Quotes by Women Choreographers

Isadora Duncan

Mary Wigman

Agrippina Vaganova

Twyla Tharp

Agnes de Mille

Ruth St. Denis

Elizabeth Streb

There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.

You don't have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.

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.

I see only the ideal. But no ideals have ever been fully successful on this earth.

Look at life all around; everything is growing, everything is moving forward. Therefore I recommend keeping in touch with life and with art.

Agrippina Vaganova

I want to dance always, to be good and not evil, and when it is all over not to have the feeling that I might have done better.

I am committed to using technology in my dances but not for the purpose of making a comment on technology, but rather to use it as a tool to express the human condition. I think that there are many disadvantages to using technology, it is expensive, difficult to set up and can steal the show by drawing too much attention away from the dance. I love the beauty and the simplicity of a warm body moving without frills, but I think technology is part of our common language now and to not create a relationship with it in dance seems like ignoring a vital tool for connection.

Birth is the beginning of physical life and death is the end of it. But the essential energy of existence (Da) continues beyond physical life. Both life and death simply exist and are two sides of the same coin of existence.

Sometimes at night I slipped into the studio and worked myself up into a rhythmic intoxication to come closer to the slowly rising character. I could feel how everything pointed toward a clearly defined dance figure. The richness of rhythmic ideas was overwhelming

Dance form is logical, but it is all in the realm of feeling, sensitivity and imagination...

When I'm taking my last breath, I want to look at how I used up the best of myself. How much did I sweat, push, pull, rip, fall, hit, crash, explode?...My dream is to be so well-used that in my last-half second, I just burst into dust.

Elizabeth Streb