You realize you can get good at something, even though ballet almost felt like you could never be good enough. No matter how hard you worked, it was so hard to be a great dancer.
There was a little part of me that always felt like I was going to be an actress, but I never acted when I was growing up. I was a dancer. That's all I did, all day, all my life. Maybe this was just where I was meant to be, and somehow I ended up here, but it just felt right. As soon as I started acting, it just felt like it was meant to be.
Coming from being a dancer, it was a great way for me to transition into being an actress. I get to really be expressive through my physical self, and that was just a comfortable way for me to start experimenting with how to get my character across.
Dean Magraw so liquid, lyrical and effortless it's like listening to a dancer.
I actually was a ballet dancer - I studied ballet from three until 13 - but like very seriously, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a contemporary ballet dancer. I wanted to go to Juilliard.
I'm a terrible dancer. Terrible. Just the pits. And I had to do these cheerleading things and it was just cringe-worthy. I mean, I'm so bad, so that was painful.
"You're next, after the feather dancers." And you had to get their attention, because otherwise people would go, "Oh, a poet." You really have to learn.
I got out of Las Vegas after high school. I knew that if I stayed there, I wouldn't have been able to pursue my dreams as an actor or dancer. My family always told me to dream big, so I made sure that I got out of there and explored new places, because the world is huge. And I'm still learning new things every day in this business and in my life.
I started as a tap dancer in Durban, which is on the coast. That was an important part of growing up, turning on the radio in the morning and hearing Zulu singing or the news in Zulu.
There's a moment when you say, "Okay, I'm not going to become a dancer. I'm not going to become a painter." So in a sense, I ended up writing about those big conflicts that I felt.
Oh, when I was a kid, I was poor. Christmas, I got no presents. Well, there was one Christmas, on our front lawn - Prancer and Dancer - they dropped off a little something.
They [Barnes Theatre Club] were a very good group, and for some reason when I finished the backstage thing, I just decided to that I should try to act. So I auditioned for Guys and Dolls and got a little tiny part as some Cuban dancer or something and then in the next play I got the lead part, and then I got my agent. So I owe everything to that little club.
I am not a natural dancer.
I’d seen him fight before, but it never got old. He was captivating. He never stopped moving. Every action was graceful and lethal. He was a dancer of death.
I'm in a very good place now because I do theater, I do TV and I make movies. I was a dancer, so I dance a little bit. I was a musician, so I do a little bit of music. And I do all of this in four or five different languages, and all over the world.
My personal trainer is an ex-dancer so we do a lot of ballet and jazz.
In my heart, my first desire was to be a dancer. I always wanted to dance and I danced from the time I was 7 till I was well into my 30s.
I am very sensitive to all form of music, painting, sculpting, dancing, and I love cinema also. For example if I look at the work of the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who happens to be a friend of mine, everything he does is inspiring to me.
An artist makes something to be physically experienced by another person. It's a raw, freely chosen, interpersonal relationship between the maker and the viewer, so it's close to what a musical composer does, or a poet or a dancer. It is coming out of one's inner being.
Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.
My choreography suits men very well, and the women who can do it are damn hard, strong dancers.
How many impressionist painters painted the same damned thing? How many actors have played the same part in renditions of a play or dancers do the same dances.
Dancers are a work of art - they are the canvas on which their work is painted.
To handle paint the way Pollock did, you need the muscularity of a ballet dancer.
In the states we all have this idea, everyone who wants to be the next best singer, next best dancer. Those same wants and desires are in India, too.
