By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.
If you only do what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you won’t fail. You’ll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that’s failure by erosion.
When you’re in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.
Our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.
You don’t get into the mood to create – it’s discipline.
Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
More often than not I’ve found, a rut is a consequence of sticking to tried and tested methods that don’t take into account how you or the world has changed.
Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.
I think that anyone who’s pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It’s a luxury.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that’s both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Art is an investigation.
If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.
Life is about moving, it’s about change. And when things stop doing that they’re dead.
The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.
In dreams, anything can be anything, and everybody can do. We can fly, we can turn upside down, we can transform into anything.
I walk into a large white room. It’s a dance studio in midtown Manhattan. The room is clean, virtually spotless if you don’t count the thousands of skid marks and footprints left there by dancers rehearsing. Other than the mirrors, the boom box, the skid marks, and me, the room is empty.
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.
Dancing is like bank robbery, it takes split-second timing.
Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism.