American Dancer Quotations

I've had this reoccurring dream for the last ten to fifteen years.

Because I like to pick up where I left off and continue from there.

I would just stand there puzzled, then realize this would be a great place to make a show.

Time is running out to permeate the piece.

By the end of it, you never know how it's going to turn out. Hopefully if I pick the right songs and put the right melodies on it and all the collaboration works out. it's a win-win situation.

I'm not after a closed system, I mean I'm after a complicated system in structure, but as far as watching it, I don't think that everything should be decided.

The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.

In this business, life is one long fund-raising effort.

We had maybe the greatest success of any company that I know of in Paris, and after two or three years I wanted to do this same number that we did for PBS, so we did it and Paris had always considered us their darlings.

No matter what you write or choreograph, you feel it's not enough.

The older I grow the more I see the influence of my family on my life. I didn't always see it. It was up to our parents to see that we had our education in a town that hadn't yet realized what racial prejudice was but actually knew and practiced it on occasion.

You know, this isn't theatre like it used to be.

Nothing personal; I just don't have people over.

Aside from a few master teachers that we have had over the years, this has been a completely local talent development. But people have started to come now from Chicago, we have a number of students from Chicago and different places of the country and even in the world.

When we were first together, he said, Nobody's ever called me Darling. I said, I can't believe that - I could just cry thinking about it.

I wouldn't mind even if it's the only thing people remember me for. It was a privilege just to be there and to contribute to something so wonderful.

It brought out in me the person whom I had the potential to become. I think that's why I loved it for its own sake, not to be a ballerina.

My mother was very interested in giving her daughters the advantage of music and dance, if we had an interest in it. My father was not.

I was in love with the West Indies and I liked the authenticity with which Trinidad was presented but the critics could have cared less.

We're all in the same room, so I want people to be involved with one another, but again you can't decide exactly to what extent that operates. It varies all the time and it depends on the show, it depends on the audience, it depends on everything.

Well let's see; I'm not obsessed with... I like Walt Disney except that you know, except for the horrible fascism. I love the art of it. I like a lot of things I don't agree with and that's one of them.

The only bad thing is that Smallville is shot in Vancouver, and Michael and I live in L.A. So sometimes I feel like a Ping-Pong ball.

The wonderful thing about life it that there will always be variables. You have to see them and be aware of them to know how to react to them.

Perhaps... I mean there are people who defend that it as an art. I don't. I like it but it's not an art form as far as I'm concerned, and yet it's a similar thing, once you can't land those jumps, you're disqualified - that precludes it from ever becoming a serious art form.

People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.

That piece has been choreographed so badly so many times. I'm loathe to do it but I may eventually because it is one of the seminal art works of the twentieth century.

Dance is the hidden language of the soul.

I'd say that anyone who is going to start a minority program to try to think in terms of a big library and some small kind of museum.

And I think it was important that I learned to love to dance eventually for its own sake, as opposed to wanting to be a ballerina.