Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When we go in the ring we know we're going to get hit. We know we're not the ballet people. But if you go in there and have doubt in your mind that you're afraid to get hit, forget it.
Ballet is certainly appreciated in New York, but it has been a part of the Russian culture, history and heritage for hundreds of years, so it's much more instilled in the Russian blood.
I was a dancer for long time. And you always hear that ballet is the core of dance, and that - once you have that down - you can do everything else. For me, jazz is like that for music.
My parents were ballet dancers, and I did a lot of ballet, too, so I think I learned quite early on how to hold my body. Although I do recall desperately wishing I was shorter at school.
I started dancing ballet when I was very young, so my background really is dance. But I remember loving the feeling of being on a stage and having a love for performing from a young age.
I take ballet class as often as possible - up to 5 times a week - and try to go to the gym on the days that I don't take class. I also do a floor barre/Pilates mat class almost everyday.
I would love to work with Joanna Newsom on a ballet. I think that would be amazing. She has a gift for orchestrating and composing, and I think she would be really engaging to work with.
Ballet might be too formal of a title for the type of dance I do, but I love to dance. I love to draw and paint; I do ceramics and photography. I'm interested in a lot of creative stuff.
I skate about 15 to 20 hours a week and also incorporate a lot of off-ice training. I take ballet and Pilates classes and lift weights with my physical therapist when I'm not on the ice.
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.
As for the once-revolutionary 'Agon,' after more than half a century, its lessons and revelations have been so absorbed into the language of ballet that it now seems almost conventional.
I was really creative. I started to dance very young. I loved to dance. I begged my mother to put me into dance classes, and finally, in third grade, she did. Tap and jazz, but not ballet.
The thing about ballet that I never knew about is that it's one of the most excruciating sports that I've ever been a part of. I say sports because they train constantly, every single day.
I know a lot of choreographers prefer to do abstract dance and not be bothered with a story, but even when I'm asked to do classical ballet or a modern piece, I still want to tell a story.
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.
I did ballet as a child and started again seven years ago. I love that you hear this exquisite music, and for a moment, you feel like a thing of beauty; it's changed my awareness of my body.
When I was 12, I was doing competitive jazz, tap and ballet in Michigan. The studio put the best dancers together, and I joined that. We always did really, really well in local competitions.
Growing up in Niagara Falls, Ontario, I took classes as a young girl and became very serious about ballet, and also performed with a local company, although it wasn't a professional company.
I just realized I wanted to do more than ballet. I was offered an apprenticeship, so I was about to join a company and drop out of high school, and then it hit me: I didn't want that anymore.
As a professional ballet dancer, I have to accept that weekends are about work. The notion of a leisurely break with all the buzz and excitement of a Friday night simply doesn't exist for me.
Dad is a skilled athlete and runs his own football school for kids. While football is his entire life and he encouraged us to play, he still found time to take me to ballet and tennis lessons.
I grew up with classical music when I was a ballet dancer. Now when I have to prepare an emotional scene, to cry or whatever, I listen to sonatas. Vivaldi and stuff. It's just beautiful to me.
I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.
I was born in Toronto and studied with the National Ballet of Canada. I went to school to study dance, slept on the floor, ate nothing, waitressed - and then there was a Mary J. Blige audition.
Culture in America and everywhere else comes from the suffering, from those who don't want the old ways. They want to bring in the new, whether it's the ballet, when it started, or Shakespeare.
I had never picked up a basketball before. I went through a grueling audition process. It was almost as if I was learning to walk. It would be like teaching somebody to dance ballet for a role.
I think 'Ballet Shoes' was a very pivotal role for me. I was about 14 then, and it was an incredible cast: Eileen Atkins, Victoria Wood, Emilia Fox, Harriet Walters. All these incredible women.
I think American Ballet Theatre is setting that standard now for classical ballet, that you can dream big, and it doesn't matter what you look like, where you come from, what your background is.
I was the oldest of the children in my family. I had to do a lot of diaper-changing and lunch-making. I was taking my little sister to ballet, picking up my brother, sort of being a super-nanny.
It's hard to change someone's ideas when they might not even really consciously know that they're being racist, or have racist ideas, just because ballet has been this way for hundreds of years.
As I got older, I started to do it more and more, and I wanted to learn all of the different types. I grew up doing modern, so I wanted to learn ballet, tap, jazz, and African - just everything.
My mom devised a plan to get me out of the house and gave me the choice between ballet or skating. She knew both of those sports were time-consuming and would keep me busy with hours of practice.
Ballet requires movements which are very unnatural. With every step, you do a circular movement of the hip. You turn out from the hip and make your knees point out to the side instead of forward.
The colors of 'The Nutcracker' ballet score have become a part of the vocabulary of film music. It's where so much of the 19th-century romantic music that I call upon as a film composer is rooted.
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 wake up every morning, and I go to ballet class no matter what's going on the night before. That's my priority, and that's what makes me feel sane and not removed from the realities of my world.
My grandmother had a Miss Margaret's School of Dance to teach tap and ballet to kids, but I never studied it. I was raised a Mormon and they're dancing fools. It's the only vice they have - dancing.
I was completely broke, so I started saying yes to everything. I said yes to a woman who approached me about shooting the Dracula ballet, even though I felt like I was probably going to sabotage it.
What I find funny are peoples' blind spots. That's the funniest thing about anybody - when they just don't realize who they are. What's funny about seeing a hippo do ballet is it thinks it's a swan.
We determine whether a book is for boys or girls long before the reader gets a chance to decide: we package them with soldiers and ballet slippers on their covers, war machines and glittering gowns.
Ballet found me. I was discovered by a teacher in middle school. I always danced, my whole life. I never had any training, never was exposed to seeing dance, but I always had something inside of me.
When you are on stage in front of an audience, you want to engage the entire crowd. If a thousand people are in the theater, you need to dance a thousand different ways, not one-thousandth of a way.
I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do.
I actually was a ballet dancer - I studied ballet from three until 13 - but like very seriously, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a contemporary ballet dancer. I wanted to go to Juilliard.
I began with dance, doing ballet at 3, then tap, jazz, modern. Then I sang in church choirs, learned how to play clarinet and drums, sang with rock bands and only then did I get into musical theatre.
I didn't grow up on dance class. I was always natural. I've been in the industry since I was eight and I've always had a choreographer since then. But I never really took ballet or anything like that.
It'd be very difficult to cast me as a ballet dancer. Everybody is, in some sense, controlled by their size and their gender. I'm not going to be allowed to play the part that Denzel Washington plays.
I started taking ballet lessons when I was 4, and I was performing in ballet companies when I was 10, and I did summer stock in Miami Beach when I was 12, and finally I said, 'I gotta go to Broadway.'
A lot of people have a lot of faith in Karole Armitage. They see her as bold, inventive, indefatigable. 'America isn't working out? There's always Europe. Ballet? No? Go modern. Keep going! Show 'em!'
In swimming at my level it's about control of the small movements. A good ballet dancer floats across the stage, the best sprinters virtually abolish gravity. All motion occurs in the right direction.