I believe that we learn by practice… it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit.
MARTHA GRAHAMThe body is a sacred garment. It’s your first and last garment; it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honor.
More Martha Graham Quotes
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We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.
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Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.
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Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body.
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Dancers are the messengers of the gods.
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Nothing is more revealing than movement.
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Discipline is liberation.
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In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength.
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The center of the stage is where I am.
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A dancer must listen to his body and pay homage to it. Behind the movement lies this terrible, driving passion, this necessity. I won’t settle for anything less.
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What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
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I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.
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Misery is a communicable disease.
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Age’ is the acceptance of a term of years. But maturity is the glory of years.
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Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.
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No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
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Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion.
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I believe one thing: that today is yesterday and tomorrow is today and you can’t stop.
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When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it’s the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography.
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No animal ever has an ugly body until it is domesticated. It is the same with the human body.
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What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.
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You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique, just because you feel. Anything feels – a leaf feels, a storm feels – what right have you to do that? You have to have speech, and it’s a cultivated speech.
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It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
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You will only get out of a dance class what you bring to it. Learn by practice.
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Our arms start from the back because they were once wings.
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Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.
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Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.
MARTHA GRAHAM