Ballet Quotes - Page 16

• After I stopped dancing, I was unable to listen to beautiful music.

  Suzanne Farrell

  Beautiful, Dance, Dancing

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul. The true dance is an expression of serenity; it is controlled by the profound rhythm of inner emotion. Emotion does not reach the moment of frenzy out of a spurt of action; it broods first, it sleeps like the life in the seed, and it unfolds with a gentle slowness. The Greeks understood the continuing beauty of a movement that mounted, that spread, that ended with a promise of rebirth.

  Isadora Duncan

  Dance, Sleep, Expression

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• Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives... So train the whole person, not just the dancer.

  Deborah Bull

  Inspirational, Dance, Dancing

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• If the dance is right, there shouldn't be a single superfluous movement.

  Fred Astaire

  Dance, Dancing, Movement

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• This search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn't want to be tracked. It takes time to get a dance right, to create something memorable.

  Fred Astaire

  Motivational, Dance, Time

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• Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

  W. H. Auden

  Dance, Children, Today

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• Ballet dancing is arduous, strenuous activity. Students are engaged in physical training that rivals the training Olympic athletes undergo. At the same time, they strive for physical perfection not for the prowess alone but as a way of achieving the means necessary to express the pure nature of their art.

  George Balanchine

  Dance, Art, Athlete

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• Ballet is important and significant - yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.

  George Balanchine

  Dance, Important, Firsts

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• I could never make a ballet by wrinkling my brow and concentrating. If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished?

  George Balanchine

  Dance, Masterpiece, Brows

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• It's like the time capsule with everything in it. Or like the seed that when you plant it, becomes the enormous tree with leaves and fruit. Everybody was in that little seed, and so everything can open. The tree of dance is like that. It just takes a long, long time to blossom.

  George Balanchine

  Dance, Long, Tree

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• My muse must come to me on union time.

  George Balanchine

  Dance, Unions, Muse

  "Balanchine Said" by Arlene Croce, www.newyorker.com. January 26, 2009.

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• Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.

  George Balanchine

  Girl, Dance, Men

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• Dance has become an exclusionary enterprise. To participate, one must be thinner than thin, of pleasing form, flexible, athletic and young. If you are not all these things, you will be allowed to dance in the privacy of your own living room. You just wouldn't dare to put yourself onstage.

  Clive Barnes

  Dance, Athletic, Rooms

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• So if the dance is five minutes long, make yourself run for perhaps eight minutes. That way, you over-train and the dance will seem easier.

  Deborah Bull

  Dance, Running, Eight

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• Someone need not be perfect to be a great dancer - feeling a soul is more important than what the body can do.

  Marcia Haydee

  Dance, Dancing, Perfect

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• Nothing so clearly and inevitably reveals the inner man than movement and gesture. It is quite possible, if one chooses, to conceal and dissimulate behind words or paintings or statues or other forms of human expression, but the moment you move you stand revealed, for good or ill, for what you are.

  Doris Humphrey

  Dance, Moving, Men

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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

  Dance, Determination, Artist

  Lincoln Kirstein (1970). “Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks”, p.10, Courier Corporation

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• Fifth positions, heads, musicality, energy. Not technical things so much-getting your leg higher or doing more turns but things that would set you apart from other dancers. The only way you can be different is to be yourself if you don't find your spirit and reveal it, you just look like every other dancer.

  Suzanne Farrell

  Dance, Being Yourself, Energy

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• As soon as I hear music, something in me starts to vibrate.

  Suzanne Farrell

  Dance, Vibrate

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• You have to be able to cut off from the ballet and relax, or you have anxiety dreams at night, worrying about what you're going to dance the next day, going over every little detail.

  Darcey Bussell

  Dance, Dream, Cutting

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• I came to New York to study ballet and English.

  Penelope Cruz

  New York, Study

  Interview With Marion Cotillard, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 28, 2009.

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• As a kid, I had a lot of energy; but the ballet lessons made me calm - this pleased my mother.

  Penelope Cruz

  Mother, Kids, Lessons

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• Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres, I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat, sleep, read, watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards.

  Sloane Crosley

  Growing Up, Home, Sleep

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• You know, ballet might be too formal of a title for the type of dance I do, but I love to dance.

  Jeff Bridges

  Inspirational, Dance, Titles

  "Jeff Bridges Abides". Interview with Tim McDonnell, www.motherjones.com. November, 2011.

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• It is through strength of technique that the body stays in possession of music.

  Arlene Croce

  Dance, Technique, Body

  Arlene Croce (2003). “Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker: An Arlene Croce Reader”, p.606, Macmillan

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