BALLET QUOTES III

quotations about ballet

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I wonder if you'd like to do a little ballet with me. A polka, perhaps. For some elephants.

GEORGE BALANCHINE

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Ballet is the fairies' baseball.

OSCAR LEVANT

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Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important.

MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV

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Ballet is created on beautiful lines and shapes. If what you hear and what you see mesh, there's a very thrilling experience.

MARTIN FRIDMANN

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Dancers infrequently experience their art as sexual: even when their limbs are wrapped around each other or they are joined in impassioned embrace, ballet is too unreal and contrived--pure artifice--and requires too much work and technical concentration to permit arousal.

JENNIFER HOMANS

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But everything was beautiful at the ballet
Graceful men lift lovely girls in white
Yes, everything was beautiful at ballet
Hey! I was happy ... at the ballet

EDWARD KLEBAN

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If ballet is not inherently sexual, it is often highly sensual and erotic: the human body publicly revealed. If there is a tension here between physicality and spirit, earth and heaven, it is easily resolved: even at its most risqué, ballet remains an idealized art.

JENNIFER HOMANS

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Ballet is the repetitive training of the body for the purpose of executing steps in traditional fashion. It is tied to and bound by the past. It is a disciplined beauty consciously preserved in the image of the old days in societies that were class-conscious and appreciative of elitist physical expertise.

SHIRLEY MACLAINE

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There are no mothers-in-law in ballet.

GEORGE BALANCHINE

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To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.

JACK HANDY

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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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Ballet is pure and demands that you serve something larger than yourself, whether it be beauty or art, or a combination of both. It requires discipline, taking care of yourself, taking care of your own body first. Then it allows you to give of that beauty, the beauty that you acquire by sculpting your own body all your life.

PETER MARTINS

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Everything cannot be conveyed by ballet, only those things which can be shown on the stage.

GEORGE BALANCHINE

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Ballet is ultimately a logical technique; it favors the shortest, most efficient route from one position into another. This factor gives an aesthetic clarity to all motions.

ANNA PASKEVSKA

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It's a gutter ballet
Just a menagerie
Still the orchestra plays
On a dark and lonely night
To a distant fading light

SAVATAGE

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Ballet is not a film, so when there's a live broadcast I feel unusual emotions. On the one hand, I understand that it should just be a regular performance and I should dance it the way I have before. On the other hand, I become aware of the fact that at any moment, the camera could be doing either a close-up on my face or a wide shot. It's a strange feeling that I don't have control over. That's why each broadcast is a huge challenge and a true trial. But I won't lie: It's also a great feeling to receive so many letters from excited people who were watching me dance in cinemas all over the world, feeling as though they were sitting right there in the audience at Bolshoi Theatre.

SVETLANA ZAKHAROVA

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Ballet is very lifted and weightless but for the quality of movement to be at my best I try to think more grounded because the up is easier for me than the down and there is a big necessity for opposition in the dance.

EMILY RICCA

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Your muscle structure and your bones have to be groomed from a very young age. Nobody wakes up at 17 and decides to become a ballet dancer.

AMANDA SCHULL

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So as not to turn invisible by staking visible form, or, so as not to interrupt the gorgeous historical flow of text and illustration, the ballerinas are dancing, so as to continue to insist on their existence, ephemerally, through the centuries, so as not to expire within discourse, however unwinged, so as not to turn, invisibly, in perpetual pirouette ...

MARIANNE GOLDBERG

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It is the illusion created which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of a magician. If the illusion fails the ballet fails, no matter how well a program note tells the audience that it has succeeded.

GEORGE BALANCHINE

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