BALLET QUOTES IV

quotations about ballet

Ballet quote

Since everyone knows that a ballerina is "not supposed to be normal," she can deploy her identity in ways calculated to achieve her own ends.

ADRIENNE L. MCLEAN

Dying Swans and Madmen: Ballet, the Body, and Narrative Cinema


Real men don't lift weights, they lift women.

ANONYMOUS MALE BALLET DANCER


I love ballet for its constancy. New governments rise up; new people appear on the scene; new facts arise; whole ways of life change; science and art follow these occurrences anxiously, adding to or sometimes changing their very compositions--only the ballet knows and hears nothing.... Ballet is fundamentally conservative, conservative to the point of self-oblivion.

M. E. SALTYKOV-SHCHEDRIN

attributed, From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernisation of Ballet


The world of romantic ballet is filled with gauzy sprites, ladies lighter than air, clad in clouds of tulle. Yet, as we see from the two best-known dances of the mid-nineteenth century, Giselle and La Sylphide, these figures are not merely icons of rarified womanhood but a palpable danger that can lead man to his destruction.

TOBI TOBIAS

"Fantasy Life,", New York Magazine, May 27, 1985


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

attributed, Ballet Dancer's in Career Transition


If nobody comes to your shows, then it's modern dance. If everybody comes to your shows and no one likes it, is that ballet? I don't know.

MARK MORRIS

interview, The Telegraph, March 30, 2010


Motherhood, muscle building, and healthy weight gain are changes directly affecting the ballerina's body, making it feel more in balance. But ballet is not composed of just one body; it is also a social body, a tightly knit network of human relationships where imbalances have for a long time been allowed to proliferate unchecked, in the mistaken belief that to change one aspect of ballet is to change the culture as a whole, killing in it what has long been regarded as beautiful.

DEIRDRE KELLY

Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection


She used to wanna be a ballerina
She used to wanna be a paper swan
She used to dance pretend for the Prince of England
With her deerskin boots and her ballet makeup on
She used to run among the forest branches
Costumed in the feather and the leaves she'd find
Practicing her pirouettes and prances
Perfectly Pavlova in her prime.

BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE

"She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina"


You can imagine me as a kid growing up in redneck Texas with ballet shoes, tucking the violin under my arm. I had to fight my way up.

PATRICK SWAYZE

New York Times, June 6, 2004


The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.

ROBERT CARO

"Music, visualized", Coast Weekend, May 24, 2012


Ballet is, first of all, derived from Renaissance court entertainments in which every posture, gesture, and movement had its emblematic political and metaphysical meaning. The stress on vertical carriage that characterizes ballet technique is rooted in the noble deportment required of Renaissance and Baroque courtiers, and that postural verticality itself has deep-seated moral associations that reach back to classical Greece.

SALLY BANES

Before


In one sense, New York City ballerinas are like nuns: they're a sisterhood. They survive in an atmosphere of an aesthetic style that happens to exist nowhere else in the world, that absorbs modern tensions and transcends them; and they put up with untold miseries because they know it's the only way to look the way they want to look--ravishing like mortal goddesses, yet reachable.

ARLENE CROCE

Afterimages


Let's hit the ballet tonight
And drink Courvoisier
We should do more than talk
Until they bring back the lights

POGO X POGO

"Walk Into Your Soul"


All ballet is dance, but not all dance is ballet.

ROBIN RINALDI

Ballet


A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.

TWYLA THARP

interview, American Academy of Achievement


I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do.

SUZANNE FARRELL

interview, Academy of Achievement, December 16, 1990