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I cannot move, I cannot even want to move, unless I hear the music first.

George Balanchine

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George Balanchine
Age: 79 †
Born: 1904
Born: January 22
Died: 1983
Died: April 23
Ballet Dancer
Ballet Master
Choreographer
Dancer
Scenographer
Screenwriter
St. Petersburg
Hear
Moving
Cannot
Music
Firsts
First
Listening
Even
Unless
Move

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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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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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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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Dance is music made visible
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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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The woman's function is to fascinate men.
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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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Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.
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Storyless is not abstract. Two dancers on the stage are enough material for a story for me, they are already a story in themselves
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The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant's trunk strong and yet flexible and soft.
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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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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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See the music, hear the dance.
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They are poets of gesture.
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Ballet is important and significant - yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.
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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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I am a cloud - in trousers.
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In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell. We can't dance synonyms.
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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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