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I think most dancers would agree that the art of ballet chooses the dancer, not the other way around.
KEVIN MCKENZIE, forward, Ballet Dancers in Career Transition
In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell…. we can’t dance synonyms.
GEORGE BALANCHINE, Life magazine, Jun. 11, 1965
The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.
GEORGE BALANCHINE, Life magazine, Jun. 11, 1965
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.
LINCOLN KIRSTEIN, forward, Four Centuries of Ballet
The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.
Learning ballet is wonderful for children even if they never become dancers. It is wonderful because it teaches discipline, grace, and manners.
ANNA PASKEVSKA, Ballet: An Eight-Year Course
What's so wonderful about ballet is that it's mind-driven physicality. It's almost a Greek ideal of body, mind, and form.
EDWARD VILLELLA, Nancy Upper's Ballet Dancer's in Career Transition
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, Four Centuries of Ballet
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