My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of personal experience and physical embodiment in the creative process of choreography.
Twyla Tharp's quote highlights the integral role that her own body and personal experiences play in her artistry as a choreographer. Rather than relying solely on concepts or theories, she asserts that her physicality and lived experiences are essential to her creative expression, suggesting that true art emerges from an authentic connection between the artist and their medium.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of physical expression in dance, one could use this quote to illustrate the significance of personal experience.
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.
I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.
Most of my songs have names of people I've met or are dear to me. There are people who have privacy issues and about people knowing about their private life. But for me, I like to include few special names and few details about them to make the song very special to me.
All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.
They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.
There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.
Do you know what elegance is? It is not only what you're wearing. It is how you wear it. who you are inside.
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
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