Dance Stage Quotes & Sayings

Souls dance undressed/ together/ and like loiterers/ on the fringes of a fair/ we ogle the unobtainable/ imagined mystery/ Yet away around on the far side/ like a stage door of a circus tent/ is a wide vent in the battlements/ where even elephants/ waltz thru
pg. 31// A Coney Island of the Mind — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

15 Step is about how if you have mental illness and try to dance you look very funny. Whenever you see me dancing on stage, I'm imitating the mentally ill. — Thom Yorke

There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something. — Mikhail Baryshnikov

Bono told me how to dance in high heels and he also told me about U2's Glastonbury performance and how everything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong, including him ripping his trousers on stage. I think he was lunging and his trousers ripped! He was telling me how he had to find a new way of performing that didn't involve moving. — Florence Welch

I'm the lady by day, and I'm Gaga by night. And I'm always going to be that way, because it's a testament to your discipline as a musician. I do like to drink, I like to get crazy, I like to go out with my friends, and I like to sing rock and roll. I used to go-go dance! And I like to be inspired by young artists, people like Millie who are outrageously hard, disciplined individuals. But at the end of the day I'm a classically trained pianist and I'm a singer, and that's what allows the girl that goes out at night to also go on stage with Tony Bennett at Lincoln Center. Because I know how to do it. — Lady Gaga

They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines."
"Maybe that's why it's hard to tell if we're living in a tragedy or a farce."
"We need more special effects and dance numbers. — Bill Watterson

The Church is both organism and organization - Woven together in a beautifully messy dance that stumbles across the stage of a fallen world. — Todd Stocker

The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage. — Robert Caro

Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot. — George Balanchine

Mannerism is not character, and affectation is the avowed enemy of grace. Every dancer ought to regard his laborious art as a link in the chain of beauty, as a useful ornament for the stage, and this, in turn, as an important element in the spiritual development of nations. — August Bournonville

The Rolling Stones were an inkling towards an appreciation of the unity of music, dance and words. Any of the black R&B people who had a stage show that involved dancing, music and words did the same thing, except that I thought Jagger's words were good, his music was good and his dancing was good. I spoke to him about Blake and tried to get him to sing [William] Blake's The Grey Monk, to use his words as lyrics. He didn't do it. In the end, I did it myself. — Allen Ginsberg

So many dancers rely on some sort of magic happening on the stage. They never, for various reasons, work full out in rehearsal. That's very uncreative. They don't discover the kinds of things that add up to a remarkable performance. — Benjamin Harkarvy

He can hum the music in his old man's quivering voice, but he prefers it in his head, where it lives on in violins and reedy winds. If he imagines it in rehearsal he can remember every step of his three-minute solo as if he had danced it only yesterday, but he knows, too, that one time, onstage in Berlin, he had not danced it as he had learned it; this much he knows but cannot recreate, could no recreate it even a moment after he had finished dancing it. While dancing he had felt blind to the stage and audience, deaf to the music. He had let his body do what it needed to do, free to expand and contract in space, to soar and spin. So, accordingly, when he tries to remember the way he danced it on stage, he cannot hear the music or feel his feet or get a sense of the audience. He is embryonic, momentarily cut off from the world around him. The three most important minutes of his life, the ones that determined his fate and future, are the three to which he cannot gain access, ever. — Evan Fallenberg

Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air. — Eva Ibbotson

The people at festivals are much more open to dance and just sing along. They come right up to the stage and they're very thankful. That's one thing I really appreciate about the yoga culture, that the people are very thankful. They come up to you as much as any fan would, but they express sincere gratitude and I appreciate that. — Brett Dennen

Dancing of late years has been degraded to the narrow limits and low professionalism of mere mechanical proficiency, associated with the most frivolous ... phases of the stage. But this day is fading ... We are turning our gaze inward, learning to seek there the divine sources of the dance, to the end that it may flower into new and more glorious forms of beauty and wealth — Ruth St. Denis

What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one's life, so that each work is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death.
I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on paper. — Jeremy Reed

Dress the part! Invent and pretend to your heart's content! Act, sing, and dance while everyone's watching! The world's a stage, remember? — Richelle E. Goodrich

Slippery stages were the terror of my life. — Fred Astaire

Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that don't. — Cormac McCarthy

