Quotes on Ballet

Being in ballet class, being on the stage, being surrounded by my peers at American Ballet Theater every day, keeps me so humble and grounded. Being in ballet class, I feel, is like this meditation for me every morning.

When you do one more 'Cinderella' or whatever, what is there to learn? Every part in the repertoire has a good side and a bad side, and the more often you do the same ballet, the more often the bad side comes out. If you want to give dance life, you must give it fresh food, not keep going back to the garbage to look for old scraps.

There's an opera out on the turnpike, there's a ballet being fought out in the alley.

I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance.

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Baseball is a ballet without music. Drama without words.

The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote.

Fifth positions, heads, musicality, energy. Not technical things so much-getting your leg higher or doing more turns but things that would set you apart from other dancers. The only way you can be different is to be yourself if you don't find your spirit and reveal it, you just look like every other dancer.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

One must shy away from questionable undertakings, even when they bear a high-sounding name.

Nobody cares if you can't dance well.

Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing.

The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art, art of the muscle sense. The awareness of tension and relaxation within his own body, the sense of balance that distinguishes the proud stability of the vertical from the risky adventures of thrusting and falling--these are the tools of the dancer.

The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.

Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music.

The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you you're not good enough. On occasion, some may be correct. But do not do their work for them. Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal. Don't take it personally when they say 'no' - they may not be smart enough to say 'yes.'

Ballet: men wearing pants so tight that you can tell what religion they are.

Ten thousand saw I at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It's part ballet. It's part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.

Ballet in the air... Twin butterflies until, twice white They Meet, they mate