Daily Inspiration Quote by Twyla Tharp

Male dancers show up here not as muses or heartthrobs, but as a labor problem. Tharp’s line has the bluntness of rehearsal-room realism: scarcity, strength, budget. It’s a reminder that dance, for all its glamour, runs on supply chains like anything else. In “those days” (and, she dryly adds, “still today”), men in dance are treated as both anomaly and asset, a “rarer breed” whose very rarity inflates their value. That little economic turn - “if you couldn’t afford to pay them” - snaps the sentence into focus. Talent isn’t just discovered; it’s purchased, recruited, retained.

The subtext is thornier than a simple complaint about gender imbalance. Tharp is also describing what kind of male dancer she needed: not just competent, but “strong,” able to handle the physical demands of her choreography and partnering. Strength functions as a coded requirement in a field where men are often simultaneously stigmatized (for dancing at all) and instrumentalized (for the lifting, the anchoring, the “support”). She’s exposing the irony: masculinity is policed in dance culture, yet “male strength” is commodified when it serves the work.

Context matters: Tharp comes up in an era when modern dance and ballet were professionalizing fast, but funding remained precarious and companies competed for a small pool of elite men. Her intent isn’t sentimental; it’s strategic. She’s documenting how gender norms shape aesthetics, casting, and even what choreographers dare to make when bodies - and budgets - are limited.