Martha Graham Quotes about Dancing

Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly, beautifully and with inevitability.

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.

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

In the end, it all comes down to the art of breathing.

The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.

Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground.

Dancers are the messengers of the gods.

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

Nothing is more revealing than movement.

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.

Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery - what it all means, the way the little bone near the ankle relates itself to the floor for a perfect stance, a perfect plie.

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.

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

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!