Things danced on the screen do not look the way they do on the stage. On the stage, dancing is three-dimensional, but a motion picture is two-dimensional.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
With dancing, you have to know spatial movement with somebody. It is steps. It's literally steps and knowing how close to be or how far away. You have to have the beat in the right place with the camera.
Dance looks absurd on film, I think, like little puppets moving around.
Over the years, I have perfected the art of dancing and photographing at the same time: it's a great double act. If you're dancing, you are joining in. If you stand there rigid, you are not in the flow of things.
I wanted to do new things with dance, adapt it to the motion picture medium.
Just because you've been on stage doesn't mean you can dance.
It is upon the length and breadth and span of a body sustained in muscular action that dance invokes its image.
It's not a natural translation, transition, to take something from stage to screen. Onstage your action is communicated through the spoken word primarily, and on screen it's communicated through pictures. So it's always been kind of unnatural to take something that lives on the stage and turn it into moving pictures.
Well, for me, the real excitement of doing physical things in films, whether you're talking about a fight scene or a stunt sequence or even a love scene, for that matter, is by necessity it has to be choreographed very much like a dance. That being said, you have to rehearse it over and over again and find a mathematical precision.
Dance is just like film in that it allows for thoughts in movement.