Twyla Tharp Quotes
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I think people want very much to simplify their lives enough so that they can control the things that make it possible to sleep at night.
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The only way to know the truth of a movement is to do it on your own body.
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Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that.
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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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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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When I started thinking seriously about learning the rules of narrative, I thought, 'You've learned the rules of dancing from the ballet; what's the matter with learning the laws of theater from the people who know how to do it?'
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When I started making dances in the '60s, narrative dance was sort of off the radar screen. What was important at the time in the avant-garde was minimalism.
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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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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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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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What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.
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Schubert had arguably the same melodic gift as Mozart, but even less support. He didn't have the early exposure, never got to travel anywhere, and yet generated and amassed a body of work that grew and developed and is very profound.
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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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I don't judge. Judgment is not my business. Existing is my business.
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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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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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Critics should be looked at simply as commentators.
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Dance is the most fundamental of all art forms.
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The formal education that I received made little sense to me.
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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 don't think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity.
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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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There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything.
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The rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing.