MAGNIFIQUE INTERNATIONAL BALLET WINTER INTENSIVE
January 2 - 6, 2025 at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts ...More Information
Paris Ballet's The Nutcracker
ON SALE SALE -- NOW -- at the Eissey Campus Theatre Box Office ...More Information
Great and famous people in
the dance and entertainment
world share some views
about dance.
Wise, poignant and/or
humorous
...Insights from
some of the greats are
always interesting!
Please, enjoy them as
Paris Ballet and Dance did finding and posting them.
If you don’t feel challenged, it’s because you’re not doing enough. Ballet should never feel comfortable.
Comfortable is lazy! If you’re comfortable when you dance, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.
100 % is not enough. You have to give 200%. One tendu takes years of hard work and will never be perfect.
Everything in ballet is a challenge.
- George Balanchine
Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for—for another time?
There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.
- George Balanchine
The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.
- George Balanchine
I don't want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance.
- George Balanchine
Ballet technique is arbitrary and very difficult. It never becomes easy--it becomes possible.
- Agnes de Mille
You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings
to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting
|moment when you feel alive.
- Merce Cunningham
I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.
- Mikhail Baryshnikov
There was still no likelihood that we could make a living from dance. We were doing it because we loved it
... We realized how full we felt; we were surrounded by music and dancing and joy.
- Alvin Ailey
Great artists are people who find ways to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity
in art and life alike.
- Margot Fonteyn
The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking oneself seriously. The first is imperative and the second disastrous.
- Margot Fonteyn
Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is for--liberation.
- Martha Graham
I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancingor to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
- Martha Graham
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
- Martha Graham
Great dancers are not great because of their technique; they are great because of their passion.
- Martha Graham
Dance is bigger than the physical body. Think bigger than that. When you extend your arm, it doesn't stop at the end of your fingers, because you're dancing bigger than that: your dancing spirit.
- Judith Jamison
Football isn't a contact sport; it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.
- Vince Lombardi
Then come the lights shining on you from above. You are a performer. You forget all you learned, the process of technique, the fear, the pain, you even forget who you are you become one with the music, the lights, indeed one with the dance.
- Shirley MacLaine
Even the ears must dance.
- Natalia Makarova
Master technique and then forget about it and be natural.
- Anna Pavlova
Technical perfection is insufficient. It is an orphan without the true soul of the dancer.
- Sylvie Guillem
Dance is like life, it exists as you're flitting through it, and when it's over, it's done.
- Jerome Robbins
I do everything the man does, only backwards and in high heels!
- Ginger Rogers
I have worked like a dog all my life, honey. Dancing, as Fred Astaire said, is next to ditch-digging. You sweat and you slave and the audience doesn't think you have a brain in your head.
- Ann Miller
Dancing is a sweat job.
- Fred Astaire
Classical dancing is like being a mother: if you've never done it, you can't imagine how hard it is.
- Harriet Cavalli
If I die on my way to the dance, it will be better than to survive having never lifted my feet.
- Agnostic Zetetic
He [Gene Kelly] once told me dancing was a man's game, as much of a sport as baseball itself. And he made us believe that. He changed our minds and suddenly, all of America wanted to dance just like Gene Kelly.
- Liza Minnelli
I should not believe in a God who does not dance.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
To sing well and to dance is to be well educated.
- Plato
Classical language and musicality are not simply effete traditions belonging to the bygone upper classes. The vocabulary and manner of classical ballet express a high order of discipline and restraint, a sense of harmony with forces larger and more lasting than the individual.
- Marsha Siegel
The discipline that ballet requires is obsessive. And only the ones who dedicate their whole lives are able to make it. Your toenails fall off and you peel them away and then you're asked to dance again and keep smiling. I wanted to become a professional ballet dancer.
- Penelope Cruz
I think what creates a winner is a person who can connect with their partner - another human being...connect with their soul
- Patrick Swayze
Dancers are athletes of God.
- Albert Einstein
The dance: a minimum of explanation, a minimum of anecdotes, and a maximum of sensations.
- Maurice Béjart
Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
- George Carlin
A major assumption that underlies this selection is that it is only within work that is progressive, experimental or avant-garde that staid, old-fashioned images and ideas about gender can be challenged and alternatives imagined. I have never seen a ballet performance that has not disappointed me.
- Ramsay Burt
Dancing is creating a sculpture that is visible only for a moment.
- Erol Ozan
You can dance in the storm. Don't wait for the rain to be over before because it might take too long. You can can do it now. Wherever you are, right now, you can start, right now; this very moment.
- Israelmore Ayivor
Dance exists first on this primordial level, not on an intellectual plane (even though it requires skill and intelligence). Its inmost substance cannot be reasoned, only experienced.
- Sondra Horton Fraleigh
Watching dance isn't about picking up moves. It's about noting the relationships between motion and space and rhythm to absorb a greater concept.
- Kathryn Craft
QUOTES ABOUT DANCE