Quotes About Ballet

Every girl - and boy, if you so choose - should take some ballet. Because ballet gives you grace. It gives you [the ability] to work with your hands. It's all about your hands.

It's nice for me to have a ballet as a kind of platform for creativity, because unlike modern dance or contemporary dance or downtown dance, ballet is formalized, and there's something orthodox about it that I like. I like that there's less emphasis on subversion and innovation. I actually think that my musical vernacular or my musical voice is also less inclined toward innovation and subversion. I think I'm a traditionalist.

So I'm studying ballet every day and really training so people will see me as a ballet dancer, which no one's seen before.

Ballet is good, because it makes you stand up tall.

I attended Professional Children's School in Manhattan because my ballet and modern dance schedules were intensive and had started to interfere with regular school hours.

In terms of withstanding incredible amounts of pain - both physical and emotional - I don't think there's any better training than ballet.

I'd really like to get to do some fighting, some martial arts training, because I think that would be really fun I do gymnastics and ballet, and I'm very, very into the physically acrobatic end of sport.

I always wanted to be an actor. I was one of those lucky kids - or cursed kids - who always knew what he wanted to do. My wife too. She's a ballet dancer, and she's known what she wanted to do since she was 5. My mother used to tell this story about how our TV set had been taken to be repaired, and back then, they took the set out of the console. So there was this empty console with an empty TV screen in it, and I would climb inside and be like, "I'm on TV!"

Nicholas Hytner, who directed Center Stage, is a huge ballet fan. He was completely open, as was Bruce Beresford, to get our perspective. "No, we wouldn't do this. Yes, we would do that. That's not realistic." So, I feel like Center Stage did well in that respect.

I deliberately made an effort not to become an expert on the ballet.

Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.

I wasn't a ballet baby. My first dance class was in an outdoor pavilion when I was three. It was called 'creative movement.' The teacher gave us chiffon scarves in beautiful colors. She turned on some music and said, 'Now go dance.' So for me, dance has always been about self-expression.

On set, the playground for the character, how much it takes varies. Is it like ballet, is it like jazz? The content always lends itself to the form, and it's really not mathematics.

Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.

Ballet is number one, everything else is scheduled in the small windows when I'm not in the studio taking class, rehearsing, on stage or on tour.

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

I was a ballet dancer growing up and that's what I was convinced I would be.

You go to the ballet and you see girls dancing on their tiptoes. Why don't they just get taller girls?

Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.

And in between the two, in between the sky and the sea, were all the winds. And there were all the nights and all the moons. To be a castaway is to be a point perpetually at the centre of a circle. However much things may appear to change-the sea may shift from whisper to rage, the sky might go from fresh blue to blinding white to darkest black-the geometry never changes. Your gaze is always a radius. The circumference is ever great. In fact, the circles multiply. To be a castaway is to be caught in a harrowing ballet of circles.

I took ballet for two years in high school and then in college on and off, and I went back into class. I'm nowhere near good enough to be a professional, but it's great to be in that environment. The discipline is so impressive.

I think most dancers would agree that the art of ballet chooses the dancer, not the other way around.

I need a big wave to really excel. The smaller stuff is a bit like...ballet for me.

The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

She drove me to ballet class...and she took me to every audition. She'd be proud of me if I was still sitting in that seat or if I was watching from home. She believes in me and that's why this [award] is for her. She's a wonderful mother.

you...are...a...frige...with...wings...we...are...freaking...ballet...dancers!

Some people think that movements, such as the movements in ballet, are a higher cultural expression, whereas some are just dirt. I think it is elitist to think that a trained movement is more acceptable than untrained and possibly unrehearsed movements.

I used to get so comfortable running the hurdles, I was just like a ballet dancer going out there and going through the routines.

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.

I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.

Capoeira was designed to look like a dance, and it's actually an incredibly effective means of fighting. Fighting is dancing. Look at a great boxing match, and it's a dancing. That's what's great about the choreography that goes on here. It's a delicate ballet with a fist in the face.

And what would be great numbers in a Broadway show are now on stage of the New York City Ballet.

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

I had some ballet training but didn't like it. It was like a game to me.

Excellent! I will still be in time for the ballet!

Do ballet and play football. Sing and dance. Laugh and cry.

Figure skating is an unlikely Olympic event but its good television. It's sort of a combination of gymnastics and ballet. A little sexy too which doesn't hurt.

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.