At the time I started in ballet they were dancing ‘The Spirit of Champagne’ on pointe, in Paris. I thought, ‘I don’t want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!
Repetition not for monotony but the ecstasy it induces.
It’s not my job to look beautiful. It’s my job to look interesting.
Pity is a corroding thing.
All things I do are in every woman. Every woman is Medea. Every woman is Jocasta. There comes a time when a woman is a mother to her husband. Clytemnestra is every woman when she kills.
The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body. I don’t leap and jump anymore. I look at young dancers, and I am envious, more aware of what glories the body contains. But sensitivity is not made dull by age.
When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it’s the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography.
Some of you are doomed to be artists.
I’d rather an audience like me than dislike me, but I’d rather they disliked me than be apathetic, because that is the kiss of death.
What I do must be done in the sunlight of awareness.
If I can’t dance, I don’t care if my dances are ever done again!
There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep.
If you feel depressed you shouldn’t go out on the street because it will show on your face and you’ll give it to others. Misery is a communicable disease.
I want to make people feel intensely alive. I’d rather have them against me than indifferent.
Nobody cares if you can’t dance well.
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 of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art.
Nothing is more revealing than movement. The body says what words cannot.
It takes at least five years of rigorous training to be spontaneous.
I never set out to create a technique. I started out on the floor to find myself, to find what the body could do, and what would give me satisfaction – emotionally, dramatically and bodily. But I did not ever dream of establishing a technique. I still can’t believe anything like that happened.
Dancing is very like poetry.