The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

Graham distinguishes between the dancer’s physical apparatus and the artistic act that the apparatus serves. The body—trainable, fallible, and finite—is treated as an instrument, like a violin to a musician: necessary for execution but not identical with the art itself. The “art” she points to lies in intention, imagination, and expressive truth—what the dancer communicates through movement rather than the mere display of athletic capability or bodily beauty. The phrasing also implies a kind of artistic transcendence: dance is made with the body, yet its meaning and value exceed the body’s material limits, aging, and vulnerability.