Twyla Tharp Quotes
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I'm not satisfied sitting in just the world of abstract work.
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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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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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The rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing.
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Desire is the first thing a modern dancer should have. Skill can be developed. But if you don't have desire as a modern dancer, forget it.
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Dance has never been a particularly easy life, and everybody knows that.
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'The Creative Habit' is basically about how you work alone, how you survive as a solitary artist. 'The Collaborative Habit' is obviously about surviving with other people.
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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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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 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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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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Dance is the most fundamental of all art forms.
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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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What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.
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I don't think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity.
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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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I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren.
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Dance is just like film in that it allows for thoughts in movement.
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This is the strange thing: Dancers don't age.
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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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The formal education that I received made little sense to me.
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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.
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I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching.
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I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.