Balanchine is tremendously quotable – if only because so many of his bon mots are adapted from others. When he declared himself to be “not a man but a cloud in trousers,” for example, he lifted the line directly from one of Mayakovsky’s greatest poems. Usually, however, the matchless choreographer offered not a straight quotation but an unacknowledged paraphrase. Here is a handful of Mr. B’s observations.
"God made men to sing the praises of women." "When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, ‘What do you mean? What is your significance?’ Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful. We're like flowers. A flower doesn't tell you a story. It's in itself a beautiful thing."
"The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener. "
"Dance is music made visible." (Also, “See the music, hear the dance.”)
“There are no mothers-in-law in ballet” (also known as Balanchine’s Law).
“We all live in the same time forever. There is no future and there is no past.”
"Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policemen don't have to look beautiful at the same time."
"In fact I disagree with everybody and I don't want to argue about it."
And when he received the Handel medallion, he said, "I can't Handel it. . .so I'll Haydn it."
See Arlene Croce's "Balanchine Said" in The New Yorker (January 26, 2009): “In later years, [Balanchine] waged a personal campaign against the twentieth-century fetish of originality. . . . He saw no harm in appropriating; and he stole and was stolen from – that was the way of art.”
Above: George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell rehearsing Don Quixote in 1968.
When you're alone with your feelings of the most beautiful dances to dance alone in your head when you dance something very beautiful, thank you.
Posted by: dance | September 14, 2009 at 08:04 PM
Both Balanchine tributes are delightful homages to his birthday!!
About the photos: The lovely Fred Fehl one for David's article isn't from "Don Quixote" but from the 1968 "Pithoprakta" (performed as part of an avant-garde ham-and-eggs production called "Metastaseis&Pithoprakta"), to a Xennakis score. That particular moment of the man's hand (Arthur Mitchell's, I think, in the performance I saw)floating under the ballerina's was never resolved into a handhold; the float was a theme in the choreography. There is a much-published Fred Fehl shot from the 1965 "Don Quixote" that shows Balanchine and Farrell, both in full costume, in a similar configuration, but he is holding her hand and leading her forward. The moment from "Pithoprakta" was another idea.
And Stacey's tribute has one of the remarkable photos by Tanaquil Le Clercq of her husband rehearsing their beloved cat Mourka. You've covered the bases for Mr. B's high summer of love!!
Posted by: Mindy Aloff | January 27, 2018 at 10:33 AM