#ballet

I went away when I was 9 to a ballet school. I thought I wanted to be a dancer, but eight years of ballet cured me of that. ↗

— Juliet Mills

#ballet #cured #dancer #eight #i

In the Thirties, when I was in New York, I did the first surrealistic ballet in a show of mine. ↗

— Vincente Minnelli

#did #first #i #mine #new

I grew up in the theater and danced ballet atrociously. ↗

— Maureen O'Hara

#danced #grew #i #theater #up

You can't drink on an eight hour flight, pass out, and then go onstage... well you can, but then you're Spandau Ballet. ↗

— Robert Smith

#drink #eight #flight #go #hour

The ballet makes us look at those bodies, it makes us listen to that music, it makes us wonder at the geometry, of the way they come together. The way that extraordinary space is controlled and given such emotional force. ↗

— John Guare

#bodies #come #controlled #emotional #extraordinary

A major assumption that underlies this selection is that it is only within work that is progressive, experimental or avant-garde that staid, old-fashioned images and ideas about gender can be challenged and alternatives imagined. I have never seen a ballet performance that has not disappointed me. ↗

— Ramsay Burt

#ballet #dance #experimental #gender #progressive

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. ↗

— Merce Cunningham

#dance #inspirational #merce-cunningham #inspirational

But he had never seen Myrna in practice...never that close up. He had been impressed and a little frightened by the contrast between seeing ballet on stange, where everyone seemed to either glide or mince effortlessly on the tips of their pointes. and seeing it from less than five feet away, with harsh daylight pouring in the floor-to-ceiling windows and no music- only the choreographer rythmically clapping his hands and yelling harsh criticisms. No praise, only criticisms. Their faces ran with sweat. Their leotards were wet with sweat. The room, as large and airy as it way, stank of sweat. Sleek muscles trembled and fluttered on the nervous edge of exhaustion. Corded tendons stood out like insulated cables. Throbbing veins popped out on foreheads and necks. Except for the choreographer's clapping and angry, hectoring shouts, the only sounds were the thrup-thud of ballet dancers on pointe moving across the floor and harsh, agonized panting for breath. Jack had suddenly realized that these dancers were not just earning a living, they were killing themselves. Most of all he remembered their expressions- all that exhausted concentration, all that pain... but transcending the pain, or at least creeping around its edges, he had seen joy. Joy was unmistakably what that look was, and it scared Jack because it had seemed inexplicable. ↗

— Stephen King

#music

Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important. ↗

— Mikhail Baryshnikov

#ballet #every #given #important #me

I have been very lucky to work in so many new ballets, but that is what a dancer's work is. ↗

— Mikhail Baryshnikov

#been #dancer #i #lucky #many