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Martha Graham

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Martha Graham
Age: 96 †
Born: 1894
Born: May 11
Died: 1991
Died: April 1
Artist
Ballet Dancer
Ballet Master
Choreographer
Costume Designer
Dancer
Music Pedagogue
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Martha Grehem
Fulfilled
Unique
Must

More quotes by Martha Graham

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It is difficult to see the great dance effects as they happen, to see them accurately, catch them fast in memory. It is even more difficult to verbalize them for critical discussion. The particular essence of a performance, its human sweep of articulate rhythm in space and in time has no specific terminology to describe it by.
Martha Graham
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Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart. The instrument through which the dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived ... the human body.
Martha Graham
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I never thought of myself as being a genius. I don't know what genius is. I think a far better expression is a retriever, a lovely strong golden retriever that brings things back from the past, or retrieves things from our common blood memory
Martha Graham
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Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully and with inevitability.
Martha Graham
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You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique, just because you feel. Anything feels - a leaf feels, a storm feels - what right have you to do that? You have to have speech, and it's a cultivated speech.
Martha Graham
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The spine is the tree of life. Respect it.
Martha Graham
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I don't think in art there is ever a precedent each moment is a new one and terrifying and threatening and bursting with hope.
Martha Graham
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Theater used to be a verb it used to be an act. But nowadays it is just a noun. It is a place.
Martha Graham
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We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.
Martha Graham
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Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.
Martha Graham
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The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.
Martha Graham
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I am certain that movement never lies. There is only one law of posture I have been able to discover - the perpendicular line connecting heaven and earth.
Martha Graham
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What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.
Martha Graham
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Sometimes it's blood memory... not the blood your mother and father gave you... but that which stretches back two or three thousand years.
Martha Graham
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There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.
Martha Graham
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I love words very much. I've always loved to talk, and I've always love words — the words that rest in your mouth, what words mean and how you taste them and so on. And for me the spoken word can be used almost as a gesture.
Martha Graham
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You give all your life to doing this one thing. It sounds grim, it sounds frightening - it isn't - it has a great gaiety at times and a great wonder.
Martha Graham
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The center of the stage is where I am.
Martha Graham
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I want to make people feel intensely alive. I'd rather have them against me than indifferent.
Martha Graham
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The body is shaped, disciplined, honored, and in time, trusted.
Martha Graham