If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing
Dancing is a spiritual exercise in a physical form.
You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.
There's no thinking involved in my choreography. . . I don't work through images or ideas. I work through the body. . . If the dancer dances, which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance, everything is there. When I dance, it means: this is what I am doing.
The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too.
The only way to do it is to do it.
I'm not expressing anything. I'm presenting people moving.
Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube; there are some things one would rather have done than do.
Beckendorf closed eyes tight and brought his hand up to his watch. from that distance, the explosion shook the world. Heat seared the back of my head. The Princess Andromeda blew up from both sides, a massive fireball of green flame roiling into the dark sky, consuming everything. . . . I stared out the window into deep blue water. Beckendorf was supposed to go to college in the fall. He had a girlfriend, lots of friends, his whole life ahead of him. He couldn't be gone.
Out here, it's just you and the ball.
We have to let nature put what's left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.