BALLET QUOTES IV

quotations about ballet

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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

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

ANONYMOUS MALE BALLET DANCER

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

POGO X POGO

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

ROBIN RINALDI

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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

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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

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