Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Taylor

Taylor’s language is almost disarmingly plain, which is exactly why it lands. “Lift the audience” announces a choreographer who treats dance less as self-expression than as a public service: a temporary upgrade to your sense of what people can be. The key word is “miraculous,” not in a religious sense but in the way a clean jump or a perfectly timed group phrase can make the body look like it’s outsmarting gravity, fatigue, and even common sense. He’s describing the aesthetic high of watching humans exceed their apparent limits, then quietly arguing that this is what art is for.

The subtext is an ethic. Taylor isn’t selling escapism; he’s reframing survival as spectacle. “We shouldn’t be here” nods to biology’s indifference - the way nature offers no guarantee of meaning, only odds. By putting that thought in the mouth of a dancer, he turns existential dread into kinetic optimism: if existence is statistically absurd, then movement becomes a celebration of the improbable fact that we get to inhabit a body at all.

Context matters. Taylor came up in a postwar American modern dance world that often prized severity, abstraction, even austerity. Against that backdrop, his wonder reads like a choice, almost a discipline: to choreograph not just anguish or critique, but buoyancy without naivete. The final phrase - “unusual and wonderful” - is a modest manifesto. It doesn’t demand reverence; it invites astonishment, the kind you can feel in your ribs when a dancer makes the impossible look momentarily ordinary.