I realize that dancers have worked long and hard for standards. However, on occasion, I think that it's good to examine one's heart and ask why are we dancing.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut.
To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.
With dancing, so much is about sexuality and sensuality and without life experience it becomes much more of a performance, rather than a living, breathing entity from the soul.
There's no dancer alive better than those of the 1950s and 1960s. It's only the energy that changes. Every now and then, someone like me comes along, and people say, 'Oh, this guy is this new thing.' But that's not so. There is no me without them. The tradition just goes on.
When I dance, I love the romance and sexiness of it, and love having it be clear to both dancers that the man leads! But the man has to know what he's doing!
Dancers work and they work and they work, and they master their skills so far that improvisation just comes flowing out of them. Their natural expression of the best they can possibly be comes out of them because there is no boundary to hold them back... That's the mentality that I'm trying to create, recreate and hold on to forever.
I used to say to myself, 'Well, in the old days everybody danced because they loved to dance, and there was none of this professional garbage going on about how much can you get for this or that or the other, or any of the kinds of things that insecurity can sometimes promote. Sometimes it's for the wrong reasons.'
Dancers have always been a kind of background image, we've always danced behind an artist or we've danced in a movie behind the actors. We've always been very secondary.
One of our problems is our sense of discipline - dancers have an extraordinary sense of self-discipline.
I'm pretty gutsy. Dancers don't think about things; they just do them.