Jim Henson's body was gone, and yet that powerful presence-that undefinable 'something' that compelled men to seek his appreciation and approval, and that women found somehow irresistible-would always remain. Anyone who had ever smiled as Ernie tried to play a rhyming game with Bert, or laughed as Kermit had chased Fozzie off the stage, arms flailing, had felt it. Anyone who had ever wished they could explore a Fraggle hole, save the world with a crystal shard, or dance with a charismatic goblin king had been touched by it. — Brian Jay Jones

I enjoy getting an artist at the beginning stages, and then I'm able to pull out something that is so pure and actually create their individual style. From how they pick up the microphone, to how to look on the stage, to their dance steps, to their talk, their opinions, to what they wear, so it really gets to be developed from the beginning. — Laurieann Gibson

About the time he threatened her nose with his finger, Peaseblossom lost her grip on the situation with the boys. The door crashed open, and three irate fairies launched themselves at the Stage Manager. Cobweb and Moth pelted him with sequins while Mustardseed rammed beads into his ears.
"Dance!" they commanded, and dance he did, hopping with impotent anger and pain from one foot to the other as he batted his meaty hands at them. — Lisa Mantchev

When you step from the wings onto the stage you go from total blackness to a blinding hot glare. After a moment you adjust, but there is that moment. like being inside lightning. — Meg Howrey

I absolutely love what I do, and I want to dance for as long as I can and feel good about what I'm putting out there on the stage. But my goal has always been to be a principal dancer with ABT. Before I knew that there'd never been a black woman that was always my goal. I wanted to dance "Odette-Odile" and Kitri in "Don Quixote" and Aurora in "Sleeping Beauty." So that's still my goal. But knowing that it's never been done before I think makes me fight even harder. — Misty Copeland

Every time I dance I have a high. I mean every time I danced, it was the whole world was the stage and I was in control of it and there was a form and a ritual and yet it was spontaneous and life didn't matter after that of before — Jacques D'Amboise

I will give you a little hint," Emma said with a wry smile. "A whore's trick, but a good one. It's a part that you're playing, like a grand actress on the stage. It isn't you. It has nothing to do with you. You're simply using your body in service to something necessary. You can smile and flirt and dance and pretend you're someone entirely different, and it won't matter. You, the real you, will still be safe inside. — Anne Stuart

Music and dance influence my style in a lot of ways. Sometimes I go off to work dressed up like I'm going to hit the stage and perform. — China Anne McClain

The audience roared and applauded again. A rush of actors exited the stage and filled the space around her. Shakespeare had already slipped away. She could see Daniel on the opposite wing of the stage.He towered over the other actors,regal and impossibly gorgeous.
It was her cue to walk onstage. This was the start of the party scene at Lord Wolsey's estate, where the king-Daniel-would perform an elaborate masque before taking Anne Boleyn's hand for the first time. They were supposed to dance and fall heavily in love.It was supposed to be the very beginning of a romance that changed everything.
The beginning.
But for Daniel,it wasn't the beginning at all.
For Lucinda,however, and for the character she was playing-it was love at first sight. Laying eyes on Daniel had felt like the first real thing ever to happen to Lucinda,just as it had felt for Luce at Sword & Cross. Her whole world had suddenly meant something in a way it never had before. — Lauren Kate

I felt that I didn't want to be in show business anymore. I felt that I wanted to be a farmer. I was milking cows and shoveling terrible stuff and working all day. By the end of the day, all I wanted was my tap shoes - I thought, 'What am I doing? I better get back where I belong on the stage where we work at night and can sleep late! — Gregory Hines

The world is captivated by Hollywood superstars, music artists, and sports personalities. Hollywood is portrayed as the epitome of beauty and fashion capital of the world. Whatever the actors and actresses are wearing dictate the fashion trends and lifestyle being followed by fans in a global scale.
The said movie and music characters never fail to amuse and amaze us with their clothes, shoes, bags, and hairstyles. The most popular shoes are the high heel booties studded with gems, gold, and anything sparkling in-between.
You certainly wonder how they can perform dance and stage stunts with these booties heels. Women look so attractive donning high heel booties. They get few extra inches in height and look stunning from head to toe.
If you are going for mall shopping or walking long distances, stay away from heeled bootiesas your feet will surely get hurt. However, if you are attending special occasions and corporate functions, heel bootiesis the perfect footwear. — John Rudy

My writing objective is to remove the stage and sing, dance, laugh and cry with the audience as one spirit. — Cathie Wright-Lewis

