In life, stress happens when you resist what arises.
I think dancing is an emotional experience.
I use geometric and mathematical ideas to organize material, but those are tools. The purpose of the work is not to expose that at all, but to arrive at some kind of expressiveness.
If the simple positions of ballet are demonstrated straight on, they seem quite dull and lifeless, but when put on a diagonal, they begin to take on all kinds of possibilities.
I no longer need to have what I see as the surface of the dance so connected to the underlying structure.
"Light Over Water" is the longest piece I have ever composed. It is a landmark in my personal struggle to create large forms. I feel that it is by and large a formally successful work, though I was constrained to write a piece at least fifty minutes long, and there are some dead spots in the music where I think I was simply marking time. However, I think when the dance is in motion, the formal problem is nonexistent.
The diagonal gives a three-dimensional feeling to dancers that cannot be achieved when they are only front and back. On the diagonal, more movement is automatically visible.
I think the gender story will become less fraught with hard edges - and not that we'll have androgyny, but that men and women will move more fluidly into each other's domains.
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours-that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child.
In many Asian households, to not go on to higher education, that's like a big no-no. I know my parents' discouragement was for my own protection, and I'm really close to them now, but they didn't understand that there is value in this. That's because they didn't know.
. . . it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I wnt about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.