Top 30 Quotes & Sayings by Ninette de Valois

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Irish dancer Ninette de Valois.

Last updated on December 22, 2024.

Dame Ninette de Valois was an Irish-born British dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director of classical ballet. 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 one of the leading ballet companies in the world. She also established the Royal Ballet School and the touring company which became the Birmingham Royal Ballet. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of ballet and as the "godmother" of English and Irish ballet.

Irish - Dancer | June 6, 1898 - March 8, 2001

Source: Wikipedia

So it takes years to make a solid company.

Ninette de Valois

And then you have the classical ballerinas, they're like sopranos. Applied to the dance.

Ninette de Valois

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.

Ninette de Valois

Somebody must always be doing something new, or life would get very dull.

Ninette de Valois

Oh yes, technique has definitely advanced. But you never advance without losing something en passant, and you lose it because you're paying so much attention to the new thing.

Ninette de Valois

There would never have been a British Ballet without Diaghilev. He had a wonderful influence.

Ninette de Valois

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?

Ninette de Valois

There's nothing in the world that isn't good, bad, and indifferent.

Ninette de Valois

Hardly any generation wants to take the whole of the last generation, it just wants to take its best bits.

Ninette de Valois

Also, if you have an accident, you can't start to dance again at the top, you're too weak; you start with the easy things - the way you did them when you were young, and come up up up, the way you did then.

Ninette de Valois

The best way to study is to go to the Cecchetti method for about a year and draw onto all the highest points and then put that into the general method.

Ninette de Valois

Exactly the same with dancing, you can't dance until you've learnt steps, the things your feet can do.

Ninette de Valois

All the children in the school should learn the steps of everything, before they learn the thing, then they know which step they're doing better, because your voice is in certain steps and has to do most of the things that have been composed in those steps.

Ninette de Valois

As time goes on, all schools only get left alive if they have found something special themselves.

Ninette de Valois

Well, I mean, 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.

Ninette de Valois

It's either not good enough and dies altogether, or it develops.

Ninette de Valois

Oh yes, after the war, and we were all starving - we had no proper food or anything - no proper shoes.

Ninette de Valois

Nearly everything in life goes in threes and fours.

Ninette de Valois

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.

Ninette de Valois

Classical ballet will never die.

Ninette de Valois

Nothing is done easily, first have the thing, then the thing has a success, then all sorts of difficulties arise through the success.

Ninette de Valois

It is a fact that all the ballet's fundamental dance steps are derived from the folk dances of Western Europe.

Ninette de Valois

The smile is the dance of the face - the dance is the smile of the limbs.

Ninette de Valois

Diaghilev was the first to notice good character dancers and that sort of thing.

Ninette de Valois

You cannot create genius. All you can do is nurture it.

Ninette de Valois

There would never have been a British Ballet without Diaghilev. He had a wonderful influence

Ninette de Valois

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.

Ninette de Valois

You never advance without losing something en passant... you lose it because you're paying so much attention to the new thing.

Ninette de Valois

No no, we ALL teach each other, whether it's dancing, whether it's singing, whether it's talking, we all listen to each other. That's progress.

Ninette de Valois

You can't dance until you've learnt steps, the things your feet can do.

Ninette de Valois