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I have always felt one of the things dance should do - its business being so clearly physical - is challenge the culture's gender stereotypes.

Twyla Tharp

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Twyla Tharp
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: July 1
Ballet Dancer
Choreographer
Dancer
Writer
Portland
Indiana
Physical
Challenges
Culture
Stereotypes
Business
Stereotype
Felt
Gender
Always
Clearly
Things
Challenge
Dance

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In those days, male dancers were a rarer breed than women. as they are still today, A good male dancer, one as strong as we were, was very difficult to come by if you couldn't afford to pay them.
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A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet, that the two disciplines were totally separate, and if you did one, you couldn’t do the other. I’m beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.
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I walk into a large white room. It's a dance studio in midtown Manhattan. The room is clean, virtually spotless if you don’t count the thousands of skid marks and footprints left there by dancers rehearsing. Other than the mirrors, the boom box, the skid marks, and me, the room is empty.
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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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The necessity to constantly turn in an excellent performance, to be absolutely wedded to this dedication and this ideal means that as a child you're going to pay for it personally.
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When it all comes together, a creative life has the nourishing power we normally associate with food, love and faith.
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Art is an investigation.
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If you only do what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you won't fail. You'll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that's failure by erosion
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Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box
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There are as many forms of memory as there are ways of perceiving, and every one of them is worth mining for inspiration.
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The blank space can be humbling. But I've faced it my whole professional life. It's my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity.
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I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission, and that's what I set out to do.
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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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I don't think politicians should be allowed into power who are not familiar with their bodies, because that's where our bottom line is. And I know that they would make totally different decisions if they felt responsible simply for their own bodies.
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When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can't simulate in a sedentary position.
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One clear difference between art and commercial work is that commercial work is exploitive: the work may be high quality but the intention is to sell product or tickets. Art exists with or without ticket sales.
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In the end all collaborations are love stories.
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You can keep on chewing gum for ten hours, but after about a minute and a half you've got all the good out of it.
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I was fortunate to love men, so I could put them on stage and make roles for them, and move through their bodies in a way that they enjoy doing...
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