Twyla Tharp Quotes
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If I didn't believe in myself as a dancer, I wouldn't choreograph.
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My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.
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Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.
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My mother was a dominant force in my life. She had a very specific idea about education, which was: you should know everything about everything. It was quite simple. There was no exclusivity, and there really was no judgment.
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Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut.
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You either entertain an audience or you don't.
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Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
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My dancers expect me to deliver because my choreography represents their livelihood.
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I always find that the best collaborations are when you work with people that know what they're doing, and you leave them alone to do it.
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I think Tolstoy had an unbelievably complicated relationship with women.
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Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background.
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I'm obviously always interested in the dancer who's an athlete and vice versa. I expect dancers to be in condition like an athlete is and to challenge themselves in the same way, to the same physical degree.
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My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born, in Jay County, to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize, but when the war came she was married, had a family, so she started teaching.
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I've always found it necessity to strip away everything but the most fundamental ways to work - the rest is style.
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People often say to me, 'I don't know anything about dance.' I say, 'Stop. You got up this morning, and you're walking. You are an expert.'
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Judgment is not my business. Existing is my business.
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After so many years, I've learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That's why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves.
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I see dance as glue for a community.
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No artist is well served in thinking what will happen to their works. The best one can hope is that they'll enter the mainstream, and people will pull bits and pieces from them.
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Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
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I've survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.
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If a thing moves, it lives.
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It is extremely arrogant and very foolish to think that you can ever outwit your audience.
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Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.