Choreographers Quotes

It's like a dance, to choreograph a fight is like a dance. It's very specific. You have to carefully plan it out. Because if someone gets hurt, then we didn't do our job, someone screwed up. The fight choreographers and the actors involved, we messed up somewhere.

You get used to working with one choreographer. You kind of get stuck in that vein and you work your way out of it, picking up someone else's style, their flavor. It takes a bit of time.

I'm heavily involved in the creative with choreographer Christopher Scott. I go to rehearsals with 'Glee' and then practice with LXD till about midnight.

I have maintained a low profile throughout my career but have always done things in my own unique way, be it dancing or dressing up. On the dance floor, I had my own unique steps and often had to lead my choreographer.

Some things need to be a song. Some things need to be a play. Some things need to be a painting. Some things need to be-though I'd never be a choreographer-some things might ought to be a dance [laughs]. I've found that exploring an idea in different ways, it gives you different opportunities.

We are just at the studio, me and my choreographers, we are spending like 30 nights and we are thinking, what is my next dance move? Because in Korea there are huge expectations about my dancing. So it was a lot of pressure.

Good choreography fuses eye, ear and mind.

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.

Choreography is simpler than you think. Just go and do, and don't think so much about it. Just make something interesting.

I worked a lot in Chicago's theater scene as a fight choreographer. And so I do have a lot of experience in stage combat and also in Kabuki dance and Kabuki theater.

Action choreographer is like talking. When you talk, you have a rhythm. When you act, you have a rhythm. When you're moving your body, you have a rhythm. So as an actor, as a choreographer, the objective is trying to blend everything in - into - ultimately back into that character.

Making dances is an act of progress; it is an act of growth, an act of music, an act of teaching, an act of celebration, an act of joy.

First of all, the most important, that is to learn everything good that has survived from other times, and carefully to watch the bad - and throw it out.

As a dancer I had worked with really hard choreographers, Jerome Robbins being the toughest. And you learned what it is to hit against a brick wall. And you learned pretty quickly to go around the wall or say, "I can't take this job."

I never danced a step in my life so naturally. My first motion picture was a musical, and Bob Fosse was the choreographer. I didn't exactly dance for Fosse, I just did the best that I could to do what he taught us to do.

GRINNING, DUCKING MY HEAD FOR BALANCE, I START TO SPIN WILDLY AS I CAN.  THAT IS MY FAVORITE DANCE, BECAUSE IT CONTAINS A SECRET.  THE FASTER I TWIRL, THE MORE I AM STILL  INSIDE.  MY DANCE IS ALL MOTION WITHOUT,  ALL SILENCE WITHIN.  AS MUCH AS I LOVE TO MAKE MUSIC, IT'S THE UNHEARD MUSIC THAT NEVER DIES.  AND SILENCE IS MY REAL DANCE, THOUGH IT NEVER MOVES.  IT STANDS ASIDE, MY CHOREOGRAPHER OF GRACE, AND BLESSES EACH FINGER AND TOE.

When a dancer comes onstage, he is not just a blank slate that the choreographer has written on.  Behind him he has all the decisions he has made in life. Each time, he has chosen, and in what he is onstage, you see the result of those choices.  You are looking at the person he is, and the person who, at this point, he cannot help but be  Exceptional dancers, in my experience, are also exceptional people, people with an attitude toward life, a kind of quest, and an internal quality.  They know who they are, and they show this to you, willingly.

Hardly any generation wants to take the whole of the last generation, it just wants to take its best bits.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.

For most of human history, we could only watch, like bystanders, the beautiful dance of Nature. But today, we are on the cusp of an epoch-making transition, from being passive observers of Nature to being active choreographers of Nature. The Age of Discovery in science is coming to a close, opening up an Age of Mastery.

Dancing was always part of my culture growing up in Barbados. When I shot my 1st video I worked really hard with my choreographer to perfect the routines.

I was a protege; by the age of 10, I was studying with ballet choreographer Anthony Tudor in a class of adults.

I think Balanchine and Robbins talk to God and when I call, he's out to lunch.

When I miss class for one day, I know it. When I miss class for two days, my teacher knows it. When I miss class for three days, the audience knows it.

God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it - from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do.

Dance every performance as if it were your last.

Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

I feel such a difference between a philologist/linguist and a linguaphile as, say, a choreographer and a ballerina.

I'm a choreographer and I love watching 'The Bachelorette.'

Stay hungry to become the best that you can be. Never be satisfied with the level of artistry you've attained. You can always be better.

If you dance with your heart, your body will follow.

Strong and convincing art has never arisen from theories.

You had to give, uh, a lot of consideration to the fact that, uh, the artist had to come back into the mike area and start singing, especially the background singers, you know. And you had to make sure they had a couple of bars of music in order to catch their breath. And uh, in many cases a lot of choreographers didn't give that, uh, the proper thought.

Movement should be approached like life - with enthusiasm, joy and gratitude - for movement is life, and life is movement, and we get out of it what we put into it.

You are the only one of you. From the beginning of time till the end of this world to the end of eternity. There's only one of you ever created. Ev-er. You are the only you. That's pretty powerful. So why on earth would you want to look like anybody else, dress like anyone else, dance like anyone else, be someone else, when you are a legend in your own right?

The choreographer cannot deliberately make a ballet to appeal to an audience, he has to start from personal inspirations. He has to trust the ballet, to let it stand on its own strengths or fall on its weaknesses. If it reaches the audience, then he is lucky that round!

I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt the approaching death. I could not bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb.

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. This is broadly true. But Heaven has the best choreographers

Mia Michaels is to my mind one of the most interesting choreographers alive right now and my colleague and my friend from So You Think (You Can Dance).

Animals cannot speak, but can you and I not speak for them and represent them? Let us all feel their silent cry of agony and let us all help that cry to be heard in the world.

Afro-Caribbean influences are in me as a creative being the same way Spanish influences were in Picasso's work. I think the notion of labels - "black dancer, black choreographer" -is a ploy to divide and conquer, and to limit.

Dance training can't be separate from life training. Everything that comes into our lives is training. The qualities we admire in great dancing are the same qualities we admire in human beings: honesty, courage, fearlessness, generosity, wisdom, depth, compassion,and humanity.

More and more, I am pulled reluctantly towards a strong horizontal current, which is a place where time is moving at such high velocity, that even our breath is forced to accelerate just in order for us humans to survive. And I have always believed, that it is in our slow exhalation, where the sense of this deep spiritual energy resides. In a world moving so fast, with the growth of technology and information, I am somehow inclined to move against this current, in search of what it might mean to be connected not just spiritually, but also vertically.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.

The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing.

I see dance being used as communication between body and soul, to express what it too deep to find for words.

If words were adequate to describe fully what the dance can do, there would be no reason for all the mighty muscular effort, the discomfort, the sweat and the splendors of that art.

Neo-Hoodoo is the 8 basic dances of 19th century New Orleans' Place Congo- the Calinda the Bamboula the Chacta the Babouille the Conjaille the Juba the Congo and the VooDoo- modernized into the Philly Dog, the Hully Gully, the Funky Chicken, the Popcorn, the Boogaloo and the dance of great American choreographer Buddy Bradley.