Merce Cunningham

“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

“The only way to do it is to do it.”

“Dance is an art in space and time. The object of the dancer is to obliterate that.”

“I'm not interested in the expression of love. I'm interested in the movements of love.”

“I think of dance as a constant transformation of life itself.”

“What is seen is not necessarily what is heard, and what is heard is not necessarily what is seen.”

“In my work, the dancers are not puppets. They are people.”

“The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion.”

“If you don't take a chance, you are not going to have a chance.”

“Movement is the source of all life.”

“I am not a storyteller.”

“The audience is the other half of the work.”

“I don't describe it. I do it.”

“Dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form.”

“I'm not trying to be a shaman. I'm just a choreographer.”

“I think that it’s not for the choreographer to tell the audience what to think.”