Zitat des Tages von Twyla Tharp:
A commission is an invitation to fall in love.
With each piece I've completed I have worked to make it intact, and each of them has been an equal high. It's like children. A mother refuses to pick out one as a favorite, and I can't do any better with the dances.
I have not wanted to intimidate audiences. I have not wanted my dancing to be an elitist form. That doesn't mean I haven't wanted it to be excellent.
I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.
It's very difficult for me to do fund raising for my own organization if I'm working for other companies because sponsors will say, 'Well, hey, man, if she's doing a ballet for Ballet Theatre, we'll give money to Ballet Theatre.'
I am fairly concise when I work and I work quickly because I think work is done better in a high gear than done our in a gear when everyone's exhausted. Get focused, do it!
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.
The only way to know the truth of a movement is to do it on your own body.
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.'
I learned very early that an audience would relax and look at things differently if they felt they could laugh with you from time to time. There's an energy that comes through the release of tension that is laughter.
I often say that in making dances I can make a world where I think things are done morally, done democratically, done honestly.
I don't think politicians should be allowed into power who are not familiar with their bodies, because that's where our bottom line is. And I know that they would make totally different decisions if they felt responsible simply for their own bodies.
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.
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.
Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody's present pops out of nowhere.
The rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing.
It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.
Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism.
I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching.
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.
There is obviously a power and a truth in action that doesn't lie, which words easily can do.
In the not-for-profit world, there can be wastefulness because there's not the desperate urgency of when you're on a clock.
Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that.
These days, I think we could all agree that having a just-friend is not a bad thing.
I don't mean this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart.
I'm not satisfied sitting in just the world of abstract work.
I never studied with Balanchine, but his work was very important to me.
You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.
In dreams, anything can be anything, and everybody can do. We can fly, we can turn upside down, we can transform into anything.
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.
Unfortunately, I think we've probably all had the experience that if we're in a relationship where one of the partners is doing it 'my' way, that relationship is not going to survive.
I think that anyone who's pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It's a luxury.
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.
We don't need to illustrate music; music illustrates itself.
Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background.
