Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut. – Twyla Tharp
A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I’m beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things. – Twyla Tharp
What is music about? You can’t listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about. – Twyla Tharp
I realize that dancers have worked long and hard for standards. However, on occasion, I think that it’s good to examine one’s heart and ask why are we dancing. – Twyla Tharp
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. – Twyla Tharp
I have a sort of tactility about music. I go into record stores and just run my fingers over it, the spines. – Twyla Tharp
No artist is well served in thinking what will happen to their works. The best one can hope is that they’ll enter the mainstream, and people will pull bits and pieces from them. – Twyla Tharp
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
When I was a kid, the avant-garde to me was boring because it was just the flip side of being really successful. – Twyla Tharp
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me. – Twyla Tharp
My father always said, ‘I don’t care if you’re a ditch digger, as long as you’re the best ditch digger in the world.’ – Twyla Tharp
When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art. – Twyla Tharp
What I do remember is visualization of the sound of music, seeing bodies in movement in relation to how music sounded, because my mother practiced at the keyboard a lot and I also went to her lessons. As a two year old, three year old I remember seeing things in movement. – Twyla Tharp
You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas… when you actually do something physical. – Twyla Tharp
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
Dance should not just divide people into audience and performers. Everyone should be a participant, whether going to classes or attending special events or rehearsals. – Twyla Tharp
There’s the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it’s had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism. – Twyla Tharp
I’m not interested in seeing dance die. It’s not to my advantage. Nor is it to our culture’s advantage or anybody else’s. – Twyla Tharp
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
In terms of individuals who actually inspired me, very few of the academic people that I had access to had that power over me. Maybe it’s simply because I wasn’t that committed to geometry. – Twyla Tharp
Unfortunately, I think we’ve probably all had the experience that if we’re in a relationship where one of the partners is doing it ‘my’ way, that relationship is not going to survive. – Twyla Tharp