#ballet

In the world of classical ballet there are only a handful of story ballets, so getting a new one is cause for excitement. ↗

— Karen Kain

#ballets #cause #classical #excitement #getting

There's nothing like the force and challenge of a new ballet to galvanize everyone involved in bringing it to life. ↗

— Karen Kain

#bringing #challenge #everyone #force #involved

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. ↗

— Gary Kemp

#ballet #band #being #day #did

The first year with ABT I learned 13 new roles. Most were lengthy ballets, more complicated than I was used to. I have suffered from tendinitis since I was 13, and it flared up again until the pain was paralyzing. There were times I prayed I'd be sick so I wouldn't have to go on. ↗

— Gelsey Kirkland

#ballets #complicated #first #go #i

A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things. ↗

— Twyla Tharp

#beginning #between #dance #i #insisted

I have ballet class every other day for two hours. And for "Six Feet Under", last week there was a sequence where I had to do a whole choreographed dance number, so I had four hours of dance practice every day. ↗

— Michelle Trachtenberg

#choreographed #class #dance #day #every

There would never have been a British Ballet without Diaghilev. He had a wonderful influence. ↗

— Ninette de Valois

#been #british #had #influence #never

Slashing its way to the finish line, 'Black Swan' is the first ballet movie for highbrow horror fans for whom ballet itself signifies little to nothing. Those of us who know and love ballet can only look on it with a different kind of horror. ↗

— James Wolcott

#black #different #different kind #fans #finish

. Classic Ballet, Keep away, keep building your creaky fairy castles, keep cloning clones and meaningless manners, hang on to your beanstalk ballerinas and their midget male shadows, run yourself out of business with your tons of froufrou and costly clattery toe shoes that ruin all chances for illusions of lightness, keep on crowding the minds of blind balletomanes who prefer dainty poses to the eloquent strength of momentum, who have forgotten or never known the manings of gesture, who would nod their noses to barefoot embargos ("so grab me" spelt backwards). Continue to repolish your stiff technique and to ignore a public that hungers for something other than a bag of tricks and the empty-headedness of surface patterns. Just keep it up, keep imitating yourself, and, , go grow your own dance makers. Come on, don't keep trying to filter modern ones through your so-safe extablishment. We're to be seen undiluted, undistorted, not absorbed by your hollow world like blood into a sponge. Yours truly, A Different Leaf on Our Family Tree . ↗

— Paul Taylor

#classic-ballet #letter #business

He can hum the music in his old man's quivering voice, but he prefers it in his head, where it lives on in violins and reedy winds. If he imagines it in rehearsal he can remember every step of his three-minute solo as if he had danced it only yesterday, but he knows, too, that one time, onstage in Berlin, he had not danced it as he had learned it; this much he knows but cannot recreate, could no recreate it even a moment after he had finished dancing it. While dancing he had felt blind to the stage and audience, deaf to the music. He had let his body do what it needed to do, free to expand and contract in space, to soar and spin. So, accordingly, when he tries to remember the way he danced it on stage, he cannot hear the music or feel his feet or get a sense of the audience. He is embryonic, momentarily cut off from the world around him. The three most important minutes of his life, the ones that determined his fate and future, are the three to which he cannot gain access, ever. ↗

— Evan Fallenberg

#dance #dancing #forgetting #memories #memory