Dance is not endangered - it will always find a way to express itself.

Maybe its a generational thing, but I never wanted to be the best black dancer in the world. I just wanted to be the best.

I've danced all over the world, and people are people. We cannot cut off from each other in life. In order to lead, you can't do that.

Dancing is being trusted with other people's guts; choreographing is trusting other people with yours. When I choreograph I'm giving a dancer something to do and trusting the dancer to do it and build on it.

We can go on talking about racism and who treated whom badly, but what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wallow in that or are you going to create your own agenda?

I've always felt that complement of opposites: body and soul, solitude and companionship, and in the dance studio, contraction and release, rise and fall.

You don't enter a dance studio and say "I can't do that." If you do, then why are you in the studio in the first place?