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Twyla Tharp


American
July 1, 1941
Dancer
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Art is an investigation.


Twyla Tharp
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If a thing moves, it lives.


Twyla Tharp
Tags: Thing Lives Moves
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Critics should be looked at simply as commentators.


Twyla Tharp
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Judgment is not my business. Existing is my business.


Twyla Tharp
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You either entertain an audience or you don't.


Twyla Tharp
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There is a moral dimension, for me, in anything that's any good.


Twyla Tharp
Tags: Good Me Any
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The formal education that I received made little sense to me.


Twyla Tharp
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It's very important to work myself physically as hard as I can.


Twyla Tharp
Tags: Work Very Myself
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Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.


Twyla Tharp
Tags: Home Way Only
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I had always seen myself as a star; I wanted to be a galaxy.


Twyla Tharp
Tags: Always Had Myself
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I don't think that scheduling is uncreative. I think that structure is required for creativity.


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


Twyla Tharp
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I think that anyone who's pushed to do the very best that they can is privileged. It's a luxury.


Twyla Tharp
Tags: Best Think Very
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I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.


Twyla Tharp
Tags: Humor Think Get
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
Tags: Best You Always
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
Tags: Wanted Mean Form
Let me put it this way: I would like to direct a successful film. An unsuccessful film I would not like to direct. Films are very difficult.
Twyla Tharp
Tags: Me Like Very
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
Tags: Thing Those Kind
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
Tags: People Think Very
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
Tags: People Just Going
People often say to me, 'I don't know anything about dance.' I say, 'Stop. You got up this morning, and you're walking. You are an expert.'
Twyla Tharp
I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand.
Twyla Tharp
Tags: Had Every Little
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
Tags: Best Hope People
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
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
Tags: Power People Me
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
Tags: Good Women You
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
Tags: Good Best People
It was not until I had graduated from college that I made a professional commitment to it. Frankly, I didn't think it wise. I was my own interior parental force, and it's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.
Twyla Tharp
Tags: Think Very Had
Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background.
Twyla Tharp
Tags: Time Had Only
It's very difficult for me to do fund raising for my own organization if I'm working for other companies because sponsors will say, 'Well, hey, man, if she's doing a ballet for Ballet Theatre, we'll give money to Ballet Theatre.'
Twyla Tharp
Tags: Money Me Because
It's always a problem, getting the curtain in at the end of the first act; having enough of a resolve so that you can bring the curtain in and then opening the show a second time is a little bizarre as a tradition. I've always preferred to go straight through.
Twyla Tharp
Tags: Time You Always
At the ballet classes I took when I first came to New York, I would see great dancers like Cynthia Gregory and Lupe Serrano. I would look at them and study what they could do, and what I couldn't do. And then I'd think maybe they should try what I could do.
Twyla Tharp
Tags: Great Like Think