Movement Vocabulary Quotes

So many people report to be contemporary dancers, and they're not. They are sort of jazz dancers that feel like they're throwing a bit of classical in there. I mean, a true contemporary dancer has got ballet as their base and classical ballet, and that is their base. And then they choose to extemporize on that and go into a contemporary world.

You learn to control every aspect of your muscles, your face, your toes, your fingernails. And that is how you tell a story, through movement.

Ballet is a riddle of means and ends.

We put too much on contemporary dancers. A lot of them cannot change styles; a lot of them can't do anything else other than run around the stage reaching and stretching in anguish to somebody off camera that I never understand who it is. But it's the teenage angst they have to live with.

If age someday grounds my feet and wilts my port de bras, what vestige of the old life will be left? The signs that I was a dancer will gradually fade like stripes on a beach towel. Even my knowledge of the art form, reaped in sweat over decades, could be lost over time.

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell... we can't dance synonyms.

It isn't easy to create a dance show, and it's different from choreographing for films... You need a lot of stamina and practice.

Being a Kathak dancer, learning Bharathanatyam was a challenge as it was not that subtle, when compared to my natural form of dance.

Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.

In theatre or in ballet, the ballerina always passes on what they know. It's a hands-on craft. You can't really learn the soul and the pathos of it if you just see a video. It has to be taught by someone who is in the know.

Ballet is a finite art - your body won't let you do it forever, so I wanted to do it while I could.

I like to think of myself as a physical actor.

I have such a respect and fascination for dance. I can be light as air or stay grounded. Dance is really another universe.

I was a dancer for long time. And you always hear that ballet is the core of dance, and that - once you have that down - you can do everything else. For me, jazz is like that for music.

Other dances are like languages, like French or Spanish, but my steps are slang, and slang is always changing.

My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.

My choreography is very classically based.

There are a lot of things that dancers can do that actors cannot and actors can do that dancers cannot.

You get used to working with one choreographer. You kind of get stuck in that vein and you work your way out of it, picking up someone else's style, their flavor. It takes a bit of time.