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That's what improvising is like for me. There's no tollbooth between my impulse and my action.

Twyla Tharp

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Twyla Tharp
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: July 1
Ballet Dancer
Choreographer
Dancer
Writer
Portland
Indiana
Like
Improvising
Impulse
Action

More quotes by Twyla Tharp

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I've always had to keep the walls in place, and the only way to do that is to keep yourself constantly occupied... From the time I was 8 years old, until I went to college, I worked... There was no social life.
Twyla Tharp
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I feel I can handle the architecture of dance as well as anybody.
Twyla Tharp
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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
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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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With each piece I've completed I have worked to make it intact, and each of them has been an equal high. It's like children. A mother refuses to pick out one as a favorite, and I can't do any better with the dances.
Twyla Tharp
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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.
Twyla Tharp
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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
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Creativity is an act of defiance.
Twyla Tharp
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Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.
Twyla Tharp
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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
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It's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.
Twyla Tharp
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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
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We're a machine and we have to be worked in the same way we have to be fed.
Twyla Tharp
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dance is simply the refinement of human movement - walking, running, and jumping. We are all experts. There should be no art form more accessible than dance, yet no art is more mystifying in the public imagination.
Twyla Tharp
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My greatest fear in working is always the end. Lately I have taken to tricking myself into finishing by leaving a hole in the middle somewhere, then stitching the two pieces together - the Union Pacific approach.
Twyla Tharp
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The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.
Twyla Tharp
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A dancer's life is all about repetition.
Twyla Tharp
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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!
Twyla Tharp
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I've always found it necessity to strip away everything but the most fundamental ways to work - the rest is style.
Twyla Tharp
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Dancing is like bank robbery, it takes split-second timing.
Twyla Tharp