George Balanchine Quotes
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I've got more energy now than when I was younger because I know exactly what I want to do.
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They are poets of gesture.
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See the music, hear the dance.
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Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for - for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.
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Music must be seen, and dance must be heard
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Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.
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Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.
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What are you waiting for? What are you saving for? Now is all there is.
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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.
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I have no literary approach - except to literature.
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First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you're very lucky and have said your prayers.
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I cannot move, I cannot even want to move, unless I hear the music first.
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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.
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The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.
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I can always invent movement, and sometimes it can be fitted into the right place, but that is not choreography. It is the music that dictates the whole shape of the work. I do not believe in the permanence of anything in ballet save the purely classical.
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Ballet is important and significant - yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.
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I don't have a past. I have a continuous present. The past is part of the present, just as the future is. We exist in time.
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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.
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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?
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Choreography is simpler than you think. Just go and do, and don't think so much about it. Just make something interesting.
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Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.
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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.
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Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policeman don't have to look beautiful at the same time.
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Ballet will speak for itself. About itself.
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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.
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The woman's function is to fascinate men.
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In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell. We can't dance synonyms.
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One is born to be a great dancer.
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The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.
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I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance.
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