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The Quotes

Humans are measured not through their words but their deeds.
The abstraction of deeds is dance itself.

~ Chinvat – the Ninth Bridge
Winner − Special Jury Award, Hungarian Pan Art Festival
(from the promotional flyer)

In life as in dance:
Grace glides on blistered feet.

~ Alice Abrams

Beside the fire, as the wood burns black,
a laughing dancer in veils of light,
whose dance transforms the darkness to gold.

~ Adu Abd Allan ben Abi-l-Khisal ben Abi-l-Khisal

He who cannot dance will say: The drum is bad.

~ African Proverb

If you can talk, you can sing.
If you can walk, you can dance.

~ African Proverb

   The mother of the dance is the melody because she gives you everything,
   tells you everything you need to know, like a mother.
   The father of the dance is the rhythm and he is the strong one,
   the leader, the authority − as a father should be!

       ~ Tayyar Akdeniz

Dance is for everybody.
I believe that the dance came from the people
 and that it should always be delivered back to the people.

~ Alvin Ailey

There is such a difference when you're dancing to music you really love,
when there is this meeting of music and dancer that fuses into one.
Those are the experiences we live for.

~ Aisha Ali

They follow me and I never know what I'm going to do.
I lead them through a variety of dance experiences,
and at these times, I'm no longer myself. I'm like a go-between.
When I hear certain pieces of music, I project myself into the place and
time where I saw a particular dancer. Then I become that performer.

~ Aisha Ali

A dancer should learn from all the arts. Go to museums and look at the paintings.
See how they balance things. Everything you do in the arts enriches you.

~ Alicia Alonso

This new form of dialogue that is bringing us to the art
to which I have dedicated my life,
is rooted in the deepest and most beautiful part of being human.
{Que esta nueva forma de diálogo nos siga acercando a un arte
al que he consagrado mi vida,
y que está enraizado en lo más profundo y bello del ser humano.}

~ Alicia Alonso

When you are ecstatic and in love, you feel buoyant, you feel life,
you feel like you're dancing in the sky.

~ Margo Anand

It’s true of all great artists that the more you see, the more you want to see.

~ Peter Anastos, choreographer

Everything in the universe has rhythm.
Everything dances.

~ Maya Angelou

Dance is a life, everyday.  don't miss it.
You're in bodies, you can move... Where is your joy?

~ Mary Anthony

Dance is a sort of silent rhetoric.

~ Canon Thoinot Arbeau

The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art,
art of the muscle sense. The awareness of tension and relaxation
within his own body, the sense of balance that distinguishes
the proud stability of the vertical from the risky adventures of
thrusting and falling – these are the tools of the dancer.

~ Rudolf Arnheim

The choreographer cannot deliberately make a ballet to appeal to an audience,
he has to start from personal inspirations. He has to trust the ballet,
to let it stand on its own strengths or fall on its weaknesses.
If it reaches the audience, then he is lucky that round!

~ Gerald Arpino

Dancing allows me to explore myself in so many ways,
to learn about my limitations and strengths, my ability
to cope with adversity and to go farther than I thought I could.
You find out what you're made of.

~ Andrew Asnes

Dancing is a sweat job.

~ Fred Astaire

Do it big, do it right, and do it with style.

~ Fred Astaire

I am bit sending messages with my feet.
All I ever wanted was not to come up empty.
I did it for the dough and the old applause.

~ Fred Astaire

I have no desire to prove anything by dancing.
I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself.

~ Fred Astaire

If the dance is right,
there shouldn't be a single superfluous movement.

~ Fred Astaire

I'm just a hoofer with a spare set of tails.

~ Fred Astaire

Slippery stages were the terror of my life.

~ Fred Astaire

Some people seem to think that good dancers are born,
but all the good dancers I have known are taught or trained.

~ Fred Astaire

The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed.
Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style.

~ Fred Astaire

This search for what you want is like
tracking something that doesn't want to be tracked.
It takes time to get a dance right,
to create something memorable.

~ Fred Astaire

I'd rather dance as a ballerina,
though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

~ Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle

Anyone who has a child today should train him
to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

~ (Wystan Hugh) W. H. Auden

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters.
Dance, dance, dance – till you drop.

