Ballet Choreography Quotes

Training for the ballet, Potter?" yelled Malfoy.

When you're really serious about ballet, it's a job - even if you're 15 years old. You're doing it six to eight hours a day.

When I'm making a new ballet, I usually read through the score a little bit, and then I have to go back and translate or transcribe all the counts for dancers because the way that you hear it is completely different from the way the musicians read and play it.

I knew I wanted to be a ballet dancer, but what kind, I wasn't sure. My two dream companies had been New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater.

I had some ballet training but didn't like it. It was like a game to me.

There would never have been a British Ballet without Diaghilev. He had a wonderful influence.

I've danced since I was 5 and went to the School of American Ballet at Lincoln Center at 7.

Everything I was being shown was ABT, so I grew up watching these videos of [Mikhail] Baryshnikov, Gelsey [Kirkland] and Paloma [Herrera]. Paloma and Angel [Corella] were the first people I ever saw dance live.

After I finished 'Center Stage,' I went back to San Francisco, and I danced for seven seasons with the San Francisco Ballet.

Do you know what it took for Balanchine to put me, a black man, on stage with a white woman? This was 1957, before civil rights. He showed me how to take her [holding her delicately by the wrist]. He said, ‘put your hand on top.’ The skin colors were part of the choreography. He saw what was going to happen in the world and put it on stage.

The moment the curtain rose on that first ballet, I knew something wonderful and new had come into my life. I can still see the first scene. The ballet was Divertimento No. 15.

City Ballet has to develop choreographers of stature and a new approach to coaching before everything we value about it fades away and, in the great tradition of the Cheshire Cat, there's nothing left but Peter Martins' smile.

The mystery of Christopher Wheeldon deepens. Yes, he's the most talented of the younger ballet choreographers - indeed, where's the competition? Yes, he's particularly good at nurturing dancers and identifying their essential qualities.