You can't plan everything - if I did a performance exactly how I rehearsed it, it would be so boring.
The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.
This is how I define grace: you're on the main stage, and it looks like it has been rehearsed 100 times, everything goes so smoothly. That's where I get my confidence and success, from knowing that I have an edge because I know I'm prepared.
It's a very insular world, ballet. I feel if I had stayed much longer, it would've consumed me. I performed six days a week and rehearsed 10-plus hours a day. And you only see the people that you work with.
As much as I dislike Trump, I have to admit that his campaign took off because he seemed real and unscripted to a lot of voters. He wasn't rehearsed, senatorial, or buttoned up. That resonated with people who are distrustful of today's politicians.
A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.
By the early '70s I had gotten reasonable and I started to get in hundreds of groups that rehearsed and never played at all. I mean, the most important thing was to look good and have a great name.
Something I learned as an actor was which scenes needed to be rehearsed and which actors are good with rehearsal, which actors learn from it, and which ones grow stale because they start to second-guess themselves.
I want people to see a real person on the ice. I want to seem tangible, hard-working, passionate about my skating, not just going out and doing something I've rehearsed a million times.
Like Russell, I enjoy the fact that when I'm playing solo, if I want to do something completely spontaneous, I don't have to worry about how I'm going to cue the other musicians, or if it's something that's rehearsed.