~ (Wystan Hugh) W. H. Auden

All the dancer's gestures are signs of things,
and the dance called rational,
because it aptly signifies and displays
something over and above
the pleasure of the senses.

~ Saint Augustine

I praise the dance, for it frees people
from the heaviness of matter and binds the isolated to community.
I praise the dance, which demands everything:
health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul.
Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people,
who are in constant danger of becoming all brain, will, or feeling.
Dancing demands a whole person,
one who is firmly anchored in the center of his life,
who is not obsessed by lust for people and things
and the demon of isolation in his own ego.
Dancing demands a freed person,
one who vibrates with the equipoise of all his powers.
I praise the dance.
O man, learn to dance,
or else the angels in heaven will not know what to do with you.

~ Saint Augustine

(Dance is)...a whole system of concepts, images, words, and practices,
some of them ritual ones. One cannot possibly understand a part of the whole,
if isolated from the remaining parts of that whole... dancing makes sense
along with music... along with the nostalgia evoked, memories from the past
together with a given way of visualizing the world...

~ Maria Susana Azzi

When you take dancing lessons,
you learn steps and you learn steps and you learn steps.
It can go on for a long time.
And then one day, you just learn to dance,
and it is so different.

~ Bill Austin

Fine dancing, I believe like virtue, must be its own reward.
Those who are standing by are usually thinking of something very different.

~ Jane Austen

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely.
Instances have been known of young people passing many,
many months successively, without being at any ball of any description,
and no material injury accrue either to body or mind;
but when a beginning is made – when the felicities of rapid motion
have been once, though slightly felt –
it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.

~ Jane Austen

A dance is a measured pace,
as a verse is a measured speech.

~ Sir Francis Bacon

The heart of the dance is the heart of the dancer.

~ Ghazallah al-Badriyyah

A violinist had a violin, a painter his palette.
All I had was myself.
I was the instrument that I must care for.

~ Josephine Baker

Ballet dancing is arduous, strenuous activity.
Students are engaged in physical training that rivals the training Olympic athletes undergo.
At the same time, they strive for physical perfection not for the prowess alone
but as a way of achieving the means necessary to express the pure nature of their art.

~ George Balanchine

Georgy Melitonovich Balanchivadze

Джорджи Мелитонович Баланчивэйдз

Ballet is important and significant – yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.

~ George Balanchine

(Choreography) is simpler than you think.
Just go and do, and don't think so much about it.
Just make something interesting.

~ George Balanchine

Dance is music made visible.

    ~ George Balanchine

Dancers are instruments,
like a piano the choreographer plays.

~ George Balanchine

First comes the sweat.  Then comes the beauty
if you're very lucky and have said your prayers.

~ George Balanchine

God creates, I do not create.
I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it –
from what I see, from what the dancers can do,
from what others do...

~ George Balanchine

I am a cloud – in trousers.

~ George Balanchine

I could never make a ballet by wrinkling my brow and concentrating.
If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece,
how will you ever get it finished?

~ George Balanchine

I don't want people who want to dance,
I want people who have to dance.

~ George Balanchine

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell ...
we can't dance synonyms.

~ George Balanchine

In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts.
God made men to sing the praises of women.
They are not equal to men: They are better.

~ George Balanchine

It's like the time capsule with everything in it.
Or like the seed that when you plant it,
becomes the enormous tree with leaves and fruit.
Everybody was in that little seed, and so everything can open.
The tree of dance is like that. It just takes a long, long time to blossom.

~ George Balanchine

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

~ George Balanchine

My muse must come to me on union time.

~ George Balanchine

One is born to be a dancer.  No teacher can work miracles,
nor will years of training make a good dancer of an untalented pupil.
One may be able to acquire a certain technical facility,
but no one can ever acquire an exceptional talent.'
I have never prided myself on having an unusually gifted pupil.
A Pavlova is no one's pupil but God's.

~ George Balanchine

Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story;
a man and two girls, there's already a plot.

~ George Balanchine

Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman,
always alert, always tense, but see,
policemen don't have to be beautiful at the same time.

~ George Balanchine

The ballet is a purely female thing;
it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers,
and man is the gardener.

~ George Balanchine

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

~ George Balanchine

The mirror is not you.
The mirror is you looking at yourself.

