Creativity Quotes

"It is not the movements that make a dance beautiful, it is the emotions that inspired the movement that make it beautiful."

- Kristy Nilsson

"Musicality is when the dancers’ movements appear to create the music – and not the other way around."

- Kristy Nilsson

"Dancing is poetry with arms and legs."

- Charles Baudelaire

"The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art, art of the muscle sense."

- Rudolf Arnheim

"Choreography is simpler than you think. Just go and do, and don’t think so much about it. Just make something interesting."

- George Balanchine

"God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it-from what I see, from what the dancers do, from what others do…."

- George Balanchine

"I could never make a ballet by wrinkling my brow and concentrating. If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece, how will you ever get it finished."

- George Balanchine

"My muse must come to me on union time."

- George Balanchine

"Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there’s already a plot."

- George Balanchine

"The problem is not making up the steps but deciding which ones to keep."

- Mikhail Baryshnikov

"Even when she walks one would believe that she dances."

- Charles Baudelaire

"Dance is something that you do—not something you talk about. It’s abstract and emotional. Art comes from a private, hidden, never fully understood place. You lose yourself in it. You become one with the music; it’s godlike; it’s spiritual. To talk about it is to trespass in a restricted zone."

- Donna McKenzie

"Style is an afterthought, not something that is preconceived. If I’m digging for diamonds in a mine, the maze that I’ve dug, which might look interesting, is just an aftereffect of all the digging, nothing more. The Buddhists say, “Look.” But we get hung up staring at the finger instead of where it’s pointing."

- Alonzo King

"In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves."

- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

"Dance is music made visible."

- George Balanchine

"Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration."

- Rudolf Nureyev

"Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays."

- George Balanchine

"Ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening, nobody on the stage at least."

- Edwin Denby

"What’s so wonderful about ballet is that it’s mind-driven physicality. It’s almost a Greek ideal of body, mind, and form."

- Edward Villella

"To dance is to reach for a word that doesn’t exist, To sing the heartsong of a thousand generations, To feel the meaning of a moment in time."

- Beth Jones

"Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts. For it is no mere translation or abstraction of life. It is life itself."

- Henry Havelock Ellis

"Dance isn’t something that can be explained in words. It has to be danced."

- Paige Arden

"Talk about dance? Dance is not something to talk about. Dance is to dance."

- Peter Saint James

"So many dancers rely on some sort of magic happening on the stage. They never, for various reasons, work full out in rehearsal. That’s very uncreative. They don’t discover the kinds of things that add up to a remarkable performance."

- Benjamin Harkarvy

"Dancing should look easy; like an optical illusion. It should seem effortless. When you do a difficult variation, the audience is aware that it is demanding and that you have the power and strength to do it. But in the end, when you take your bow, you should look as if you were saying, ‘Oh, it was nothing. I could do it again.’"

- Bruce Marks

"When the music and dance create with accord…their magic captivates both the heart and the mind."

- Jean Georges Noverre

"Only angels and ballerinas dance on their toes."

- David Ira Rottenberg

"The world loves a clone and a good knock-off. It cheats the artist… In the obsession for technical wizardry, people disappear; and if your voice isn’t present in a relationship, you don’t matter."

- Alonzo King

"The deep art… That’s the part that has to be guarded like a miser would his money… Like a dope addict would his dope… Like a lover with their love."

- Alonzo King

"In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down."

- Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love