I can't really hear the audience applause when I'm on stage. I'm totally immersed in the piece. But sometimes I get a lot of it and wonder, "Now, why did they applaud here?" If it's a white crowd, they usually applaud because they think it's a pretty movement. If it's a black crowd, it's usually because they identify with the message. — Judith Jamison

Actors on stage, you can go from playing a myriad of roles, from Shakespeare to a Eugene O'Neil drama, and it's the norm. I came up in a world where you're supposed to be able to do three things very well. Act, sing, dance, paint, do something. The emphasis was on versatility. — Rocky Carroll

I felt I was standing on a stage many hours after the dance had ended, when the silence lay as heavily upon the empty theater as a blanket of snow. — Arthur Golden

It's about that applause I want to speak to you. I want you to remember that when you've done a little dance or a song or sketch, the applause which you get is not only because you yourself have done your best, but because each of those men is seeing in you someone he loves at home, and because of you is able to forget for a little while the unhappiness of not being in his home, and in some cases the great tragedy of not knowing what has happened to the children in his family. — Noel Streatfeild

To give you an idea of the size of the Earth, I will tell you that before the invention of electricity it was necessary to maintain, over the whole of six continents, a veritable army of 462, 511 lamplighters for the street lamps. Seen from a slight distance that would make a splendid spectacle. the movements of this army would be regulated like those of the ballet in the opera. First would come the turn of the lamplighters of New Zealand and Australia. Having set their lamps alight, these would go off to sleep. Next, the lamplighters of China and Siberia would enter for their steps in the dance, and then they too would be waved back into the wings. After that would come the turn of the lamplighters of Russia and the Indies; then those of Africa and Europe; then those of South America; then those of North America. And never would they make a mistake in the order of their entry upon the stage. It would be magnificent. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing. — Lincoln Kirstein

The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time ... Both space and time, as perceptible factors, disappear almost entirely in the dance illusion. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Dance really built my confidence on stage. I'm still a shy person. But I have a lot more confidence than I did when I started. — Leon Bridges

I'm living in New York, getting paid to do what I love. I get to boss people around, wear a fancy costume, dance with beautiful mermaids, and meet my fans every night at the stage door. I'm loving it. — Drew Seeley

For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark. — Stephen King

I don't use backing tapes when I am singing and dancing on stage. I can do cartwheels and sing. — Beyonce Knowles

I loved to dance in studios, but not necessarily on stage. What I loved was to sweat and to feel every single pore open up — Peter Martins

It was the best night of my life, getting to dance on stage with Madonna! — Amy Schumer

My years of ballet and jazz dance lessons didn't make me any more graceful - they just helped keep me from bumping into the furniture on stage. — Toni Tennille

I've never walked off stage and said, I shouldn't have done that. Because when you do what I do, you're like a fighter. You throw the right hand and say, That's what got me to this dance. You can't have doubt. If you have doubt, there's no show. — Don Rickles

As I bounced her on my knee, AJ undid the first three buttons on his shirt and ripped off his tie. "I'm ready to dance."
"You've been dancing the entire time we haven't been on stage." I replied.
"No, I mean I really want to dance."
"Ugh," I groaned. "You mean that mexican shit. — Katie Ashley

I left school the day I turned 16, the earliest day I legally could. Determined to follow a life on stage, preferably with some dance connection, I applied for and won a place at the local drama school. I was on my way. — Celia Imrie

I write things in my house, and hopefully there's a reader out there who enjoys it and has an experience with it, but that's very different than a performer on stage, where there's an immediate dance with the audience. It's incredibly powerful. — Stacey D'Erasmo

The society girl meets more dangers than the girl on the stage. There is more danger at a tango tea than in the theatre. The actor is less dangerous than the dancing master. — Lillian Russell

As long as there are dancers around who love to dance, there will be an Alvin Ailey American Dance Company. We miss him so much, but he's alive as soon as you see a dancer hit the stage. — Judith Jamison

Dance as if life is a work of art.
Dance as if life is a stage for a dance drama. — Debasish Mridha

I like the most provocative and most surprising partnerships on stage. Intensity and surprise. — Mikhail Baryshnikov

Within the holy circle of the stage, geometrical principles are used to organize physical energy so that the beauty of the human form reveals a web of drama and truth---that is the essence of dance as I have come to know it. — Gelsey Kirkland

I started dancing ballet when I was very young, so my background really is dance. But I remember loving the feeling of being on a stage and having a love for performing from a young age. — Caroline Sunshine

