Time & Perspective Quote by Paul Taylor

Creativity, in Paul Taylor's telling, isn't a lightning bolt so much as a stray radio signal you have to catch before it disappears. He reaches for the most un-dancerly metaphor imaginable - a melody - to describe choreography as something that arrives, not something you manufacture. That choice matters: music is culturally coded as inspiration you "hear" internally, while dance is often treated as pure discipline and trained body. Taylor quietly flips the hierarchy. The body doesn't lead; the idea does. The dancer becomes a stenographer for the subconscious.

The practical details do a lot of subtextual work. "Try to write it down or record it" isn't romantic; it's procedural, almost clerical. Humming into a tape recorder dates the quote, sure, but it also signals urgency: this is work that happens in the cracks of a day, not in a sanctified studio moment. His tools are low-tech and portable because the enemy is forgetting. In an art form that evaporates the instant it is performed, capturing the seed of a phrase becomes an act of preservation.

Then there's the blunt geography: on the road or off the road, "but mostly... at home". That's a demystification and a small assertion of control. For a touring dancer, the road is supposed to be the crucible. Taylor insists the real incubation is domestic, private, repeatable. The persona here isn't the tortured genius; it's the attentive craftsperson, alert to the mind's little deliveries, ready to translate them into movement before life overwrites them.