The Ballet Blog

"A ballerina takes steps given to her and makes them her own. Each individual brings something different to the same role" 

Maria Tallchief, a Native American ballerina. (via womenorgnow)

sfballet:

Principal Yuan Yuan Tan is interviewed in Time Out Hong Kong!

"No one can arrive from being talented alone. God gives talent, work transforms talent into genius." 

Anna Pavlova (via masterpiecesofhumanity)

"The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork 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

(Source: theballetblog)

"Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to paradise of the achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration, there are daily small deaths." 

Martha Graham

(Source: theballetblog)

"If you want to dance seriously, do. You must think about it day and night, dream about it, —desire it" 

Christa Justus

(Source: theballetblog)

"Where ever a dancer stands is holy ground." 

Martha Graham

(Source: theballetblog)

"Within the holy circle of the stage, geometrical principles are used to organize physical energy so that the beauty of the human form reveals a web of drama and truth— that is the essence of dance as I have come to know it." 

Gelsey Kirkland, Dancing on my Grave

(Source: theballetblog)

balletstandsforbeautiful:

“I get great pleasure out of dancing, more and more so, I get carried away by the music, my moods and my feeling and what I want to express. Nothing negative happens when I go on stage.”

- Marie-Agnes Gillot

(Source: aurelie-dupont)

"Genuine art does not have as its object a mere transitory game. Its serious purpose is not merely to translate the human being into a momentary dream of freedom, but actually to MAKE him free." 

Friedrich Schiller

(Source: theballetblog)

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

St. Augustine

(Source: theballetblog)

"Hence it is from the representation of things spoken by means of posture and gesture that the whole of the art of dance has been elaborated." 

Plato

(Source: theballetblog)

"The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time…Both space and time, as perceptible factors, disappear almost entirely in the dance illusion." 

Susanne K. Langer

(Source: theballetblog)

"[Dancers must] Master technique and then forget about it and be natural." 

Anna Pavlova  (via perfectballetbody)

"To a layman, a ballerina seems incomprehensibly fussy about her shoes. But for a dancer the pointe shoe is more than just a tool of the trade, more than a tradition, more than a costume. It is an extension of her body, intimately related to her profession and her art. It is the essential “equipment” that makes her dancing possible." 

Eliza Minden

(Source: theballetblog)