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Quotations on Ballet 34 Quotes Found One of the few things in dance to match the Royal Ballet's curtain calls is the Royal Ballet's dancing. Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important. I do take class because I still dance, and yes, I do slip into class with the Royal Ballet from time to time. Dance is very, very old. With Louis XIV at Versailles is where ballet started. The music industry is so easy compared to the ballet world. At the ballet, you really feel like you're in the presence of something outside the rest of your life. Higher than the rest of your life. The New York City Ballet is obviously speaking to a whole new generation and bringing it the same wonder and beauty that it brought previous generations. The moment the curtain rose on that first ballet, I knew something wonderful and new had come into my life. I can still see the first scene. The ballet was Divertimento No. 15. The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking. I went to the Performing Arts School and studied classical ballet. That attitude is something that's put into your head. You are never thin enough. There might've been wires, but I have this ability to make myself light. Well you know what, in ballet, when you kind of lift yourself here, it's all up in the head. The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing. The New York City Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that. The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive. The ballet makes us look at those bodies, it makes us listen to that music, it makes us wonder at the geometry, of the way they come together. The way that extraordinary space is controlled and given such emotional force. 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. God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity. My Mom is a ballet director, so I had this idea in me that classical training is the best foundation for anything you do, so I wanted to get a classical background and voice. 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. My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics. 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 went away when I was 9 to a ballet school. I thought I wanted to be a dancer, but eight years of ballet cured me of that. I wanted to give people - which is fairly bizarre considering my whole life is contemporary dance really - I wanted to give people a really fulfilling sense that they had seen a white classical ballet - in a very pure form. I copied my brother. He was a natural dancer. Graceful. People always asked did we study ballet. We never did. Heaven help the American-born boy with a talent for ballet. People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin. Being a former dancer, classical dancer, it informed me as a human being just in terms of the grace I guess. Ballet is a very graceful form of art. You also become very aware of your body and your mind and your body is working in conjunction. That kind of helps you in acting as well. It's not only using your mind, it's like making your mind communicate this character into your body so that you can bring it to life and physicalize it. I went to art school when I was little. I took ballet lessons. I played a little kick ball. I was sort of into everything because I had too much energy and I didn't know where to put it. When I was a preteen, I got into singing, and became really obsessed with it. 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 took several years of dance lessons that included ballet, tap and jazz. They helped a great deal with body control, balance, a sense of rhythm, and timing. A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things. When life takes me on a new journey, I simply remember the smile my first ballet recital put on my face and I move forward. Acting is a sense of wonder and magic and mystery for me and when life takes me on a new journey, I simply remember the smile my first ballet recital put on my face and I move forward. 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. |
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