Dance is the purest expression of every emotion, earthly and spiritual
The distance between me and Benny [Goodman], was that I was trying to play a musical thing, and Benny was trying to swing. Benny had great fingers; I'd never deny that. But listen to our two versions of 'Star Dust.' I was playing; he was swinging.
Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain.
Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?
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.
I describe things in terms of body movements. I dance a bit to describe what sort of movement it ought to make, and that's a good way of talking to musicians. Particularly bass players.
The world of dance is a natural world from which civilization has divorced many of us by making it appear remote - something reserved for the few who have a special talent.
My dance is a sacred poem in which each movement is a word and whose every word is underlined by music. The temple in which I dance can be vague or faithfully reproduced, for I am the temple.
When a poem might become a song, then certain parts are repeated and might become a refrain or a chorus, so they change in that way. But it's more the nature of the words and what they're saying that determines whether it's a poem or a song.
Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.
Anytime I switch to another instrument, I immediately turn it into another kind of drum so that I can understand it better.
When I would create a dance, I wouldn't have the luxury that ballet people do when they take a piece of music and impose a dance upon it. What we did in motion pictures was have a song and within that song try to elaborate. My usual method was to do what a writer does: get a plot.
Making dances is an act of progress; it is an act of growth, an act of music, an act of teaching, an act of celebration, an act of joy.
Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music
If you look at a dancer in silence, his or her body will be the music. If you turn the music on, that body will become an extension of what you're hearing.
