Dance is about never-ending aspiration.

You don't enter a dance studio and say "I can't do that." If you do, then why are you in the studio in the first place?

If you look at a dancer in silence, his or her body will be the music. If you turn the music on, that body will become an extension of what you're hearing.

The first time I started choreographing was in the dark, in my living room, with the lights completely out, to some popular music on the radio. I put the radio on full blast and I started moving. I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't want to see it... I had to start in the dark.

The way Alvin Ailey has transformed modern dance and dance in general is the fact of variety. It's a cornucopia of ways to move. There are choreographers in the company as - as diverse, as different from each other as Donald McKayle and Bill T. Jones, or Jawole Zollar and John Butler, Lar Lubovitch, you know, and Judith Jamison.

Maybe it's a generational thing, but I never wanted to be the best black dancer in the world. I just wanted to be the best.