BALLET QUOTES II

quotations about ballet

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I think I only started thinking seriously about the ballet when I was already studying it. At 14, I started noticing that I could do it better than anyone else, and I had courage, a child's courage, to be greater than the other children.

SVETLANA ZAKHAROVA

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So great is the wear and tear on the hip joints resulting from the unnatural demands of ballet that by the time they reach the age of forty, some ex-ballerinas are fitted with plastic hips.

WENDY BUONAVENTURA

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Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria -- sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness -- performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.

LINCOLN KIRSTEIN

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Learning ballet is wonderful for children even if they never become dancers. It is wonderful because it teaches discipline, grace, and manners.

ANNA PASKEVSKA

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Dancing makes me see everything clearer and it is a challenge that you make with yourself to keep improving every day. In ballet you are never good enough, you are constantly trying to be better, I love that!

EMILY RICCA

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Although most informed balletomanes would place artistry above technique, artistry without a strong technique is a flaccid, bloodless thing indeed, whereas technique without much artistry can still dazzle us in the manner of the circus or sports arena translated to a higher plane. Though the perfect blend of the two elements is the consummation devoutly to be wished, the real enemy of good ballet is not the slight preponderance of one or the other but the prevalence of pantomime--the turning of dance into second-rate theater.

JOHN SIMON

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People say about the ballet that our daily physical routine is like working in a coalmine.

DIANA VISHNEVA

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Ballet is purifying, every movement physically honed and essential, with no superfluity or excess.

JENNIFER HOMANS

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Contrary to vulgar legend the lives of great ballerinas are not entirely given up to a few minutes of graceful movement every night followed by champagne drunk out of their toeshoes till dawn, in the company of financiers ... no, most of their time is spent in filthy rehearsal halls, inhaling dust, or else in class, daily, year in year out, practicing, practicing even after they are already prima ballerinas.

GORE VIDAL

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Once a ballet is set, it's written in stone; the steps become a sacred text to be varied only by the inflections of interpretation. Productions or performers straying further are, in most cases, considered irresponsible or self-indulgent.

TOBI TOBIAS

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Ballet is all about bodies, bodies in motion, about line and curve and bulge, about arms and legs and backsides, as much as it is about princes and swans. There's no escaping it, although many hotly insist that to talk of ballet as physical and erotic is to demean the art. What shows through their indignation are signs of the age-old dilemma of integration: is sexuality something one keeps carefully apart from the other activities one engages in like eating, bathing, thinking, dancing, or even appreciating dance; or should it be integrated naturally into the fabric of human experience?

GRAHAM JACKSON

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Ballet is a universe of the imagination, a place of magic and enchantment, beauty and romance. Its many worlds vibrate with graceful dancers, glorious music, and sumptuous costumes.

TRUDY GARFUNKEL

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A dancer must defy many things, gravity is only one of them.

@iSpeakBallet

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There should not need to be a synopsis in the program. The movements and the music should express everything the audience needs to know.

GEORGE BALANCHINE

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I'm bored stiff by ballet. I can't bear those muscular white legs like unbaked plaited loaves, and I get quite hysterical every time one of the women sticks out her leg at right angles, and the man suddenly grabs it and walks round in a circle as though he were opening a tin.

JILLY COOPER

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The Ballet toe shoe is one of the few instruments of torture to survive intact into our time.

ANONYMOUS

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Ballerinas are conditioned from a young age to accept self-sacrifice as an integral part of the art form. They learn to work through the pain, from childhood until the end of their days as dancers, numbing the pain with drugs and other means.

DEIRDRE KELLY

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Girls are a dime a dozen in ballet--not like the boys who are treated like princes. Another girl will be plucked from some audition somewhere.

SONA CHARAIPOTRA

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Time flows to a crawl
As the ballet of the impact
Spreads out across the blacktop
Angels dancing down like raindrops

SPOCK'S BEARD

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At the ballet, you really feel like you're in the presence of something outside the rest of your life. Higher than the rest of your life.

ROBERT CARO

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