It’s a very insular world, ballet. I feel if I had stayed much longer, it would’ve consumed me. I performed six days a week and rehearsed 10-plus hours a day. And you only see the people that you work with.
Ballet companies have their ups and downs, just like the rest of us.
I took ballet when I was eight, like a lot of other people.
And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life – it lives in the constant present.
I keep starting supergroups, writing ballets and things like that.
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.
In the Thirties, when I was in New York, I did the first surrealistic ballet in a show of mine.
I love ballet because you can see how beautiful the body is.
Ballet really taught me so much about the power of movement.
I know that dancers, especially ballet dancers, can’t do it forever.
What really matters is that ‘Black Swan’ deploys and exaggerates all the cliches of earlier ballet movies, especially ‘The Red Shoes,’ another tale of a ballerina driven mad and suicidal.
I push myself hard. I don’t like pain, exactly, but as a ballerina, I lived in constant pain. At ballet school in Stockholm, I remember we had a locker where if someone had been to the doctor and gotten painkillers, we divided them among us. In a sense, we were all addicted.
I love street and I love ballet and I love to convey what I can.
The ballet world, it’s a crazy world.
I love how chic yet simple ballet style is for everyday dressing.
The only family I knew was the Royal Ballet and I didn’t feel I was part of it in a way. I moved up quite quickly so I didn’t make many friends. You are on your own in that sort of place.
I’m not completely trained in any one area – I’m not a tap person or a ballet person. I don’t have a big back-up of steps; I can’t just fall back on what I know.
I really wanted to make it as a ballet dancer to make my mom proud. But it didn’t happen.
All ballet galas are unbearable, but they’re unbearable in different ways.
I always knew I wanted to dance. I started ballet when I was three years old, and I just knew it was something that I loved and that I wanted to do.
I grew up wanting to be a ballet dancer.
I think it’s particularly stupid that filmmakers have traditionally said, ‘Yeah, I like baseball, but the movie’s not going to be about the intricacies of the game.’ I mean, you wouldn’t cast an overweight guy with stubble if you were doing a ballet film.
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 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.
No live performance can ever be perfect, and that’s what keeps you on your toes – it pushes you to practice harder, show up for that 8 A.M. ballet class, and walk through the stage door every night just to have the chance to do it all again.
I went to ballet school for nine years, and there was an agent for the whole school who happened to be there visiting one of the performances. She suggested an audition.
The heart of the classical repertory is the Tchaikovsky-Petipa ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ and no ballet is harder to get right.
It’s a normal part of the culture of ballet to go to a nutritionist in your first few weeks. They write down everything you eat and use a little roller that pinches you to measure the fat all over your body. Then, every semester, you get a letter saying either you’re too thin, or you’re OK, or you’re overweight.
I will say a lot of dancers do such beautiful things for their body and then they smoke a cigarette. I’ve never been a smoker, but I realized after taking yoga . . . in ballet you’re not encouraged to do a lot of breathing. I think in a weird way, a lot of dancers find relief in actually breathing.
Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.
All ballet, all reading, all music. That was my world, my inner world.
Ballet is a finite art – your body won’t let you do it forever, so I wanted to do it while I could.
Dance is very, very old. With Louis XIV at Versailles is where ballet started.
My earliest memory is of sitting at Mum’s dance school, watching her teach a ballet class.
Instead of watching cartoons when I was little, I had Russian ballet videos from, like, the 1950s and 1940s.
I’ve always been a figure skater and ballet dancer. I love physical comedy, and any chance that I get to do that… that is so me.
I’ve been wearing makeup for as long as I can remember. I started by playing with my mom’s lipsticks, then in ballet I would apply my own stage makeup.
Yeah, I grew up doing ballet and jazz and tap, but I stopped at the age of 25, and I’ve never stepped foot in a ballroom.
I knew I wanted to be a ballet dancer, but what kind, I wasn’t sure. My two dream companies had been New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater.
I used to dance for seventeen years -classical ballet, which was very disciplined. I like yoga and Pilates, but I don’t have the discipline to go to the gym.
The ballet world I don’t think is an art form that is quick to change or to adjust or evolve.
I did ballet from the age of five, but what I loved was my gymnastics. I kept the ballet going because of the gymnastics, then found I was going to be too tall.
It’s amazing what a resource modern technology is now for making ballets, and I film my rehearsals almost every day.
When I stopped doing ballet, I started training in the pool. I would do my barre exercises in the water, because that prevents injuries.
Hip hop classes and ballet are what I’ve been keeping up with, and of course my usual abdominal workout, which consists of 500 sit-ups a session. Or I take a 30-minute abs class at my gym. But dance classes are a full-body cardio workout, which always brings me success and keeps me feeling great.
I love musicals; I love the ballet, opera, the circus. It’s all performance to me.
I really developed an early love for ballet. Like most dancers, I am still ‘first’ a dancer. I’m very proud of it. Once you are a dancer, the physicality never leaves you, nor does the strength. Hopefully, it keeps you like an athlete.
I originally wanted to be a ballet dancer and trained for years, but when I was around 18, I realized I wasn’t going to be as good a ballet dancer as I’d hoped I’d be and decided to become an actress instead.
Since ballet has such a solid classical framework, everything is supposed to be a very specific way, so you learn to look at things with an eye towards perfection. But in acting, it isn’t always necessarily good to be like that – really magical things can happen when it’s unexpected and messy.
I will never run out of cycling shorts, ballet slippers, denim shorts, socks and pyjamas.
I was very serious about ballet until the age of 12, at which point my body changed, and it wasn’t quite right.
As a little girl, I didn’t dream of being a ballet dancer; I dreamt of being a movie star like Ginger Rogers and dancing with Fred Astaire. I used to watch the Sunday double-bills on TV and Iong to be part of what seemed a perfect Disneyland world. Astaire was a genius.
George Balanchine is my role model because his work is so varied. You can see two ballets of his and not even realize that they are by the same choreographer.
I grew up studying ballet; I grew up honing my craft.
I definitely have been nervous, but often I get more nervous performing with the corps de ballet than doing a solo. There’s so much pressure doing a group number because if you muck it up, you’ve ruined it for everyone.
I took ballet dancing forever, and there was a natural transition into acting.
I’ve been practicing ballet since I was three years old.
If a ballet dancer falls over, it’s knowing how to get out looking clumsy that counts.
My mother and my father always had me in ballet and dance, and I sang in a girl’s group.
I realized early on, I’m more interested in Baryshnikov than some dancer who wants to do a rock show with ballet.
I always knew I was a bit different from my friends, had too much energy, and suddenly I could get it all out with ballet.
A young girl reached out to me to be her mentor one day, which I didn’t really know anything about. What I did remember was what it was to be alone as an African-American dancer in the ballet world and wanting to connect with someone who looks like me.
Most dancers have no awareness of how they look; half of them think they’re fat. There is anorexia in the ballet world; there are those things.
There was a period of time when I studied ballet a lot when I was growing up.
I love ballet. Ballet is its own being. It has its own vocabulary. I feel as if I am in a different world when I am in the ballet studio.
