Ninette de Valois
Ninette de Valois
Dame Ninette de Valois OM CH DBEwas an Anglo-Irish dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director of classical ballet. She began life in Ireland as Edris Stannus. Most notably, she danced professionally with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, later establishing the Royal Ballet, one of the foremost ballet companies of the 20th century and still one of the leading ballet companies in the world. She also established the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet School. She is widely regarded as one of...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionDancer
Date of Birth6 June 1898
CountryIreland
It's like the voice. We don't force a voice which we decide is lower than a lot of others, we teach it to sing in what we call their key, don't we?
Classical ballet will never die.
You cannot create genius. All you can do is nurture it.
Hardly any generation wants to take the whole of the last generation, it just wants to take its best bits.
You never advance without losing something en passant... you lose it because you're paying so much attention to the new thing.
First of all, the most important, that is to learn everything good that has survived from other times, and carefully to watch the bad - and throw it out.
Nothing is done easily, first have the thing, then the thing has a success, then all sorts of difficulties arise through the success.
Somebody must always be doing something new, or life would get very dull.
The smile is the dance of the face - the dance is the smile of the limbs.
God gave us all exactly the same fingers, arms, legs, and feet, but in our different countries we divided them all a little differently as we feel it, do you understand?
You can't stop what comes into a country, you can be influenced, but you can't stop it, you shouldn't, because it makes all the others interesting, we all get muddled up together, and produce something that belongs to everyone.
There's nothing in the world that isn't good, bad, and indifferent.
And then you have the classical ballerinas, they're like sopranos. Applied to the dance.
Nearly everything in life goes in threes and fours.