Quote

The content and thematic materials of dance is, of itself, like boxing. You play tennis and baseball. But boxing is not a sport you play: you stand up and do it.

Twyla Tharp

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Twyla Tharp
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: July 1
Ballet Dancer
Choreographer
Dancer
Writer
Portland
Indiana
Baseball
Materials
Dance
Stand
Thematic
Sports
Boxing
Play
Tennis
Like
Sport
Content

More quotes by Twyla Tharp

Image
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.
Twyla Tharp
Image
Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else's footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.
Twyla Tharp
Image
I’m much stronger than most women. Consequently, when I work with men, or when I’m partnered by men... We can actually go into kinds of movement that haven’t been available before, simply because I’ve strengthened myself as a woman, not because I’ve weakened him.
Twyla Tharp
Image
I've survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.
Twyla Tharp
Image
It's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.
Twyla Tharp
Image
By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.
Twyla Tharp
Image
I have not wanted to intimidate audiences. I have not wanted my dancing to be an elitist form. That doesn't mean I haven't wanted it to be excellent.
Twyla Tharp
Image
My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born, in Jay County, to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize, but when the war came she was married, had a family, so she started teaching.
Twyla Tharp
Image
I've always thought my creative life began the moment my mother called me Twyla.
Twyla Tharp
Image
Every dance I make is a dive into this well of ancient memory.
Twyla Tharp
Image
The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.
Twyla Tharp
Image
Never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it's important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative.
Twyla Tharp
Image
Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind's eye and what you can produce the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be. With absolute skill comes absolute confidence.
Twyla Tharp
Image
The formal education that I received made little sense to me.
Twyla Tharp
Image
Every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn't have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.
Twyla Tharp
Image
I've always found it necessity to strip away everything but the most fundamental ways to work - the rest is style.
Twyla Tharp
Image
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.
Twyla Tharp
Image
I do believe that when dancing is right, the movement possesses a logic common to us all.
Twyla Tharp
Image
I had received my first establishment grants in response to applications filed the year before. To the pages of baffling forms I had simply attached a handwritten note saying, 'I make dances, not applications. Send the money. Love, Twyla.
Twyla Tharp
Image
Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them. . . The one thing that creative souls around the world have in common is that they all have to practice to maintain their skills. Art is a vast democracy of habit.
Twyla Tharp