You're never more of an individual than when you're a happy team player.
I loved the stage not because it provided an escape from myself or my humdrum life but because when the curtain went up I could be whoever I wanted to be, and that was true freedom - to be myself.
The arts are the hospitals for our souls.
Fifth positions, heads, musicality, energy. Not technical things so much-getting your leg higher or doing more turns but things that would set you apart from other dancers. The only way you can be different is to be yourself if you don't find your spirit and reveal it, you just look like every other dancer.
I set as my goal to be the best dancer I could be. Not the most famous, or the highest paid dancer, just the best I could be. Out of this discipline came great freedom and calm.
On the other hand, I think it is wonderful for everyone to take ballet classes, at any age. It gives you a discipline, it gives you a place to go. It gives you some control in your life.
You don't learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don't really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time.
When you get on stage, you can be anything. You are removed from reality in a way, the real world.
As soon as I hear music, something in me starts to vibrate.
Although we do come from a silent profession, it is important for us to verbalize what we want to say. (As I tell my students): you could love someone all your life, but if you never say it how are they going to know? There comes a point when you have to say what you mean, which makes you scream louder when you dance.
Treat each class as if it were your first.
When you are on stage in front of an audience, you want to engage the entire crowd. If a thousand people are in the theater, you need to dance a thousand different ways, not one-thousandth of a way.
Do not brood. It makes the moment you are living in unavailable for learning and life.
I think it was important that I learned to love to dance eventually for its own sake, as opposed to wanting to be a ballerina.
When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.
That the work involved, the willingness to take chances, the commitment, the opportunity to get on stage and make people happy, was more important than becoming famous, or even what I was dancing.
It's ungrateful to be wishing you were doing something else at the moment you are living. You haven't lived in the moment that you are really living, you are wishing you were somewhere else.
Dancers are a great breed of people. And they really want to dance so you don't have to beg them to work. However, dancers sometimes build walls around themselves because they are presenting themselves all the time: dancing is very much a confession.
Once I started dancing, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was as a child.
Good theater should always send people away feeling changed.
Eating a healthy diet is not just about eating a few special foods. There's a bigger picture. You need to practice moderation, eat a variety of foods, and get enough physical activity.
I was very much of a tomboy.
After I stopped dancing, I was unable to listen to beautiful music.
I was very happy that I was as normal as possible before I went into serious dance.
There is pain and sacrifice in everyone's world. That's why, when I was dancing, I had no pain.