~ George Balanchine

Balanchine, on approving a dancer's technique:

You know how to do battement tendu.

~ George Balanchine

You haven't got anything to dance about
until you're over thirty-five anyway.

~ Bert Balladine

What do you dance?

~ Traditional African Bantu greeting to a member of another Bantu tribe

Technique is what you need to do to dance well,
principally to make it feel good to your partner.
Style is everything else you do when you dance,
hopefully to make it look good
to your partner, and your audience.

~ David Barker

Dance has become an exclusionary enterprise.
To participate, one must be thinner than thin,
of pleasing form, flexible, athletic and young.
If you are not all these things,
you will be allowed to dance
in the privacy of your own living room.
You just wouldn't dare to put yourself onstage.

~ Clive Barnes

One of the few things in dance to match the
Royal Ballet's curtain calls
is the Royal Ballet's dancing.

~ Clive Barnes

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

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov
Mikhaïl Nikolaevitch Baryshnikov
Михаил Николаевич Барышников

If your only dance experience is the Nutcracker, it will be a shock;
hopefully shocking in a good way.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

It doesn't matter how high you lift your leg.
The technique is about transparency, simplicity, making an earnest attempt.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

I do not try to dance better than anyone else.
I only try to dance better than myself.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

I like the most provocative
and most surprising partnerships on stage.
Intensity and surprise.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

I want to see people dance, and I would like
to guess what kind of people they are.
I don't want to know the recipe for their pasta.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

Just sit and open your eyes and open your heart.
It's dance theater.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know
that we all should have been in another business.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

The problem is not making up the steps but deciding which ones to keep.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows
he has to bring something to the stage from within himself.
He has to put in something in order to be able to take something.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

To achieve some depth in your field requires a lot of sacrifices.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

We're trying to stretch our muscles creatively.
It gives us so much more freedom.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

What brought me to the theater,
no matter you're a Jew or a Russian or Armenian or Latvian,
are suddenly illuminated by stage light
and one beautiful image of dance.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

You can be totally involved, you could admire just the shape of
or you could be totally emotionally mushed up into the dance.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

Even when she walks
one would believe that she dances.
{Même quand elle marche
on croirait qu'elle danse.}

~ Charles Baudelaire

There are short-cuts to happiness,
and dancing is one of them.

~ Vicki Baum

Dance first. Think later.
It's the natural order.

~ Samuel Beckett

In the dance, one finds the cinema, the comic strips, the Olympic hundred
meters and swimming, and what's more, poetry, love and tenderness.
{Dans la danse, on retrouve à la fois le cinéma, les bandes dessinées, le cent
mètres olympiques, la natation, avec, en plus, la poésie, l'amour, la tendresse.}

~ Maurice Béjart

The dance:
a minimum of explanation,
a minimum of anecdotes,
and a maximum of sensations.
{La danse, un minimum d'explication, un
minimum d'anecdotes, et un maximum de sensations.}

~ Maurice Béjart

There are two ways of being creative.
One can sing and dance.
Or one can create an environment
in which singers and dancers flourish.

~ Warren G. Bennis

Leaders must encourage their organizations
to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.

~ Warren G. Bennis

There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them,
those who only dance to their own rhythm,
and those who don't dance at all.

~ José Bergamín

Let's face the music and dance.

~ Irving Berlin

A silent figure is the dancer, true but still,
words become dance, and all things there express'd.

~ André Bjerke

God respects us when we work,
but he loves us when we dance.

~ Les Blanc (also attributed as a Sufi saying)

A correct execution of an adagio
is the ne plus ultra of our art;
and I look on it as the touch-stone of the dancer.

~ Carlo Blasis

What is dance? I am dancing all the time.
Every gesture, the body line of every pose,
the way I get from place to place, the movement in the acting –
none of it would be the way it is if I weren't a dancer.

~ Ray Bolger

Nothing happens in the body
without happening in the brain first...
dancing is 95% mental.

~ Bobby Boling, A Dancer's Manual

Let us keep the dance of rain our fathers kept
and tread our dreams beneath the jungle sky.

~ Arna Bontemps

Ballet is not technique
but a way of expression that comes more closely
to the inner language of man than any other.

