Martha Graham - Dancer Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

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Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

Martha Graham
I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.

Martha Graham
You can be Eastern or Burmese or what have you, but the function of the body and the awareness of the body results in dance and you become a dancer, not just a human being.

Martha Graham
The body is shaped, disciplined, honoured, and in time, trusted. The movement becomes clean, precise, eloquent, truthful. Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it. This might be called the law of the dancer's life — the law which governs the outer aspects.

Martha Graham
People have asked me why I chose to be a dancer. I did not choose: I was chosen to be a dancer, and, with that, you live all your life.

Martha Graham
In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.

Martha Graham
I don't try to tell the dancers exactly what a dance means before they do it. I can correct it and tell them what they have done after they have done it, and what it means to me. But I don't say, "Be fearful here," "Be angry here," because I think that is intrusion.

Martha Graham
A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish. After all, I choreographed for myself. I never choreographed what I could not do. I changed steps in Medea and other ballets to accommodate the change. But I knew. And it haunted me. I only wanted to dance.

Martha Graham
Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.

Martha Graham
Dancers have more bones than most people and on the days when you work hard you are sure that you have somehow accumulated more bones than you started with.

Martha Graham