Quotes on Ballet

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' on pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!

It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely.

The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant's trunk; strong and yet flexible and soft.

I think American Ballet Theatre is setting that standard now for classical ballet, that you can dream big, and it doesn't matter what you look like, where you come from, what your background is.

Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a young man; therefore mind it while you learn it, that you may learn to do it well, and not be ridiculous, though in a ridiculous act.

In the ballet studio, it was such an organized and disciplined environment, like I'd never had in my life. Seeing myself in the mirror, surrounded by the classical music, that's when I started to fall in love with dance.

When I was 16, I moved to Torrance, California to train at a more advanced studio, and by 19, I joined the American Ballet Theatre in New York. It all happened so fast - it was pretty unheard of that someone could train for so few years and become a professional at one of the most elite dance companies in the United States.

It's hard to change someone's ideas when they might not even really consciously know that they're being racist, or have racist ideas, just because ballet has been this way for hundreds of years.

Please send me your last pair of shoes, worn out with dancing as you mentioned in your letter, so that I might have something to press against my heart.

And then he danced,-all foreigners excel the serious Angels in the eloquence of pantomime;-he danced, I say, right well, with emphasis, and a'so with good sense-a thing in footing indispensable: he danced without theatrical pretence, not like a ballet-master in the van of his drill'd nymphs, but like a gentleman.

Dance training can't be separate from life training. Everything that comes into our lives is training. The qualities we admire in great dancing are the same qualities we admire in human beings: honesty, courage, fearlessness, generosity, wisdom, depth, compassion,and humanity.

The ballet world is so competitive, and for no reason. It's not a sport. It's an art. There's no winner.

The defect in wisdom and taste which exists among the majority of dancers is due to the bad education which they generally receive. They apply themselves only to the material side of their art, they learn to jump more or less high, they strive mechanically to execute a number of steps, and like children, who utter a great many words devoid of sense and relation, they execute many phrases of steps devoid of taste and grace.

I never thought of myself as special or particularly good at anything. But once I started ballet, suddenly I had a new identity: prodigy.

To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.

Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.

Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

Ballet became this escape for me. I feel like I was on my own a lot. I was searching for stability, so I was going off on my own and imagining what I thought stability was. Ballet became a way for me to cope.

We should realize in a vivid and revolutionary sense that we are not in our bodies but our bodies are in us.

The ballet needs to tell its own story in such a way it can be received without having to be translated into language.