I'm a b-boy for life. I'm a dancer, I started with free style dancing and b-boying during the '80s and I always said to myself that when I get the chance to do my own thing, I will always have the b-boy element and the dance element because that's where I come from.
I've always been a dancer, and I will always be a dancer.
One of the things that made Bob so unique and wonderful is that he had a genuine style, like Balanchine, like de Mille.
A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish. After all, I choreographed for myself. I never choreographed what I could not do. I changed steps in Medea and other ballets to accommodate the change. But I knew. And it haunted me. I only wanted to dance.
When I was 16, I felt I might be left with some effeminacy because of all the dancing. I was so full of classical dance that I wanted to get away and do something else.
I like to say, 'Once a dancer, always a dancer.' In everything - the way you walk, the way you move, the way you talk, the way you sit - everything is just, you've been trained a certain way your whole life, so it's a bit muscle memory.
I always considered myself a dancer before anything else.
You can be Eastern or Burmese or what have you, but the function of the body and the awareness of the body results in dance and you become a dancer, not just a human being.
I was an international krumper at one time. I can't talk about it, really, because when you've lived for krump like I have, when you get a bit older and you move away from it, it's hard.
I would like to tell all dancers to forget themselves and the desire for self display. They must become completely absorbed in the dance. Even in a classical variation there should never be any thought of a dancer doing a variation--he should become identified with it.
I've trained in dance for most of my life, but ballet was the thing I left behind the earliest because they felt like I didn't have the right body for it, and I didn't like that and never felt like I could be a part of that dance structure.
I would have to challenge the term, modern dance. I don't really use that term in relation to my work. I simply think of it as dancing. I think of it as moving.
I like to dance, but I'm not a dancer.
I am thankful that 'Jhalak' made me a professional dancer now from just a 'barat' dancer.
You have to work with your body when you dance; you can't shy away from your physicality. For me, it's really linked to an incandescent way of accepting yourself and projecting. The dancing was at the core from the beginning.
Though films have established me as an actor, dance has given me an identity and a boost to my career, and I am thankful to God for that.