~ George Borodin

While I dance, I cannot judge,
I cannot hate, I cannot separate myself from life.
I can only be joyful and whole.
That is why I dance.

~ Hans Bos

All dance is about sensual expression. It is about energy and vitality,
and it is one of the most liberating activities available to us.

~ Wendy Bounaventura

I'm always very true to the music
and I honour the music in the way I see it.

~ Matthew Bourne

It is not so much upon the number of exercises,
as the care with which they are done,
that progress and skill depend.

~ August Bournonville

The beauty to which the Dance ought to aspire
is not dependent upon taste or pleasure,
but is founded on the immutable laws of Nature.

~ August Bournonville

Artists lead unglamorous daily lives of discipline and routine,
but their work is full of passion.
Each has a vision and feels responsibility to that vision.

~ Merryl Brockway

Love is a lot like dancing;
you just surrender to the music.

~ Pierce Brosnan

I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance,
and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.

~ Louise Brooks

Movement without meaning is just exercise.

~ Marie Brooks

Opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor.

~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.

~ James Brown

James Brown lives,
as long as someone steps out of their body
and dances uncontrollably.

~ Rev. Al Sharpton
(Speaking to the crowd, at James Brown's induction
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

I don’t want to feel a shoe; I want the shoe to become part of me.

~ Leslie Browne

A child sings before it speaks,
dances almost before it walks,
music is with us from the beginning.

~ Pamela Brown

Dance can give the inarticulate a voice.

~ Pamela Brown

The human animal dances wildest
on the edge of the grave.

~ Rita Mae Brown

Dance every performance as if it were your last.

~ Erik Bruhn

The call to dance is a response to a primitive urge to rhythmic motion.
It is an unavoidable internal rhythm of life.

~ Dorothy Buck

Body language is a very powerful tool...
80% of what you understand in a conversation
is read through the body, not the words.

~ Deborah Bull

I enjoy the freedom of modern dance
as well as the constraints of classical dance.

~ Deborah Bull

So if the dance is five minutes long,
make yourself run for perhaps eight minutes.
That way, you over-train and the dance will seem easier...

~ Deborah Bull

I think it's useful to experience other types of dance and other cultures,
and the life of a classical dancer these days is certainly not all tutus!
So experience of other dance forms is a good idea.

~ Deborah Bull

It's not magic! It's physics.
The speed of the turn is what keeps you upright.

~ Deborah Bull

You can't reduce lactic acid, but you can increase your tolerance to it.
I do this through running or cycling, but it's a good idea
to match your training bout to the type of dance you do.

~ Deborah Bull

Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives...
So train the whole person, not just the dancer.

~ Deborah Bull

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.

~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Our profession creates illusions.
It is not a matter of having a perfect body,
but of dancing in such a way as to look perfect.

~ Wilheim Burmann

Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable.

~ Frederich Busch

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

~ Darcey Bussell

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.

~ Darcey Bussell

On with the dance!  Let joy be unconfined.

~ Lord George Gordon Byron

Though I soon became typecast in Hollywood as a gangster and hoodlum,
I was originally a dancer, an Irish hoofer, trained in vaudeville tap dance.
I always leapt at the opportunity to dance in films later on.

~ James Cagney

Kind are her answers,
But her performance keeps no day;
   Breaks time, as dancers
From their own Music when they stray.

~ Thomas Campion

The further off from England the nearer is to France –
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.

~ Lewis Carroll

Dance then wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
and I'll lead you all.

~ Sydney Carter

Classical dancing is like being a mother:
if you've never done it,
you can't imagine how hard it is.

~ Harriet Cavalli

You're not here by mistake.  Someone at your audition
watched you dance and saw something special.
All you've gotta do is figure out how to find that again.

~ Center Stage

To dance is to be out of yourself and in yourself at the same time.
Those whom you encompass need only to look...
because they are inside of you when you dance.

~ Eva Cernik

I use dancing to embellish, extend or enlarge upon an existing emotion.

~ Gower Champion

The really great dancer is perhaps a rarer phenomenon
than great musicians, painters or sculptors.
This is because dance is a consummation of all these arts.
The dancer, in addition to the qualities that pure dance demands,
must be sensitive to and have an uncanny ear for music,
must have a painter’s sensibility to the significant line,
a sculptor’s approach to form, an architect’s vision of space
and a trained actor’s responses to dramatic situations.

