Physical Storytelling Quotes

Dance is like life. It exists as you are flitting through it, and when it's over, it's done.

I do everything I know how in a dance.

I wiggle my shoulders, I shake my legs, I walk up and down the stage, I hop around on one foot. But I never bump and grind. Why, that's vulgar. I'd never do anything vulgar before an audience. My mother would never allow it.

The way people move is their autobiography in motion.

If professional wrestling did not exist, could you come up with this idea? Could you envision the popularity of huge men in tiny bathing suits, pretending to fight?

The world of dance is a charmed place. Some people like to inhabit it, others to behold it; either way it is rewarding.

Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart. The instrument through which the dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived ... the human body.

Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully and with inevitability.

A lot of people don't realize that wrestling is acting; you're playing a role and a part.

Ballet is a riddle of means and ends.

I worked with dance a lot, for each character - different ways I could move my body, different music. It's the most fun thing in the world, because I love each and every one of the characters and I'd be happy just to play one of them, but the fact that I get to play upwards of six, seven, eight or whatever, it's a total dream.

Honestly, I am so ignorant of how dance works that I can't even imagine a story that you would want to tell through movement.

Fight scenes are really more like dances than they are fights, because you're depending on your partner to do the right move at the right time. Yes, a tough person or somebody who knows what they're doing will look better in a fight scene, but it also has a lot to do with the other person.

I had danced when I was younger, until I was about 12, and I always idealized it, as most young girls do, as the most beautiful art. It's an expression without words.

If theater is ritual, then dance is too... It's as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears. When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.

I think physical comedy is an amazing asset because it tells a story that's more universal than just language and dialogue. I grew up watching Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. They're very powerful figures in my life.

In song and dance, man forgets how to walk and speak and is on the way into flying into the air, dancing... his very gestures express enchantment.

I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.

Dance is low on the totem pole of the arts, because you're not left with a painting... a book that will stay there, a score you can read.

Professional wrestling... is no different than a Broadway play except that in a Broadway play, actors are using dialogue to tell a story and establish their characters, while in WWE, they're using a physical dialogue to tell their story and build their characters. That's a very unique art; it really is.

Wrestling is a performance. Its entertainment, we [wrestlers] tell stories. We make our fans happy by telling stories but the long and short of it its pretty much the same thing as acting.

Storyless is not abstract. Two dancers on the stage are enough material for a story; for me, they are already a story in themselves

Man must speak, then sing, then dance. The speaking is the brain, the thinking man. The singing is the emotion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all.

You don't stop when a musical number comes up and do the number and then take up the scene where you left off. It all moves forward. Your work as an actor was part of your work as a dancer as well. It was dialogue through movement.

Everything in dancing is style, allusion, the essence of many thoughts and feelings. The abstraction of many moments.