Twyla Tharp
In dreams, anything can be anything, and everybody can do. We can fly, we can turn upside down, we can transform into anything.Collection: Dreams
There's the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it's had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism.Collection: Romantic
I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.Collection: Humor
Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.Collection: Best
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.Collection: Art
Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.Collection: Failure
I feel I can handle the architecture of dance as well as anybody.Collection: Architecture
What we want from modern dance is courage and audacity.Collection: Courage
After so many years, I've learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That's why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves.
Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That's the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart.
Dance should not just divide people into audience and performers. Everyone should be a participant, whether going to classes or attending special events or rehearsals.
I have a sort of tactility about music. I go into record stores and just run my fingers over it, the spines.
Let me put it this way: I would like to direct a successful film. An unsuccessful film I would not like to direct. Films are very difficult.
To make real change, you have to be well anchored - not only in the belief that it can be done, but also in some pretty real ways about who you are and what you can do.
When I started making dances in the '60s, narrative dance was sort of off the radar screen. What was important at the time in the avant-garde was minimalism.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
There is obviously a power and a truth in action that doesn't lie, which words easily can do.
I don't hate language. I have my own language, but I also enjoy the English language. Obviously, you don't read a lot of literature and not care about language.
There are very few critics who have historical context or authority.
I always find that the best collaborations are when you work with people that know what they're doing, and you leave them alone to do it.
I don't judge. Judgment is not my business. Existing is my business.
Schubert had arguably the same melodic gift as Mozart, but even less support. He didn't have the early exposure, never got to travel anywhere, and yet generated and amassed a body of work that grew and developed and is very profound.
The artist doesn't really think about consequences - he or she does the work, stands back and looks at and thinks, 'Hmm, that could have worked better like this.' But as a person who needs to sell tickets to do the next work, one needs to analyze how it does or does not hit its mark.
When I was a kid, the avant-garde to me was boring because it was just the flip side of being really successful.
Kids should be encouraged to compete.
My father always said, 'I don't care if you're a ditch digger, as long as you're the best ditch digger in the world.'
Art is an investigation.
Creativity is not just for artists. It's for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it's for engineers trying to solve a problem; it's for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.
The only way to know the truth of a movement is to do it on your own body.
Critics should be looked at simply as commentators.
To survive, you've got to keep wheedling your way. You can't just sit there and fight against odds when it's not going to work. You have to turn a corner, dig a hole, go through a tunnel - and find a way to keep moving.
'Bum's Rush' is a piece about timing, and everything that's in the piece needs to be with the piece. If people are missing, or marking, or unable to use their voices, the impulses that prompt the action are lost, and its logic crumbles.
I see dance as glue for a community.
You either entertain an audience or you don't.
I do at least 75 push-ups a day.
This is the strange thing: Dancers don't age.
You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.
I had always seen myself as a star; I wanted to be a galaxy.
Dance is just like film in that it allows for thoughts in movement.
It's always a problem, getting the curtain in at the end of the first act; having enough of a resolve so that you can bring the curtain in and then opening the show a second time is a little bizarre as a tradition. I've always preferred to go straight through.
Any comic is a tragic soul. Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive. Particularly if one has been in the process of separating off the emotions, it's one place you can process them.
The necessity to constantly turn in an excellent performance, to be absolutely wedded to this dedication and this ideal means that as a child you're going to pay for it personally.
When I say I can see through clothes, sometimes I try to use it as an X-ray vision to look into the dancer and see who this dancer is right now, at this exact moment in time. I live inside them in a way.
What I do remember is visualization of the sound of music, seeing bodies in movement in relation to how music sounded, because my mother practiced at the keyboard a lot and I also went to her lessons. As a two year old, three year old I remember seeing things in movement.
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.
I think that anyone who's pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It's a luxury.
It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.
When I look at the people who are the guiding figures in modern dance, I think, 'This does not look to me like the way I want to spend my days.'
I'm not interested in seeing dance die. It's not to my advantage. Nor is it to our culture's advantage or anybody else's.
Counterpoint is a component that gives real energy, and it is about optimism.