Dancing - Dance Quotes

Ireland is a land of poets and legends, of dreamers and rebels. All of these have music woven through and around them. Tunes for dancing or for weeping, for battle or for love.

I studied dancing from the time I was a kid, but I was pushed into it by my mother. My brothers and I had to fight our way to and from dancing school.

In the 1930s there was this tendency in Hollywood to portray everyone as rich. Even if they were doing a poor man’s dance, they were all so nicely clothed, gowned, coiffured. That’s why I decided to wear white socks, loafers, T-shirts, and blue jeans.

The greatest of all time had to be Gene Kelly, man. Gene Kelly, because he’s a guy’s guy. I love Fred Astaire, but Fred Astaire was so smooth, and it was great. He was so classy. But Gene Kelly — he could be like somebody’s dad, who just decided to get up off the couch […]

Having grown up on the South Side of Chicago going to public schools, having been a medical doctor, having worked in Cambodian refugee camps as well as being an engineer as well as being someone who was very versed in dance and the arts — yes, I’m supposed to bring those perspectives to bear on […]

I’d say that “My Way” was very significant for my era of artists and art history and reminding people that even though hip-hop mattered, R&B did as well, because I do think that it became more about the opulence and the lifestyle more so than the dance and the entertainment. I can literally remember a time […]

Well, you know, one day you wake up, and you realize that you’re 75, and you go, Where did the time go? It’s a shock to the brain. because my spirit, my inner being, still wants to do the things that I used to do, but my body says, No, you won’t. You will not […]

You give all your life to doing this one thing. It sounds grim, it sounds frightening – it isn’t – it has a great gaity at times and a great wonder.

To me, this acquirement of nervous, physical, and emotional concentration is the one element possessed to the highest degree by the truly great dancers of the world. Its acquirement is the result of discipline, of energy in the deep sense. That is why there are so few great dancers.

The dance is a poem of which each movement is a world.