There are a lot of possibilities I'm looking at for the future, but I'm very insistent on not limiting myself.
I have long been interested in exploring and advancing the valuable relationships between the arts and society.
In schools giving students a full education, not to create great artists but about the right to have full expression and imagination and creativity, along with an acknowledgement that everybody learns differently. You try and you fail and you try again. All those skills are useful in the workplace, too.
I frequently go to the ballet, but I don't miss it in the sense that I wish I were still dancing.
It's a false proposition that we have to take the arts away to fund something else.
When I was about 12, I was studying Chinese and ballet with my brother, and one morning Jonathan said to me, 'I don't think I'm going to go to ballet class anymore,' and I looked at him and said, 'You know, I don't think I'm going to go to Chinese class anymore.'
The Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater in Vail is unlike any other performance venue in the world, set with mountains and trees as a backdrop.
As a dancer running around the world, I always questioned whether that's what I wanted to do.
Fulfilling your mission is one thing; vision is another, and having a commitment to something leads you to do better work.
I last went to a gym when I was a teenager to make sure I could lift ballerinas.
If I see somebody dancing really well, it can make me want to dance. Or it could be the music. But perhaps the thing I miss the most is that when you're dancing, everyday concerns vanish. It's a unique world.
I am always looking for options that yield something unexpected.
That's how you live. You participate. You take risks.
I strive to create new opportunities in terms of partnerships and new works being presented and things you haven't seen anywhere else. Also to help you see old things in ways you haven't seen them before.
Dance should mean something to you.
Where a city is only focused on one aspect, it becomes a city without a soul, not a city people want to live in.
I like that feeling of letting loose, of not planning every step. The best performances are the ones that you just let happen.
The retirement timing is always a tricky thing for a dancer. I think it's different for everyone. How you say goodbye to the thing you have really focused on that much is a tough one. I've always intended to leave in good shape, to exit on a high note.
I'm going to do some consulting for nonprofits and arts agencies. These are areas I'm interested in that didn't come directly out of Harvard, but certainly I started looking at things in a different manner.
My whole life was geared toward being a highly educated person.
