Gene Kelly Dance Quotations

When they do let them sustain on screen from head to toe, though, then you know they must think the person is a good dancer.

America now has more and better dancers than they have ever had in the history of the country, but that won't account for the public wants to see.

I didn't want to be a dancer... I just did it to work my way through college. But I was always an athlete and gymnast, so it came naturally.

I'd studied dance in Chicago every summer and taught it all winter, and I was well-rounded. I wasn't worried about getting a job on Broadway. In fact, I got one the first week.

My mother had gotten a job as a receptionist at a dancing school and had the idea that we should open our own dancing school; we did, and it prospered.

In film, a dancer should always be shot from head to toe, because that way you can see the whole body and that is the art of dancing. Nowadays they shoot the nose. Left nostril. Right nostril. Hand. Foot. Bust. Derrière. The film prevents you from determining who is a good dancer and who is not.

I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov do Twyla Tharp's Sinatra Suite on PBS. I have no numbers to prove it, but I bet that kids who saw that loved it. I think you will see younger dancers, who certainly have the artistic sense and capabilities, start going back to romantic numbers.

I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn't catch on right away - but I had some good mentors in New York who encouraged me.

I never wanted to be a dancer. It's true! I wanted to be a shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

When Ginger Rogers danced with Astaire, it was the only time in the movies when you looked at the man, not the woman.

Any man who looks like a sissy while dancing is just a lousy dancer.

It fit into my scheme of things for many reasons. At the time it was true that male dancers were looked down upon, and it was true that a lot of the male dancers were effeminate. But what I was really trying to do was develop something that would be American.

You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams.