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Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives, through adolescence, and while they are trying to work out who they are as people, never mind as a dancer. So train the whole person, not just the dancer. (Verdon Gwen)
My dance classes were open to anybody, my only stipulation was that they had to come to the class every day. (Verdon Gwen)
If I only made dances about my own experience in dance, it would always be on my track, and I don't want that, I want to be on the track of where dance can take me. (Verdon Gwen)
Independent dance - and, fine, it's a very good thing that it remains independent - is a much tougher life: all dancers expect that, and accept that there will be periods of not being able to work, provided there are choice moments during the year when they really can work. (Verdon Gwen)
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It's not just for its influence on us, but to know that we can play a part in it, to understand the influence that we have outside our own existence. (Verdon Gwen)
On the other hand in London you can get an audience that desires dance to go as far as it can go: they've seen the bricks of ideas built over a period so therefore there is an acceptance of what otherwise might seem out on a limb. (Verdon Gwen)
One of our problems is our sense of discipline - dancers have an extraordinary sense of self-discipline. (Verdon Gwen)
The dance world is too small in lots of ways - it's too intense, it rattles around itself, and it needs exposing to other ideas. (Verdon Gwen)
The first 2 weeks, they didn't learn the piece - they went through the process of how the piece was made. (Verdon Gwen)
Then I came in twice a week - for my own enjoyment as well as to be a guide. And then we started to apply some of the splinters of the ideas back into the piece. (Verdon Gwen)
There's a mass of places, really, where the idea started. (Verdon Gwen)
They improve greatly, and sometimes I go and see the performances they do and I am consciously aware that there isn't enough work for the good dancers. (Verdon Gwen)
They should be working, and there isn't enough work. (Verdon Gwen)
Those 25 dancers we worked with for a day, in as highly productive a way as possible - a long class, a period of teaching bits of the repertory - in fact I didn't teach Bank, I've used parts of Oil and Water. (Verdon Gwen)
We could ask artists from abroad to come in too, so that there could be a mixing and matching of skills from Europe, America and here which would widen our world. (Verdon Gwen)
We need to think on a broader plane, we need to do more than we're doing. (Verdon Gwen)
Well, it's not full time - my dancers are only paid for six months of the year in two three-month blocks; but yes, it is possible we could do it in another year. (Verdon Gwen)
What we do now is to be valued - but we need to do more, so that it's more exciting to other people, and therefore that excitement shines back on us and we're able to have the energy to do more, to widen our creativity. (Verdon Gwen)
As we rise higher in the understanding of ourselves, the national and racial dissonances will be forgotten in the universal rhythms of Truth and Love. (Verdon Gwen)
But in reality we are accompanied by the whole dancing universe. (Verdon Gwen)
I believe that my whole creative life stemmed from this magic hour under the stars on that hilltop. (Verdon Gwen)
I see dance being used as communication between body and soul, to express what it too deep to find for words. (Verdon Gwen)
It is not a question of who dances but of who or what does not dance. (Verdon Gwen)
Remembering that man is indeed the microcosm, the universe in miniature, the Divine Dance of the future should be able to convey with its slightest gestures some significance of the universe. (Verdon Gwen)
The real message of the Dance opens up the vistas of life to all who have the urge to express beauty with no other instrument than their own bodies, with no apparatus and no dependence on anything other than space. (Verdon Gwen)
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