Life is the most beautiful dance on the most beautiful stage we call Earth. — Debasish Mridha

I would rather be on stage playing to 25 people with a band I love and the music I love than learning dance moves I don't want to do for 25,000 people. — Drake Bell

Acting for screen is very different from acting on stage, and then obviously when you dance ... everything is a physical embodiment. But the discipline is the same approach. You have to take both things seriously; nothing well-crafted is by mistake. — Amanda Schull

Your mind makes you dance like a monkey all the time ... Now you have to become stronger; you have to make the mind dance. Make it dance on the stage of mantra. For that, mediate and repeat mantra. — Swami Muktananda

I watch the beautiful performance with an ache in my chest.
Then, just when I can't stand the sadness anymore, a dancer floats out from the side of the stage. A dancer in ragged clothes, filthy and half starved. He's not even in ballet shoes. He's just barefoot as he glides out to take his place in the dance.
The other dancers turn to him, and it's clear that he is one of them. One of the lost ones. By the look on their faces, they weren't expecting him. This is not part of the practiced show. He must have seen them onstage and joined in.
Amazingly, the dance continues without a missed beat. The newcomer simply glides into place, and the final dancer who should have danced solo with her missing partner dances with the newcomer.
It is full of joy, and the ballerina actually laughs. Her voice is clear and high, and it lifts us all. — Susan Ee

Any earthly production would have been cancelled at the slightest suggestion of rain, but this was William's Stage - it was William's call - and if the children danced and the congregation remained transfixed, the show would go on. — Jake Vander Ark

My mother sent me to dance and drama classes when I was young, and then I got a stage role in 'Set To Partners' when I was 12, followed by Benjamin Britten's 'Let's Make An Opera.' — Shirley Eaton

It was so much more. You allowed your feelings to spill onto the stage in a way everyone in that room could relate to. Angela inspired it, perhaps, but the specifics you chose made a universal statement. That is the art of choreography. — Kathryn Craft

When you are on stage in front of an audience, you want to engage the entire crowd. If a thousand people are in the theater, you need to dance a thousand different ways, not one-thousandth of a way. — Suzanne Farrell

To come out here and play on Woodstock grounds, first year ever headlining on the main stage there's nothing more iconic. [Mysteryland] is one of those festivals that holds down the legacy of dance music it's been around for so many years. It's been part of what we do for so long. It kinda makes sense to bring the tradition over here to America. The festival grounds of Woodstock, that's pretty epic. — Steve Aoki

Love is a Dance set on the stage of Forgiveness and Grace. — Todd Stocker

What are we (I ask) but puppets in a show-box? Oh, omnipotent Destiny, pull our strings gently! Dance us mercifully off our moserable little stage! — Wilkie Collins

Back then he'd hammered out rags as rough as the planks that made up that schoolhouse stage. Over the years he's taken a saw and rasp to those tunes and smoothed them at the edges, sanded them slowly over time with finer and finer grit paper, and applied a polish to them. The songs are comfortable now. People can take their shoes off to dance without fear of a spike in the foot; they can lie back on that smooth and waxed wood to take a nap in the afternoon or make love all night long. Oliver sees himself as a carpenter, a craftsman putting notes and melodies together, fitting them when they will, stepping back to rest and reconsider when they won't. — Richard J. Alley

My thoughts are the dance of my consciousness on the stage of my mind. — Debasish Mridha

When you are on stage you are having an affair with three thousand people. — Gelsey Kirkland

The adult who puts his arm around his companion in the ballroom, and the child in the roadway, skipping in a round dance - they forget themselve, they dissolve the weight of earthly contact and the rigidity of daily existence. The soul slips into a twilight stage. — Curt Sachs

What brought me to the theater, no matter you're a Jew or a Russian or Armenian or Latvian, are suddenly illuminated by stage light and one beautiful image of dance. — Mikhail Baryshnikov

Dance is an ephemeral, a fleeting art. To describe this momentum, every movement on stage, in words is virtually impossible. — Mikhail Baryshnikov

Philosophy is the dance of conscience on a stage called the mind. — Debasish Mridha

When I connect to my soul, project it into another # character , and then bring it to the stage or to a film
that has always been for me the great joy of # acting . It's been as if my soul kind of leaps out of my body and is able to be free and dance around. — Kyra Sedgwick

He adored telling this story of near disaster and how he had triumphed, just as he relished the report of how he went on stage every night on tour in his The Cosmic Dance of Shiva, requiring all manner of spinal flexibilities and related actions, while his sacroiliac was painfully out of place. — Walter Terry