~ K. Subhas Chandran

If their feet aren't in the right place, at least their hearts are.

~ Christian M. Chensvold, on novices

Until you're ready to look foolish,
you'll never have the possibility of being great.

~ Cher

One may judge a king by the state of dancing during his reign.

~ Chinese proverb

Dance is movement, and movement is life.
{La danse, c'est le mouvement, et le mouvement, c'est la vie.}
~ Ludmilla Chiriaeff

Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself.
Before you can move their tears, your own must flow.
To convince them, you must yourself believe.

~ Winston Churchill

Hardly any man dances when sober, unless he is insane.
Nor does he dance while alone, nor at a respectable and moderate party.
Dancing is the final phase of a wild party
with fancy decorations and a multitude of delights.
{Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi insanit, neque in solitudine
neque in convivio moderato et honesto. Tempestivi convivi,
amoeni loci, multarum deliciarum comes est extrema saltatio.}
~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Murena

Dancing is at once rational and healthful:
it gives animal spirits;
it is the natural amusement of young people,
and such it has been from the days of Moses.

~ William Cobbett

As an American, the first thing I noticed about British dancers
was their intellectual response to movement. In countries like Israel, the USA,
Australia and South Africa, the approach is much more athletic. People spend
a lot of time outdoors,  and play sports in clothing that exposes the body.
Northern Europeans tend to be more introverted – more covered up in every sense.

~ Robert Cohan

Fantasy is a reality you can dance to.

~ Richard  Cohen

We have no adequate conception
of the perfection of the ancient tragic dance.
The pleasure which the Greeks received from it
had for its basis difference; and the more unfit the vehicle,
the more lively was the curiosity & intense the delights
at seeing the difficulty overcome.

~ S. T. Coleridge

How inimitably graceful children are in general –
before they learn to dance.

~ S. T. Coleridge

To dance is to affirm.

~ Bayard Coll

The dance is the mother of all languages.

~ R. G. Collingwood

Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.

~ Confucius

Dancing is like dreaming with your feet!

~ Constanze

Do you love me – now that I can dance?

~ Pop song and lyric by The Contours

It's that vision of freedom you create
when you're defying physical law...

~ Bart Cook, NYCB

Dancers dance through their pain
I shrink from mine.

~ Mason Cooley

Ballet is only good when it is great.

~ Arlene Croce

Good choreography fuses eye, ear and mind.

~ Arlene Croce

If Balanchine had any secret, it was one that has endured
through two hundred years of classical ballet.
It is that dancing correctly in three dimensions, on the music,
creates the fourth dimension of meaning.

~ Arlene Croce

It is through strength of technique that the body stays in possession of music.

~ Arlene Croce, on Balanchine’s philosophy

1. Beginning Dancer: knows nothing.
2. Intermediate Dancer: knows everything; too good to dance with beginners.
3. Hotshot Dancer: too good to dance with anyone.
4. Advanced Dancer: dances everything, especially with beginners.

~ Dick Crum

The most important thing about folk dance in its original setting
is that it gives the dancer an opportunity to express both
the identity with a society
and the dancer's place within that society.

~ Dick Crum

Instead of seeing the rug being pulled from under us,
we can learn to dance on a shifting carpet.

~ Thomas Crum

i'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

~ (edward estlin) e. e. cummings

An art process in not essentially
a natural process; it is an invented one.
It can take actions of organization from the way nature functions,
but essentially man invents the process. And from or for that process
he derives a discipline to make and keep the process functioning.
That discipline too is not a natural process. The daily discipline,
the continued keeping of the elasticity of the muscles,
the continued control of the mind over the body’s actions,
the constant hoped-for flow of the spirit into physical movement,
both new and renewed, is not a natural way.
It is unnatural in its demands on all the sources of energy.
But the final synthesis can be a natural one, natural in the sense that
the mind, body and spirit function as one.

~ Merce Cunningham

The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion,,
the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor
that makes the class work not a gymnastic hour and a half,
or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery,
but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline
to become moments of dancing too ...

~ Merce Cunningham

The only way to do it is to do it.

