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.
Interpretation
Dance is a fleeting art form that cannot be permanently captured like other art forms.
Twyla Tharp's quote highlights the unique nature of dance as an art form that stands apart from others such as writing, music, and visual arts. Unlike playwrights and composers who create lasting texts and scores, or painters and sculptors who produce tangible works that endure through time, dance is characterized by its transitory essence; it exists in the moment and then dissipates, making it both beautiful and elusive. This ephemerality underscores the unique experience of live performance and the emotional connection it fosters, even though it can't be preserved in the same way as other art forms.
In practice
In a lecture on the importance of live performance, one might cite this quote to illustrate the unique qualities of dance.
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.
A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.
A graphic designer, you know, who understands ideas and understands that ideas are what makes the world go round, could change the world with a magazine. If one talent could do it right now, and everybody would stop saying it's the death of magazines.
I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers.
On Creating β What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.
Each flitch, each board, each plank can have only one ideal use. The woodworker, applying a thousand skills, must find that ideal use and then shape the wood to realize its true potential.
I just make the music feel the way I want it to feel, and I don't put it out until I'm totally happy with it.
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