Art & Creativity Quote by Graeme Murphy

Murphy is drawing a hard line between choreography that decorates a plot and choreography that excavates a score. When he says it was "really important to get the essence out of the music", he’s talking about a hierarchy of loyalties: the music isn’t a mood board for narrative cute-ness, it’s the engine that dictates pace, texture, even the moral temperature of a scene. The phrase "for the story" matters here. He isn’t rejecting storytelling; he’s insisting the story should be discovered through the music’s internal logic rather than stapled onto it.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke of a common temptation in dance theater: using well-loved compositions as premium packaging for clever concept work. "Press the music into the service" is almost industrial language, as if the score can be machine-stamped into whatever shape a choreographer wants. Murphy hears that as a kind of violence - not just to the composer, but to the audience, who can sense when the movement is skating on top of the sound instead of being pushed and pulled by it.

"Whimsical" is the tell. He’s not anti-humor or anti-fantasy; he’s wary of whimsy as an alibi for shallow choices, for letting storybook charm override musical truth. In a field where narrative ballets can drift into tasteful illustration, Murphy stakes out a more demanding contract: if the tale is to feel alive, it has to be accountable to the score’s essence, not merely accompanied by it.