Music begins to atrophy when it departs
too far from the dance.
~ Ezra Pound

 

Ballet is a dance executed by the human soul.
~ Alexander Pushkin

 

 

Sometimes I gave conflicting emotions because it's been going on for so long now,  but then I see somebody dancing real well and it just comes back like an old love.

The flame ignites again.

~ Ann Reinking

 

 

There was never a merry world since the fairies left off dancing.
~ John Selden
 

 

Maya (was) able to absorb within a month what some other dancers cannot do in a decade.
~ Marina Semyonova on Maya Plisetskaya

 

     

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

~ Rod Serling

 

 

Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion.
You must set yourself on fire.
~ Fred Sero

 

 

“He who cannot dance will say: "The drum is bad”

~ African Proverb

 

 

It was then that my religious consciousness emerged to flower years afterward into definite forms of religious dancing in which there is no sense of division between spirit and flesh, religion and art.

~ Ruth St. Denis
 

 

The real message of the Dance opens up the vistas of life  to all who have the urge to express beauty with no other instrument than their own bodies, with no apparatus and no dependence on anything other than space.
~ Ruth St. Denis
 

 

We should realize in a vivid and revolutionary sense that we are not in our bodies but our bodies are in us.
~ Ruth St. Denis
 

 

When you are fifty, you're neither young nor old; you're just uninteresting. When you are sixty, and still dancing, you become something of a curiosity. And boy! if you hit seventy, and can still get a foot off the ground, you're phenomenal!
~ Ruth St. Denis

 

 

If you can talk, you can sing.
If you can walk, you can dance.
~ African Proverb
 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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 (quoting Mayakovsky)

 

 

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
 

 

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
 

 

 

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,
policeman 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
 

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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 out.
~ 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 it or you could be totally emotionally mushed up into the dance.
~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

 

 

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.
~ Charles Baudelaire

 

 

 

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

 

 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

 

 

I'm always very true to the music and I honor 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.
~ Auguste 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

 

 

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

     

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

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 is a sweat job.
~ 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.
I just dance.  I just put my feet in the air and move them around.
~ Fred Astaire 

 

 

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

 

 

I would rather dance as a ballerina,
though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
~ Margaret Atwood in 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.
~ St. Augustine

 

 

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