Ballet Culture Quotes

I come from a magnetic field of Catholicism. I was baptised by my mother's family, who were all traditional Catholics. But my mother was the black sheep of the family - she ran away to the ballet at 17.

I loved the atmosphere of the dance studios - the wooden floors, the big mirrors, everyone dressed in pink or black tights, the musicians accompanying us - and the feeling of ritual the classes had.

Ballet is more than a profession - it is a way of life.

When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.

In fact, ballet companies did not exist in the Midwest when I was a child.

It's hard to change someone's ideas when they might not even really consciously know that they're being racist, or have racist ideas, just because ballet has been this way for hundreds of years.

I like to be around dancers who are totally committed to the art form, totally committed to the men and women around them.

That something that I fought so hard for throughout the beginning of my career is I didn't want to pancake my skin a lighter color to fit into the... ballet. I wanted to be myself. I didn't want to have to wear makeup that made my nose look thinner.

Choreographers tend to treat ballet dancers like kids they can manipulate.

Ballet's image of perfection is fashioned amid a milieu of wracked bodies, fevered imaginations, Balkan intrigue and sulfurous hatreds where anything is likely, and dancers know it.

I was kind of a loser at ballet school. It's all rich kids, and I was not a wealthy kid. I didn't have the Chanel butterfly clip everyone else did.

I had the benefit of there being no stigma attached to the arts. My brother's a ballet dancer, and he never came up against anything.

In 1998, Vanity Fair asked me to write a big piece for them on the 50th anniversary of the New York City Ballet. My life, to a great extent, had been spent at and with the New York City Ballet, and I decided to try it. It was very scary, writing about something I loved so much and had such strong opinions about.

It's weird for minorities even just to buy tickets to the ballet. We feel like it's not a part of our lives and we're not a part of that world.

I'm always ballet ready.

Coco Chanel was always doing things with ballet, so it is a tradition clashing fashion and ballet.

It's a normal part of the culture of ballet to go to a nutritionist in your first few weeks. They write down everything you eat and use a little roller that pinches you to measure the fat all over your body. Then, every semester, you get a letter saying either you're too thin, or you're OK, or you're overweight.

The classical ballet world is so exclusive and small, and a lot of people don't know about it.

At age 14, coming to the U.S., all I knew was American Ballet Theatre, Baryshnikov, Nureyev, and some of the European companies. I barely knew anything about Balanchine.

An ex-ABT ballerina, while staging a ballet for the company, once followed a dancer into the bathroom to deliver notes through the stall door. She was known to bark - literally, like a dog - during private rehearsals.

I want to share the ballet world with everyone.