Choreographic Innovation Quotes

Balanchine is the number one influence for me. His work was really musically driven. He and Jerome Robbins were the ones who really showed me that dance could be about the inner relation between movement and music. When I was a student first seeing their work, I was like, 'Oh, this is a thing?'

The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.

I don't think there is anything new left for me in choreography.

The chance to work on Broadway choreography as opposed to having to deliver Broadway choreography can be two distinct things.

We know that Diana Vishneva is a phenomenon of strength and style, and she certainly has earned the right to stretch her talents as best she can.

There is a clearing for new creative thought in choreography. I don't feel intimidated; there is a lot I can do that is new or innovative or different.

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.

City Ballet remains a great company in perpetual artistic crisis.

I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission, and that's what I set out to do.

What we want from modern dance is courage and audacity.

I like graceful and elegant partnering that gives an illusion of ease instead of emphasizing difficulty. I don't want to make something 'contemporary' or 'trendy,' because ballet doesn't progress on one track: it can branch out in many directions, and as Balanchine showed, there's always room for pure classicism and more subtle alterations of it.

Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.