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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.
Twyla Tharp -
You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.
Twyla Tharp
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What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.
Twyla Tharp -
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.
Twyla Tharp -
Counterpoint is a component that gives real energy, and it is about optimism.
Twyla Tharp -
The only way to know the truth of a movement is to do it on your own body.
Twyla Tharp -
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.
Twyla Tharp -
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.
Twyla Tharp
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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.
Twyla Tharp -
Dance is the most fundamental of all art forms.
Twyla Tharp -
I'm not satisfied sitting in just the world of abstract work.
Twyla Tharp -
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.
Twyla Tharp -
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?'
Twyla Tharp -
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.
Twyla Tharp
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Dance is just like film in that it allows for thoughts in movement.
Twyla Tharp -
Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism.
Twyla Tharp -
In the not-for-profit world, there can be wastefulness because there's not the desperate urgency of when you're on a clock.
Twyla Tharp -
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!
Twyla Tharp -
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.
Twyla Tharp -
I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren.
Twyla Tharp
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The formal education that I received made little sense to me.
Twyla Tharp -
Dance should not just divide people into audience and performers. Everyone should be a participant, whether going to classes or attending special events or rehearsals.
Twyla Tharp -
Everyone has a talent. It's simply a question of good discipline, of the good fortune to have an education that meshes with that talent, and a lot of luck.
Twyla Tharp -
When I say I can see through clothes, sometimes I try to use it as an X-ray vision to look into the dancer and see who this dancer is right now, at this exact moment in time. I live inside them in a way.
Twyla Tharp