Martha Graham Dance Quotes

#1. I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.

Louise Brooks

#2. 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

#3. 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

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

Martha Graham

#5. Dancing is very like poetry.

Martha Graham

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

Martha Graham

#7. 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

#8. I feel that the essence of dance is the expression of man
the landscape of his soul. I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human can be.

Martha Graham

#9. Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.

Martha Graham

#10. 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

#11. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.

Martha Graham

#12. Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for
liberation.

Martha Graham

#13. Dance is the landscape of man's soul.

Martha Graham

#14. To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art.

Martha Graham

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. You don't pick dance. Dance picks you.

Martha Graham

#18. Nobody cares if you can't dance well.

Martha Graham

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. Our arms start from the back because they were once wings.

Martha Graham

#23. I get up, I fall down, all the while I am dancing.

Martha Graham

#24. I never set out to create a technique. I started out on the floor to find myself, to find what the body could do, and what would give me satisfaction - emotionally, dramatically and bodily. But I did not ever dream of establishing a technique. I still can't believe anything like that happened.

Martha Graham

#25. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep.

Martha Graham

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

Martha Graham

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain.

Martha Graham

#32. 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

#33. The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

Martha Graham

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.

Martha Graham

#37. I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.

Martha Graham

#38. The world I'm interested in is the one where things are not named.

Martha Graham

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

Martha Graham

#40. 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

#41. All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.

Martha Graham

#42. 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

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

Martha Graham

#44. You will only get out of a dance class what you bring to it. Learn by practice.

Martha Graham

#45. If I can't dance, I don't care if my dances are ever done again!

Martha Graham

#46. Dance is the hidden language of the soul

Martha Graham

#47. Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.

Martha Graham

#48. 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

#49. Modern dance isn't anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.

Martha Graham

#50. It's what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.

Martha Graham

#51. Stand up! Keep your backs straight! Remember that this is where the wings grow.

Martha Graham

#52. The spine is the tree of life. Respect it.

Martha Graham