George Balanchine Dance Quotations

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell ... we can't dance synonyms.

The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.

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.

Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.

I am a cloud - in trousers.

My muse must come to me on union time.

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?

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

Ballet is important and significant - yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.

See the music, hear the dance.

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.

Ballet dancing is arduous, strenuous activity. Students are engaged in physical training that rivals the training Olympic athletes undergo. At the same time, they strive for physical perfection not for the prowess alone but as a way of achieving the means necessary to express the pure nature of their art.

The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.

Dance is music made visible

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...

Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert, always tense. But i dont agree with that because policeman don't have to look beautiful at the same time" *

Choreography is simpler than you think. Just go and do, and don't think so much about it. Just make something interesting.

Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.

I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance

First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you're very lucky and have said your prayers.

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.

Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.