Dance By Martha Graham Quotes & Sayings

It's what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance. — Martha Graham

I am a dancer. I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living ... In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an athlete of God. — 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

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open ... — 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

Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for
liberation. — Martha Graham

Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion. — Martha Graham

If I can't dance, I don't care if my dances are ever done again! — Martha Graham

Think of the magic of the foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests. It's a miracle and the dance is a celebration of that miracle. — 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

At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' on pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it! — 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

The reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living. — Martha Graham

It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely. — Martha Graham

Nobody cares if you can't dance well. — Martha Graham

I am certain that movement never lies. There is only one law of posture I have been able to discover - the perpendicular line connecting heaven and earth. — Martha Graham

Dance is the landscape of man's soul. — Martha Graham

Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground. — Martha Graham

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. — Martha Graham

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

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. — Martha Graham

There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. — Martha Graham

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 Graham

Dancing is a very living art. It is essentially of the moment, although a very old art. A dancer's art is lived while he is dancing. Nothing is left of his art except the pictures and the memories
when his dancing days are over. — Martha Graham

It is difficult to see the great dance effects as they happen, to see them accurately, catch them fast in memory. It is even more difficult to verbalize them for critical discussion. The particular essence of a performance, its human sweep of articulate rhythm in space and in time has no specific terminology to describe it by. — Martha Graham

You will only get out of a dance class what you bring to it. Learn by practice. — Martha Graham

Dance is the hidden language of the soul — Martha Graham

Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain. — Martha Graham

The world I'm interested in is the one where things are not named. — Martha Graham

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. — Martha Graham

Martha Graham, along with George Balanchine, is one of the two commanding figures in 20th-century American dance. For those much younger than I am, her genius as a performer will have to be taken on faith - and on the always-suspect evidence of film. What will last, if things go well, is her genius as a choreographer, as a woman of the theater. — Robert Gottlieb

You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out. — 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

I get up, I fall down, all the while I am dancing. — Martha Graham

My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement. — Martha Graham

I don't try to tell the dancers exactly what a dance means before they do it. — 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

Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it. — Martha Graham

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. — Martha Graham

I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act. — Louise Brooks

Modern dance isn't anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America. — Martha Graham

To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art. — Martha Graham

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired. — Martha Graham

I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen. — Martha Graham