Lately I've been really into screaming a lot through delay [effects], having seven people on stage topless going crazy, stuff like that. Really in your face, but maybe more organic than choreographed dance moves. — Grimes

Sometimes I wish I was just a girl in an indie band. I could dance around on stage and it wouldn't be so much about me. — Lily Allen

My first mentor and inspiration was my Irish Dancing teacher Patricia Mulholland. She created her own form of dance known as Irish ballet and created stage productions of old Irish myths and legends. They were my first experiences on stage. She told my mum I was destined for the stage, and I took that as my cue. — Laura Donnelly

I worked a lot in Chicago's theater scene as a fight choreographer. And so I do have a lot of experience in stage combat and also in Kabuki dance and Kabuki theater. — Nick Offerman

It's all of a piece, I thought. It's an echo so close to perfect you can't tell which one is the living voice and which is the ghost-voice returning. For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark. Mike — Stephen King

I performed in public for the first time at three years old. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was on a big stage. There were probably three or four hundred people in the audience. We were doing this dance, this Kermit the Frog routine, all of us in our little green leotards. — Jaime Pressly

I've had some really, really wild fun nights in Vegas. I ended up on stage once with this band, The Digital Underground, doing the Humpty Dance. — Ashton Kutcher

Just because you've been on stage doesn't mean you can dance. — Rachel Stevens

People like the shows I do. I want to be real, to have fun, even when I dance on stage ... it's a buzz. — Estelle

Steven and I stood on the stage at the Boston Garden after the Stones had just played there and the stage was still up. We had been playing cards, maybe a high-school dance, to 400 or 500, maybe a thousand. We just stood on the stage and thought, 'Well,man,maybe someday.' In 4 years that was OUR stage. — Joe Perry

If I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction. I see it as a body. — Antony Tudor

No, dance is not a monster. The stage is monstrous, not in the negative sense but on the grandiose side. And dance is sacred as something emotionally strong happens. — Sylvie Guillem

When we teach a child to sing or play the flute, we teach her how to listen. When we teach her to draw, we teach her to see. When we teach a child to dance, we teach him about his body and about space, and when he acts on a stage, he learns about character and motivation. When we teach a child design, we reveal the geometry of the world. When we teach children about the folk and traditional arts and the great masterpieces of the world, we teach them to celebrate their roots and find their own place in history. — Jane Alexander

You could put me on a stage in front of 100 people, and I could do a tap dance, but one-on-one was really difficult for me. And it took me most of my life to learn how to work with that anxiety, to embrace and be comfortable with it. — Brie Larson

Even when the tree falls, it makes the soil fertile to give birth to life. So where is the question of death? You live in one form or another! The world is a stage for the wonderful dance of life. — Aruna Shenoy

I'm not going to be dancing with the stars at this stage in my life. But I want to dance and bop around, and I did, and I can. — Angela Lansbury

My sisters used to learn dance, and I used to stand behind them and dance. So my guruji suggested that I also learn, as I seemed interested. I started learning at the age of three and was always on stage for something or the other. My mother is proud of me, and clearly my artistic bent comes from her. — Madhuri Dixit

In the halls of heaven it was now dark enough for the Aurora Borealis sisters to begin their lively dance of the veils. With an enchanting play of colors they flitted light and quick about the great stage of the heavens, in fluttering golden dresses, their tumbling pearl necklaces scattering here and there in their wild caperings. — Sjon

Many times people can access that being stage more fully and more easily if at first you are actually doing something. If you run, or dance, or do something kind of vigorous, and let the energy release, then sometimes it's easier to sit or lie down and then feel at ease and rest and be quiet and move inside. — Shakti Gawain

Love is the dance of the spirit on a stage called heart with the songs of mind to satisfy our eternal desires to belong. — Debasish Mridha

You are a dancer in this great stage we call life. Your imagination is the writer and thoughts are the director of the dance drama. So unleash your thoughts to dramatize your dance. — Debasish Mridha

Hope is the dance of the spirit.
Mind is the stage and imagination is the music. — Debasish Mridha

Unpredictable action is movement's equivalent to a page-turner in literature. On stage, we have certain options to make our moves appear surprising or even shocking. One choice is to remove transitions. We try to construct motion hunks, hunks of action that could be missed if an audience member blinks. — Elizabeth Streb