itch, a huge and illogical church.

In my case, even before learning to dance,

I was positive I'd been ordained to it...
~ Paul Taylor
 

 

A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet.

I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.
~ Twyla Tharp
 

 

Twyla Tharp on creating “Brahms/Hande” with Jerome Robbins:
He basically made me crazy, because it would be like, you know,

I plan what I'm going to do, I do it, I'm ready to move on; he plans what he's going to do, he does it, he's ready to go back.

 

 

I also had a will that let me eliminate everything that stood in the way of my becoming the best dancer I could be.  By a gradual process... (I) had invested every bit of my dreams, my hopes, my energies in defining myself as a dancer.

~ Twyla Tharp

 

 

I always, somehow, knew that I was going to dance.

~ Twyla Tharp

 

 

I do everything I know how in a dance.
~ Twyla Tharp
 

 

I often say that in making dances I can make a world where I think things are done morally, done democratically, done honestly.
~ Twyla Tharp
 

 

I think that probably the moments of discovery do come from a place that is not totally organized. Order is something that we already know about.

Discoveries are in a place we don't already know about.
~ Twyla Tharp
 

 

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.
~ Twyla Tharp
 

 

I'm not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories.

Either something works, or it doesn't.
~ Twyla Tharp
 
 

 

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney
 Folk dance like a wave on the sea.
~ William Butler Yeats
 

 

And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.

~ William Butler Yeats
 

 

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
 How can we know the dancer from the dance?
~ William Butler Yeats
 

 

 On dancing on pointe:

Why don't they just get taller girls?
~ Henny Youngman
 

 

Dance, one of the oldest forms of artistic expression,
requires only the human body for its realization.
~ Igor Youskevitch

 

 

 

We're a machine and we have to be worked in the same way we have to be fed.
~ Twyla Tharp
 

 

You have to believe there's something at the other side.

And you have to have faith in yourself.

You have to think that you have the tools to accomplish it.
~ Twyla Tharp
 

 

Long experience has taught me that the crux of my fortunes is whether I can radiate good will toward my audience.

There is only one way to do it and that is to feel it.

You can fool the eyes and minds of the audience, but you cannot fool their hearts.

~ Howard Thurston

 

 

I would like to tell all dancers to forget themselves and the desire
for self display. They must become completely absorbed in the dance.
Even in a classical variation there should never be any thought
of a dancer doing a variation--he should become identified with it.
~ Anthony Tudor

 

 

If I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction.

I see it as a body.

~ Anthony Tudor

 

 

I am lost, and I rejoice in the openness I cannot decide where to go, so for now, I will dance where I am and be. There is no goal, no destination, just wilderness and life and being. I sing and dance and live in the wilderness, and I am home.

~ Tziporah

 

 

Whenever we dig down into the achievements of a creative artist,
we invariably trace them to the beginning of all beginnings: labour.
~ Galina Ulanova
 

 

Diaghilev was the first to notice good character dancers and that sort of thing.
~ Ninette de Valois

 

 

First of all, the most important, that is to learn everything good that has survived from other times, and carefully to watch the bad - and throw it out.
~ Ninette de Valois

 

 

Nothing is done easily, you first have the thing, then the thing has a success, then all sorts of difficulties arise through the success.
~ Ninette de Valois

 

 

We are developing the other parts, and we can't give quite all our attention to the upper part, but soon the lower parts will be developed, and the upper part and the lower part will become partners, that will be wonderful.
~ Ninette de Valois

 

 

You can't dance until you've learnt steps, the things your feet can do.
~ Ninette de Valois

 

 

You never advance without losing something en passant... you lose it because you're paying so much attention to the new thing.
~ Ninette de Valois

 

 

Whoever has seen the masked at a ball
dance amicably together,
and take hold of hands without knowing each other,
leaving the next moment to meet no more,
can form an idea of the world.
~ Vauvenargues

 

 

What's so wonderful about ballet is that it's mind-driven physicality.

It's almost a Greek ideal of body, mind, and form.

~ Edward Villella

 

 

Dancing is an art because it is subject to rules.
~ Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire
 

 

Let us read and let us dance –
two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.
~ Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire
 

 

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

~ Kurt Vonnegut

 

 

Try to be fearless…
fear can inhibit you and keep you from a life.
~ Miranda Weese

 

 

I dance with the dancers.

~ Walt Whitman

 

 

Strong and convincing art has never arisen from theories.
~ Mary Wigman
 

 

Ballet: men wearing pants so tight that you can tell what religion they are.
~ Robin Williams

 

 

Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance.
~ Oprah Winfrey

 

 

I'm dancing to the music of the madness inside me.
~ George C. Wolfe