Twyla Tharp Quotes

You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important - in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language.

I kind of lost interest in the classical dance. I was very much interested in the modern choreography.

I was a Spanish dancer. I don't mean to put that down, because that was great, too, but nothing like the kind of dancing you had to do in 'West Side Story,' which was called jazz.

I got the part [in Into the Forest], I started taking ballet again to try to regain my strength back. I actually love that it was changed to Crystal Pite's modern dance. And I wouldn't even really call it modern dance because it feels like it's in its own genre.

Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work.

When you look at that period when Warhol and the Velvets and the Stones were doing things, it was this intersection of art and music. And then it went away.

Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable.

I love dancing; I adore salsa dancing and wish I could be in a Broadway chorus.

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

Obviously I always wanted to do a contemporary piece.

Modern dancing is old fashioned.

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

I started out as a dancer as a kid; I've been dancing since I was 4. So performing was always part of what I was.

While other girls swooned over The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, I worshipped Rudolf Nureyev and Isadora Duncan.

When I was growing up, all the art that touched me was lens-generated, like Gerhard Richter, or Polke, Rauschenberg, Warhol.

I started dancing when I was four years old and then was in class until I was about 20 years old or so, and then primarily was dancing just in shows that I was doing, but not really studying and training.

I wanted to give people - which is fairly bizarre considering my whole life is contemporary dance really - I wanted to give people a really fulfilling sense that they had seen a white classical ballet - in a very pure form.

As I made my way through 'On Line,' the austere, stridently dogmatic, sometimes revelatory exhibition 'about line' at MoMA, I found myself thinking, 'Someone please wake me when the seventies are over!' In the empire of curators, the sun never sets on the seventies. It is the undead decade.

Dance never really goes away; it just reforms and reinvents, and it's become more athletic with new connection to fitness and sport. Dance used to have this exclusivity, but not any more.

I've always had an innate ability to dance, but I'm not as spiffy as those cinema legends like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.

I was on Kanye's Yeezus tour as a dancer, but really, I was a Vanessa Beecroft model. I was one of the three 'dancers' who couldn't dance and was more of an accessory than an individual. Vanessa was pretty involved. Her style is about a lot of standing. It's very simple but haunting.

What interested me was dance - the way that it was constructed with time-space constructions, and that it was abstract. I always thought: 'Why couldn't theater be that way? Or an opera?'

I was always the kid down the street who got the other kids to put on a show. But it was only when I was 19, and discovered ballet and contemporary dance, that I got interested in the fact that you could have a whole evening of dance - rather than just waiting for the dancers in a musical.

I majored in dance in college.