Ballet Technique Quotes

We moved from the suburbs to L.A. and I picked up break dancing when I was 10. I joined a dance crew in high school and I was battling. I also took ballet most of my life until high school.

Point shoes are torture devices.

Pointe shoes are torture devices. I mean, ballerinas get used to it, but it was definitely a new experience for me. They feel medieval. I was very happy to stop wearing them.

I have learned a great deal from the theatrical side of Covent Garden. The Paris Opera Ballet is more concerned with technique. It's perfect. It's beautiful. It's well done. But it lacks the theatrical tradition that is so important in England. At the Royal Ballet, absolutely everyone on stage seems to be caught up in the plot.

I love ballet, and it's a little boring for me to go to the gym because I'm used to the dancing discipline - it's really hard but much more fun.

I did ballet at the Menlo Park Academy of Dance from age 4 to 11, but then I switched to ballroom, and I've been doing that ever since.

I think that taking ballet is one of the best things a girl can do. Period.

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

I joined the Royal Ballet School when I was 13. Before then, I'd done ballet twice a week after school. The rest of my class had started aged 11, so I'd missed two years and was really far behind.

I was one of those dancers who they say wants to feel the floor through their pointe shoes. I would end up not wearing toe pads and that stuff. I would just wrap minimal amounts of paper towels around my toes.

A simple scoop-neck leotard highlights a ballerina's swanlike neck and elegant posture, both rooted in a powerful core.

At the ballet classes I took when I first came to New York, I would see great dancers like Cynthia Gregory and Lupe Serrano. I would look at them and study what they could do, and what I couldn't do. And then I'd think maybe they should try what I could do.

Do you know what I've learned? That although ecstasy is the ability to stand outside yourself, dance is a way of rising up into space, of discovering new dimensions while still remaining in touch with your body. When you dance, the spiritual world and the real world manage to coexist quite happily. I think classical ballet dancers dance on pointe because they're simultaneously touching the earth and reaching up to the skies.

For ballet dancers, style is about melding personal expression with physical form.

Technical things are getting more mechanical. Take 'Swan Lake,' the Black Swan pas de deux. Now, my goodness, they're turning not just 32 fouettes - but double or triple pirouettes.

I started dancing when I was five, and I trained intensively as a competitive dancer up until the end of high school. I did all genres, and later on a did a lot of extra ballet on top of that. I actually got accepted to Julliard for dance during my senior year, but I ultimately turned it down to come to L.A. to act.

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.

Ballet is the fairies' baseball.

I like dramatic ballets, particularly if they're ballets in which I have a chance to go from one extreme of style or characterization to another.

In ballet class, I felt like Ralph Wiggum.

If you looked at my feet, you would know for sure that I used to do ballet. They're completely destroyed and ripped up.

Apparently, I have good feet for ballet.

My first ballet class was on a basketball court. I'm in my gym clothes and my socks trying to do this thing called ballet. I didn't know anything about it.

There was a stage when Balanchine and I didn't talk. I was trying to develop my classical technique as opposed to the fast-track technique that he was pushing. We were very quiet with each other. But after two years he saw what I was doing and sent messages through other people that, yes, this is good.

You should see ballerinas' feet. They don't have nails. You see beauty, but it's unbelievable pain - with a 40-year pension! That's it, and then life is really finished.