I do believe that when dancing is right, the movement possesses a logic common to us all.
Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut...
There are as many forms of memory as there are ways of perceiving, and every one of them is worth mining for inspiration.
Every dance I make is a dive into this well of ancient memory.
I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand.
I thought I had to make an impact on history. I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission. Posterity deals with us however it sees fit. But I gave it 20 years of my best shot.
In those days, male dancers were a rarer breed than women. as they are still today, A good male dancer, one as strong as we were, was very difficult to come by if you couldn’t afford to pay them.
There’s this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything.
The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.
My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born, in Jay County, to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize, but when the war came she was married, had a family, so she started teaching.
I have always felt one of the things dance should do – its business being so clearly physical – is challenge the culture’s gender stereotypes.
Dance is the stepchild of the arts.
You can keep on chewing gum for ten hours, but after about a minute and a half you’ve got all the good out of it.
Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you. If you’re generous to someone, if you do something to help him out, you are in effect making him lucky. This is important. It’s like inviting yourself into a community of good fortune.
Without the little ideas, there are no big ideas.
My mother was a dominant force in my life. She had a very specific idea about education, which was: you should know everything about everything. It was quite simple. There was no exclusivity, and there really was no judgment.
It was not until I had graduated from college that I made a professional commitment to it. Frankly, I didn’t think it wise. I was my own interior parental force, and it’s very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.
You don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.
That’s what improvising is like for me. There’s no tollbooth between my impulse and my action.
I was valedictorian. Did I enjoy going to school? I hated it. It wasn’t a choice on my part, it was expected.