Quotes About Ballet

I was always nervous about coming back to Australia which was a complete hangover of the days when I left when ballet was not accepted, when I was not accepted, when I was considered a freak for wanting to be a ballet dancer. And, to be 100% honest, I rather dreaded coming back.

People often say to me - how clever you are! How brilliant to be able to go from ballet to theatre as you do. I answer that it is not clever at all. It is the gift of looking at oneself coolly, of calculating the future objectively. I could see the danger signals as far as ballet was concerned before anyone else did, that's all.

I can state that I created a ballet company of which everyone said: St. Petersburg has the greatest ballet in all Europe.

We must first realize that dancing is an absolutely independent art, not merely a secondary accompanying one. I believe that it is one of the great arts. . . . The important thing in ballet is the movement itself. A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle . . . is the essential element. The choreographer and the dancer must remember that they reach the audience through the eye. It's the illusion created which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of a magician.

I wanted to be a dancer from when I was about nine or something like that and started ballet. I used to really like it and got into it and did it full time for a couple of years. I did a lot of ballet but I traded that in for acting when I was about 15.

I grew up learning ballet and then I took up contemporary as I got older. I probably thought I was going to be a ballet dancer when I was younger, but at a certain age, I really was more interested in acting.

When I was playing college football, they would take the football team to a ballet school. We would learn to do tour jete's to prepare us when you are running in pursuit to tackle a ball carrier and you get hit, or somebody comes from another angle. This way you can spin away from the hit and your foot is out so you can go right into your run - basically, it pushed us toward the tackle. There's a good tweet: "Take ballet - it will push you towards the tackle."

There's no similarity between football and ballet, so this ain't ballet music being played on the field. I'm pumping something that's going to put me in a frame of mind to go to war, and something that's very high tempo and high beat.

I've been dancing my entire life. Jazz, hip hop, ballet. And then there's tap dancing. I love to tap.

So...I'm larking through the Baby Gap, looking at tiny capri pants and sweaters that cost more than ... I don't know,more than they should. And I get totally sucked in by this ridiculous, tiny fur coat. The kind of coat a baby might need to go to the ballet. In Moscow. In 1918. To match her tiny pearls.

The particular ballet was not so important as the fact that I was physically healthy, and capable of getting out there and dancing as often as possible.

My biggest downfall is my inner voice. Growing up as a dancer makes you very judgemental with yourself. You learn to look at yourself in the mirror and you criticise every line in your body. It's never perfect. I grew up with this because I had ballet every day in school.

I've got no plans to be a ballet dancer at the moment.

On the other hand, I think it is wonderful for everyone to take ballet classes, at any age. It gives you a discipline, it gives you a place to go. It gives you some control in your life.

I ended up training only for four years before I was accepted into American Ballet Theater in New York City.

In ballet, I felt that no matter how good I was, if I didn't have the right body type or if I didn't fit a certain mold there was nothing I could do.

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 in the air... Twin butterflies until, twice white They Meet, they mate

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

I know that I'll forever be involved in ballet. This is where my life was meant to be, and I don't see myself straying completely away, ever.

I hated the ballet, but I liked performing. I did 20 shows, and I couldn't get the smile off my face.

If a boxer ever went as crazy as Nijinsky all the wowsers in the world would be screaming 'punch-drunk.' Well, who hit Nijinsky? And why isn't there a campaign against ballet? It gives girls thick legs

You have to be able to cut off from the ballet and relax, or you have anxiety dreams at night, worrying about what you're going to dance the next day, going over every little detail.

Some people even think that I'm still just not right for it [ballet]. And I think it's shocking because they hear those words from critics saying I'm too bulky, I'm too busty. And then they meet me in person and they're like, you look like a ballerina. And I think it's just something maybe that I will never escape from, those people who are narrow-minded. But my mission, my voice, my story, my message, is not for them. And I think it's more important to think of the people that I am influencing and helping to see a broader picture of what beauty is.

I've won my last four matches by knockout. Out of 30 fights, I've won more than 20 by knockout. I think that a ballet dancer wouldn't win by knockout.

I started taking ballet lessons when I was three and a half and I still take dance classes.

I wanted to give people - which is fairly bizarre considering my whole life is contemporary dance really - I wanted to give people a really fulfilling sense that they had seen a white classical ballet - in a very pure form.

I feel like I represent every young dancer, and even non-dancer, who felt they were not accepted by the ballet world. I'd like to think that they can see themselves in me.

I used to dance when I was younger - ballet and modern dance.

I was a protege; by the age of 10, I was studying with ballet choreographer Anthony Tudor in a class of adults.

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.

Well, that's why I really love Diego Della Valle, because he's crazy. Instead of going out to find a top business school graduate, for whom it would have taken five years to see the difference between a ballet shoe and a book, he asked me to revive the label. It's a bit like Balenciaga. Brands like Vivier are pillars - they are monuments of fashion; they are names we don't forget. But the general public doesn't necessarily know that and therefore we had to get the name re-known.

I just stay healthy all year round. I try to feel good in my skin. For me, I have trained in ballet my whole life so my body really feels best when I feel strong and tight and toned, and I think that comes from years and years of constant training as a ballerina. Leading up to the show, getting out there in your underwear, you just want to feel your best mainly in your head than more anything else. Obviously you want to feel good physically too, so it's more just in your head, pushing yourself, approaching this challenge and taking the opportunity to push yourself a little further.

Transplanting the ballet to the United States is like trying to raise a palm tree in Dakota.

I have been curious about the mind and body for as long as I can remember. I was a gymnast, a ballet dancer, and a philosophy and physical therapy major. Following the thread of curiosity about mind and body, I took my first yoga class in 1980 and knew from the start that it would be a lifelong passion.

Pilates is my favorite core strengthener. I do it three or four times a week. With all the strengthening and lengthening, it's like ballet. Plus, you get to do it lying down!

My life isn’t theories and formulae. It’s part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I’ve absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone… from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature.

For 24 hours a day, for 10 years, all I thought about was being in a band. That's all I did. I had no other social life. I don't want my life to be like that now. I've spent the past 10 years having a real life as well. But Spandau Ballet is such a difficult shadow to outrun.

I thought I'm going to die. So why can't I do everything? And what is this idea that I worked all day yesterday, so I'm tired today? I've never believed that.I thought, "Just suppose I could choreograph a ballet." And I did it. Suppose I could teach dance at the theater in Cleveland. And I did it. Suppose I could sing for a living - that I could stop these two jobs as a waitress and a salesperson.

People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin.

Ballet is an incredibly difficult, beautiful art form that takes a lot of training, a lot of time, and a lot of hard work.

Ballet teaches you how to hold yourself.

The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade.

It's very easy to become selfish and narrow-minded and see ballet as the only thing in life, but there's lots more.