George Balanchine Quotes

I used to love ballet and I did it really, really intensely. But it came so much about achieving physical perfection, which when I was 14 was a big deal.

I think that ballet and skating definitely go hand in hand, especially growing up at Ballet West, which is an incredible academy.

I fell in love with art and music and dance and acting and how all those things can cultivate something really special and unique - depending on the performance and the show. That really kind of helped me develop my love of theater.

I've never looked at what I do as show business, I guess, because of my connection to the art and how I was introduced to the dance.

I consider myself a decent athlete but when I started to train martial arts like Kung Fu, I realised it had nothing to do with how athletic you are. It's all mental. It's what you know, how you use it and your mental toughness and composure. It's incredible.

Like an athlete, [dance] is an everyday job. You have to stay in shape - unless you just want to loaf through a couple of hoofing routines. But that just didn't satisfy me.

The first time I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov it was like he had an anti-gravity machine in his pants. He would jump and stay in the air for 10 minutes.

I think that I'm so fortunate to have found classical ballet. It completely changed my life and it shaped the person that I am today, on and off the stage.

I think classical ballet dancers dance on pointe because they're simultaneously touching the earth and reaching up to the skies

I got the part [in Into the Forest], I started taking ballet again to try to regain my strength back. I actually love that it was changed to Crystal Pite's modern dance. And I wouldn't even really call it modern dance because it feels like it's in its own genre.

Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves. The great difference between sport and art is that sport, like a sonnet, forces beauty within its own system. Art, on the other hand, cyclically destroys boundaries and breaks free.

I think most people don't really understand all that it takes to stand on your toes, and to be able to jump and land without any noise, or for a male dancer to be able to lift a girl. All of these things look so effortless, but there's an attention to detail and years of training, as well as being able to transform into a character and being able to meld all of those things together.

One of the most beautiful sights in dance is American Ballet Theatre in full flight.

The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too.

The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves.

Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to screaming.

The hardest thing that I'll ever do, is ballet. Because you are either good or bad.

I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.

Contrary to vulgar legend the lives of great ballerinas are not entirely given up to a few minutes of graceful movement every night followed by champagne drunk out of their toeshoes till dawn, in the company of financiers ... no, most of their time is spent in filthy rehearsal halls, inhaling dust, or else in class, daily, year in year out, practicing, practicing even after they are already prima ballerinas.

Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policeman don't have to look beautiful at the same time.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

Music and dance are all you need.

In the arts, foolhardiness is always harmful; even worse, however, is clumsiness.

It is the mission of all art to express the highest and most beautiful ideals of man.

Although most informed balletomanes would place artistry above technique, artistry without a strong technique is a flaccid, bloodless thing indeed, whereas technique without much artistry can still dazzle us in the manner of the circus or sports arena translated to a higher plane. Though the perfect blend of the two elements is the consummation devoutly to be wished, the real enemy of good ballet is not the slight preponderance of one or the other but the prevalence of pantomime--the turning of dance into second-rate theater.