Twyla Tharp Quotes
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In circuses, there is a lot of magic. Things become other things.
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I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
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Any comic is a tragic soul. Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive. Particularly if one has been in the process of separating off the emotions, it's one place you can process them.
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I don't judge. Judgment is not my business. Existing is my business.
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I find that dancers are only well trained in ballet these days.
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You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.
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Dance is the most fundamental of all art forms.
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I think that anyone who's pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It's a luxury.
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Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.
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At the ballet classes I took when I first came to New York, I would see great dancers like Cynthia Gregory and Lupe Serrano. I would look at them and study what they could do, and what I couldn't do. And then I'd think maybe they should try what I could do.
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In dreams, anything can be anything, and everybody can do. We can fly, we can turn upside down, we can transform into anything.
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My favorite audience is everybody. I worked in a drive-in theater from the time I was 8 years old until I went to college, and I'm accustomed to everybody can buy a ticket and everybody should be taken into account.
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With each piece I've completed I have worked to make it intact, and each of them has been an equal high. It's like children. A mother refuses to pick out one as a favorite, and I can't do any better with the dances.
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I've always believed that a dance evening energizes an audience, that an audience goes out feeling chemically stronger and more optimistic. This is what I understand about dance. And this is an important thing. We need this. Our culture needs it.
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Dance is just like film in that it allows for thoughts in movement.
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Counterpoint is a component that gives real energy, and it is about optimism.
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To survive, you've got to keep wheedling your way. You can't just sit there and fight against odds when it's not going to work. You have to turn a corner, dig a hole, go through a tunnel - and find a way to keep moving.
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Work is work; wherever I'm working, I do the best I can. If the actual dollars come from investors as opposed to taxpayers and patrons, what's the difference?
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This is the strange thing: Dancers don't age.
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The formal education that I received made little sense to me.
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I've always felt compelled to explore range, because, as far as I know, we're only here once. So let's see how much we can encompass.
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There is obviously a power and a truth in action that doesn't lie, which words easily can do.
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I am fairly concise when I work and I work quickly because I think work is done better in a high gear than done our in a gear when everyone's exhausted. Get focused, do it!
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I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand.