Performance & Stage  

Enjoy these dance quotes about the stage -
inspiration for a stunning performance!

“For a dancer, to be able to perform well, 

most of his waking hours must be devoted 

to preparing for the holy white instant of performance.”

- Paul Taylor

“It's extremely arrogant and foolish 

to think you can ever outwit your audience.”

- Twyla Tharp 

“Long experience has taught me that the crux of my fortunes 

is whether I can radiate good will toward my audience. 

There is only one way to do it and that is to feel it. 

You can fool the eyes and minds of the audience,

but you cannot fool their hearts.”

- Howard Thurston 

“The dance is over, the applause subsided 

but the joy and feeling will stay with you forever.”

- W. M. Tory 

“Dance from your heart and love your music, 

and the audience will love you in return.”

- Maria 

“One's concentration as a performer must remain centered 

on the action of which one is a part. For it is in truth 

only one's own concentration on the imagined reality of the role 

that can force the audience's attention to that same place.”

- Rick

“Striving for a connection with the audience is essential 

because you are in the moment it is a give and take relationship. 

Catching someone's eye during a performance makes it more special.”

- Aubrey Lynch 

“After I perform, I hope the audience is excited, inspired, 

and taken away from their everyday grind or work. 

Perhaps even inspired enough to get up and dance themselves.”

- Lenore Pavlakos 

“The real self of an artiste lies in art, so when an artiste performs, 

all the pain, trauma and tension get released through art, 

be it dancing, painting, singing, writing or even martial arts.”

- Mrinalini Sarabhai 

“Dance is like wine 

it matures with every performance.”

- Alarmel Valli 

“Seen from the wings, a ballerina's life is made-up of 

sheer physical misery relieved only by the euphoria of performance. 

Physical agony is a normal thing backstage 

and arouses the awe and pity only of outsiders unused to its sight.” 

- Author Unknown

"Then come the lights shining on you from above. You are a performer.  

You forget all you learned, the process of technique,  

the fear, the pain, you even forget who you are you become one 

with the music, the lights, indeed one with the dance."  

-Shirley Maclaine  

“Dance every performance as if it were your last.” 

 
- Erik Bruhn 

“When you are on stage 

you are having an affair with three thousand people.”

- Gelsey Kirkland 

“It doesn't matter where you are on the stage, just as long as you're there.” 

- Author Unknown 

“The world on stage is a fairy-tale world. You end an 

evening enveloped in the applause from the audience. 

But outside the theater, you are back into reality, 

and when you come home you realize                            

that you are just an ordinary person like everybody else.” 

- Author Unknown 

“There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows 

he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. 

He has to put in something in order to be able to take something.”

- Mikhail Baryshnikov 

“I just know that when I go on stage, I give everything I have, 

not only my legs, not only my feet, not only my body. 

I try to tell a story. 

Sometimes I'm able to cry because I feel like it. 

Sometimes I'm able to love because I feel like it.”

- Sylvie Guillem 

“Dancers work and live from the inside. 

They drive themselves constantly producing a glow 

that lights not only themselves but audience after audience.”

- Murray Louis 

“Glorious bouquets and storms of applause 

are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys. 

but to move an audience in such a role, 

to hear in the applause that unmistakable note 

which breaks through good theatre manners and comes from the heart, 

is to feel that you have won through to life itself. 

Such pleasure does not vanish with the fall of the curtain, 

but becomes part of one's own life.”

- Dame Alice Markova 

“Dancing should look easy; like an optical illusion. 

It should seem effortless. When you do a difficult variation, 

the audience is aware that it is demanding and that you have 

the power and strength to do it. But in the end, 

when you take your bow, you should look as if 

you were saying, ‘Oh, it was nothing. I could do it again.’”
                 

- Bruce Marks 

“People in the audience, when they've watched the dance, 

should feel like they've accomplished something, 

that they've gone on a journey.”

- Paul Mercurio 

“It is a temptation to exploit one's technique 

because an audience is easily reached this way, 

but they cannot be moved by technique alone 

and to move an audience is the role of dance as an art.”

- Alla Ossipenko

“Striving for a connection with the audience is essential 

because you are in the moment – it is a give and take relationship.” 

- Author Unknown 

“When it comes to the requirements for pleasing an audience, 

all the knowledge and instruction and apparatus in the world 

is worth less than one ounce of soul.”

- Ottawa Keyes 

“The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience 

as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, 

and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time... 

Both space and time, as perceptible factors, 

disappear almost entirely in the dance illusion.”

- Susanne K. Langer