George Balanchine Quotes about Dance

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

Dance is music made visible

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.

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

See the music, hear the dance.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

I am a cloud - in trousers.

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.

My muse must come to me on union time.