A Quote by Sylvie Guillem

The problems I had with the Paris Opera Ballet are a thing of the past. — © Sylvie Guillem
The problems I had with the Paris Opera Ballet are a thing of the past.
At the Paris Opera Ballet, they were always making choices for me.
One of the first things I created was music for the Paris opera's ballet troupe. That was the first time that electronic music was played at the opera. I really like the relationship between the music and the choreography.
I have learned a great deal from the theatrical side of Covent Garden. The Paris Opera Ballet is more concerned with technique. It's perfect. It's beautiful. It's well done. But it lacks the theatrical tradition that is so important in England. At the Royal Ballet, absolutely everyone on stage seems to be caught up in the plot.
The first time I took a plane to dance in front of an audience outside France was when I was in the Paris Opera Ballet School, and we flew to Japan.
I did grow up in France, and even though I didn't go to the school or dance with the Paris Opera Ballet, I absorbed similar ideas in my training. I understand the scale of a big company. I danced for one for almost 20 years.
The minute we don't finance the arts, the accountants, attorneys and politicians keep taking the cream of money off the top and it doesn't trickle down unless all of society understands that we must support the arts, whether it's ballet, opera, fashion. Fashion is like opera, is like ballet, is like theatre. It's a visual theatre.
I was going to be a singer. If I hadn't been in my profession, I was going to be an Opera singer. That's from a young kid. I had all these records from all those famous Opera singers. I wanted to be an Opera singer - that was my whole thing and physical fitness got in the way, thank God.
My father's an opera nut, and my stepmother used to work at the Metropolitan Opera, so I had a lot of opera immersion. I like the grandness and pretention of it.
I knew I wanted to be a ballet dancer, but what kind, I wasn't sure. My two dream companies had been New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater.
I remember once saying in a television interview that the only things I hadn't been in were the opera and the ballet. Two days later, I got a call from Lord Harewood, of the English National Opera, saying "Would you like to be in 'Ariadne auf Naxos?'"
We tend to forget that in those days before the Internet and HBO and Imax and 3-D cinema, opera was the thing. Opera and theatre. If you were a man of the world and you mingled among the happy few, you would be at the opera.
I had no sense of having reached some goal because I was an etoile at the Paris Opera. My ambition, if you can call it that, was to discover and learn and be excited by what I was doing. If I didn't have that, I would find it elsewhere.
Bel canto is to opera what pole-vaulting is to ballet.
I remember vividly seeing 'Tarzan' and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked.
Ballet costumes are easier that opera because they are designed for movement.
Since I was a child I've loved going to the opera, theatre and ballet.
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