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
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.
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.
You can't dance until you've learnt steps, the things your feet can do.
We are developing the other parts, and we can't give quite all our attention to the upper part, but soon the lower parts will be developed, and the upper part and the lower part will become partners, that will be wonderful.
Diaghilev was the first to notice good character dancers and that sort of thing.
All Ballets' fundamental steps are derived from the folk dances of Western Europe.