In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.

To some degree, yeah, because I have to play a certain number of originals that might be considered avant-garde material. I realize though, that only a few people in the audience actually know what that music is, or understand it.

So, rap has that quality, for youth anyway; it's a kind of blues element. It's physical, almost gymnastic. It speaks to you organically. Rap grows out of what young people really are today, not only black youth, but white - everybody.

Black music has become a commercial commodity. Live performances are not so accessible as they were previously. It use to be possible to go to the bar on the corner and hear music. It was available for a fifteen cent beer.

Yes, the audience is so important to Negro music, especially the element of call and response.

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.

And when I met Cecil Taylor it was a complete transformation of musical identities. All the tenets that I had grown up with were thrown out the window.

In America, for a brief time, people who followed Coltrane were studied and considered important, but it didn't last long. The result is that the kind of music I played in the '60's is completely dismissed in this country as a wrong turn, a suicidal effort.

In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.

Rap actually took root in the Negro community, and then in the Hispanic community, long before it impacted on the larger American community as a whole.

I find that here in the States, audiences are generally less knowledgeable, from the cognitive point of view, though they are emotionally more receptive.

So, I was just a young guy, maybe with an idea, and Cecil Taylor, himself a rebel, would take a chance on a guy like me. It turned out to be a very symbiotic partnership. I learned a lot from him.

You get a show where people are jumping up and dancing, but it's not a critical event in the sense of profound catharsis. Essentially it's celebratory.

It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz.

A whole generation of young whites have involved themselves with traditional Negro music.

Today, music is visual.

In rap music even though the element of poetry is very strong so is the element of the drum the implication of the dance. Without the beat its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.

The Lord doesn't like us to be dead. Be alive. Sometimes I dance to the glory of the Lord, because He said so.

I never danced a step in my life so naturally. My first motion picture was a musical, and Bob Fosse was the choreographer. I didn't exactly dance for Fosse, I just did the best that I could to do what he taught us to do.

Dance is very, very old. With Louis XIV at Versailles is where ballet started.

I cannot sing, dance or act; what else would I be but a talk show host.

No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.

When I got a lap dance, because I was 17, they had to put a massive pillow between me and the girl when she was grinding me. It was weird, yet pleasurable.

I grew up with six brothers. That's how I learned to dance - waiting for the bathroom.

I would love to do more music, definitely. That is my true passion. Dance is first and then music.

They're not particular about whether you're playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it.

I have thought about the next steps, and you know, they still don't know that I can dance. They don't know it, and it's frustrating me because I feel that it's an edge that I have, and I'm not talking about I took this hip hop class, I'm talking about this is how people actually know me.

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.

It's always been my dream to do a dance scene with Anthony Hopkins.

Sex in a dance is in the eyes of the beholder. I never thought my dances sexy. I suppose that's because I see myself with my face washed, and to me I look like a rabbit.

I had certain physical limitations that made me change the choreography for myself or made me more interested in choreography only rather than dancing. I have never been a person who wanted to just dance. I have always been interested in developing for other people.

We were at our best when we were playing in the dance halls of Liverpool and Hamburg. The world never saw that.

We want to be the band to dance to when the bomb drops.

Life is like dancing. If we have a big floor, many people will dance. Some will get angry when the rhythm changes. But life is changing all the time.

People come to see beauty, and I dance to give it to them.

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.

I wasn't out drinking and abusing my body. I simply loved to go out and dance.

And dance is wonderful because dance is so immediate.

Disco is just pop music you can dance to.

For a London play, rehearsal time would be four weeks for the entire show. In films, I'd spend six weeks on the big dance numbers to get them perfect before the actual shooting.

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.

I'm a song and dance girl. I can act enough to get by. But that's the limit of my talents.

I don't really think about dance except just before rehearsals start. I put it off. I don't live my life thinking about dance.

Actors fall into this trap if they missed being loved for who they really were and not for what they could do - sing, dance, joke about - then they take that as love.

I believe honesty comes across in music because for people that music isn't just something to dance to. For people for whom music is something that they feel, they understand what I'm talking about.

Dance is definitely what I love doing much more than anything else.

No, but way before that, I've been doing little dances in movies for years. Yeah, that was an amazing chance. You know, at my age to be able to do a music dance video, very unusual.

Let us keep the dance of rain our fathers kept and tread our dreams beneath the jungle sky.

My grandmother had a Miss Margaret's School of Dance to teach tap and ballet to kids, but I never studied it. I was raised a Mormon and they're dancing fools. It's the only vice they have - dancing.