Dance Quotes - Page 31

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

  George Balanchine

  Ballet, Important, Firsts

  74 Copy quote

• 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

  Ballet, Masterpiece, Brows

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• In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell. We can't dance synonyms.

  George Balanchine

  Ballet, Stories, Impossible

  Life magazine, p. 98, June 11, 1965.

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• In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts. God made men to sing the praises of women. They are not equal to men: They are better.

  George Balanchine

  Men, Firsts, Praise

  162 Copy quote

• 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

  Long, Tree, Ballet

  89 Copy quote

• My muse must come to me on union time.

  George Balanchine

  Ballet, 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, Men, Two

  97 Copy quote

• 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

  Ballet, Athletic, Rooms

  6 Copy quote

• If your only dance experience is the Nutcracker, it will be a shock; hopefully shocking in a good way.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov

  Way, Nutcrackers, Shock

  16 Copy quote

• It doesn't matter how high you lift your leg. The technique is about transparency, simplicity, making an earnest attempt.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov

  Simplicity, Legs, Matter

  60 Copy quote

• I want to see people dance, and I would like to guess what kind of people they are. I don't want to know the recipe for their pasta.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov

  People, Recipes, Want

  18 Copy quote

• We're trying to stretch our muscles creatively. It gives us so much more freedom.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov

  Giving, Trying, Muscles

  26 Copy quote

• What brought me to the theater, no matter you're a Jew or a Russian or Armenian or Latvian, are suddenly illuminated by stage light and one beautiful image of dance.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov

  Beautiful, Light, Matter

  8 Copy quote

• You can be totally involved, you could admire just the shape of or you could be totally emotionally mushed up into the dance.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov

  Shapes, Admire, Involved

  4 Copy quote

• There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them, those who only dance to their own rhythm, and those who don't dance at all.

  Jose Bergamin

  Inspirational, Dancing, Rhythm

  8 Copy quote

• A silent figure is the dancer, true but still, words become dance, and all things there express'd.

  Andre Bjerke

  Silent, Figures, Stills

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• What is dance? I am dancing all the time. Every gesture, the body line of every pose, the way I get from place to place, the movement in the acting - none of it would be the way it is if I weren't a dancer.

  Ray Bolger

  Dancing, Acting, Movement

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• I enjoy the freedom of modern dance as well as the constraints of classical dance.

  Deborah Bull

  Modern, Enjoy, Wells

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• I think it's useful to experience other types of dance and other cultures, and the life of a classical dancer these days is certainly not all tutus! So experience of other dance forms is a good idea.

  Deborah Bull

  Thinking, Other Cultures, Ideas

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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, Dancing, Ballet

  52 Copy quote

• Though I soon became typecast in Hollywood as a gangster and hoodlum, I was originally a dancer, an Irish hoofer, trained in vaudeville tap dance. I always leapt at the opportunity to dance in films later on.

  James Cagney

  Opportunity, Hollywood, Vaudeville

  28 Copy quote

• Dancers dance through their pain I shrink from mine.

  Mason Cooley

  Pain, Mines, Shrinks

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• Tap dancing all started with the old clog waltz.

  Sammy Davis, Jr.

  Dancing, Tap Dancing, Waltz

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• But remember that intent is everything. One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises. In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing, and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door. This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds. The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.

  Agnes de Mille

  Wings, Ideas, Differences

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• Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.

  Agnes de Mille

  Play

  7 Copy quote