Daily Inspiration Quote by Graeme Murphy

Murphy reaches for an orchard image because dance careers are brutal about time: your body is the calendar, and it doesn’t negotiate. The “tree” is a life in motion - repertoire, relationships, injuries, mentors, new dancers coming up behind you - and the point is that you never get a clean, cinematic arc where everything ripens at once. Some things are still hard and green (skills you’re building, ideas you can’t yet stage, parts of yourself you haven’t grown into). Some are blossoms (projects on the verge, collaborations that only need the right season). Some are “ready to drop off,” which lands with a quiet sting: roles you can’t dance anymore, companies you’ve outgrown, identities that have done their work.

The intent feels less like self-help than survival strategy. By framing his career as simultaneous cycles rather than a single ladder, Murphy sidesteps the dancer’s most corrosive obsession: measuring worth by peak performance and permanence. The subtext is permission to let things fall without calling it failure, and to resist the panic of premature harvesting - forcing work out before it has the strength to hold.

As a working artist (and as someone who shaped contemporary Australian dance), Murphy is also speaking from a world where creation is iterative and communal. Choreography is revision; companies renew by shedding. The metaphor normalizes change as ecology: growth, bloom, and loss happening at the same time, on the same tree. That’s not sentimental. It’s a disciplined way to keep making work when the body, the audience, and the culture keep moving on.