Daily Inspiration Quote by Twyla Tharp

Tharp’s refusal of “modern dance” reads less like pedantry than a strategic jailbreak. Labels in dance aren’t neutral; they’re little funding categories, grant-panel checkboxes, marketing blurbs, and tribal markers that decide who gets programmed, who gets reviewed, who gets taught. By “challenging the term,” she’s puncturing the prestige and gatekeeping baked into it, the way “modern” can become a museum tag the minute it’s institutionalized. The irony is that modern dance started as a revolt against rigid forms, and Tharp is now revolting against the revolt’s bureaucracy.

Her pivot to “I simply think of it as dancing” is a power move: she collapses the hierarchy between high-art experimentation and the basic human act of moving through space. It’s also a subtle claim to authority. If it’s just “dancing,” then she doesn’t need to audition for anyone’s definition of avant-garde; her work can steal from ballet, jazz, Broadway, or pedestrian gesture without apologizing. The line “I think of it as moving” pushes even further, reducing the art form to its rawest element and, in doing so, expanding what counts as legitimate vocabulary. Movement includes athleticism, work, play, awkwardness, style, accident.

Context matters: Tharp came up in an America where modern dance and ballet were policed as rival camps, each with its own orthodoxy. Her career is built on crossing those borders. This quote doesn’t just reject a term; it rejects the idea that art needs a credentialed subgenre to be serious.