~ Merce Cunningham

A dance legacy must be performed in order to be preserved

~ Ann Daly

Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing.
It's the rhythm of your life.
It’s the expression in time and movement,
in happiness, joy, sadness and envy.

~ Jacques d'Amboise

Enjoy the process of learning to dance.
The process of our profession,
and not its final achievement,
is the heart and soul of dance.

~ Jacques d'Amboise

Because ballet can seem remote onstage – glittering, exquisite,
perfect and not quite real – Anne Belle puts her viewers in the
studio and backstage to see the exacting physical and mental demands
of the art, the sweat and the grueling repetition. Once brought
down to earth, ballet becomes something we can all relate to:
a tension-fraught and inspiring human quest to conquer the impossible.

~ Dance Magazine

... The dancer not be separated from the dance,
she also cannot be separated from the history of dancing,
from the line of dancers and teachers leading to her.

~ The Dancer and the Dance (film)

You can't see a painter or a writer or a musician if you just look at them,
but you can see a dancer in a child if they've studied ballet for a year.

~ The Dancer and the Dance (film)

It's not just for its influence on us, but to knowknow
that we can play a part in it, to understand the influence
that we have outside our own existence.

~ Siobhan Davies

The dance world is too small in lots of ways – it's too intense,
it rattles around itself, and it needs exposing to other ideas.

~ Siobhan Davies

To understand the culture, study the dance.
To understand the dance,
study the people.

~ Chuck Davis

Tap dancing all started with the old clog waltz.

~ Sammy Davis, Jr.

Dance – an art form. The body – an instrument.
Learn to play the instrument and master the art form.

~ Debbie Dee

The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart.
Something heroic and remote.

~ Edgar Degas

Locked in this dance is a secret language that tells the story
of women's lives... their passions and their spirituality, their sacrifices,
their joys, their intuitions, their emotional life drama.

~ Delilah

Ballet technique is arbitrary and very difficult.
It never becomes easy... it becomes possible.

~ Agnes de Mille

But remember that intent is everything.
One does not just jump, one lifts into the air, one rises.
In the same way the lifted leg of an arabesque becomes a wing,
and not a mechanical leverage like a raised trap door.
This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics.
The dancer tries to express something;
the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds.
The acrobat is lost in a web of muscles
the dancer is all but invisible in projected idea.

~ Agnes de Mille

Dance constitutes a true recapturing of...
freedom and childish play.

~ Agnes de Mille

Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer,
or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.

~ Agnes de Mille

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times.

~ Agnes de Mille

The artist never entirely knows. We guess.
We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

~ Agnes de Mille

The effort involved in making a dancer's body
is so long and relentless, in many instances painful,
the effort to maintain the technique so grueling
that unless a certain satisfaction is derived
from the disciplining and the punishing,
the pace could not be maintained.

~ Agnes de Mille

The practice mirror is to be used
for the correction of faults,
not for a love affair,
and the figure you watch
should not become your dearest friend.

~ Agnes de Mille

The truest expression of a people
is in its dance and in its music.
Bodies never lie.

~ Agnes de Mille

The universe lies before you on the floor, in the air,
in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind.
From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.

~ Agnes de Mille

When you perform you are out of your self
larger and more potent, more beautiful.
You are for minutes heroic.
This is power.
This is is glory on earth.
And it is yours for the taking.

~ Agnes de Mille

Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter,
second only to screaming.

~ Agnes de Mille

When I dance I am really meditating
rather then performing for an audience.
I am completely absorbed by the music
and the steps I choose to respond to the music.

~ Agnes de Mille

All Ballets' fundamental steps are derived
from the folk dances of Western Europe.

~ Dame Ninette de Valois

Diaghilev was the first to notice
good character dancers and that sort of thing.

~ Dame Ninette de Valois

First of all, the most important, that is to learn
everything good that has survived from other times,
and carefully to watch the bad – and throw it out.

~ Dame Ninette de Valois

Nothing is done easily,
first have the thing, then the thing has a success,
then all sorts of difficulties arise through the success.

~ Dame Ninette de Valois

We are developing the other parts,
and we can't give quite all our attention to the upper part,
but soon the lower parts will be developed,
and the upper part and the lower part will become partners,
that will be wonderful.