Ballet Teacher Quotes

Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible.
If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.

Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out to be a killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this: 1. Hassle. 2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.) 3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid's insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.) 4. Turning into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had developed bulging varicose veins in her legs during pregnancy that never retreated, and the prospect of calves branched in blue tree roots mortified me more than I could say. So I didn't say. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.) 5. Unnatural altruism: being forced to make decisions in accordance with what was best for someone else. (I'm a pig.) 6. Curtailment of my traveling. (Note curtailment. Not conclusion.) 7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.) 8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend's five-year-old in the room.) 9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew--every woman, too, which is depressing--would take me less seriously.) 10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother would feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter's life is hideous, too.)

Finally, after years of study and watching, I realized our teachers were not just teaching steps or imparting technical knowledge, they were giving us their culture and their tradition. “Why” was not the point and the steps were not just steps; they were living, breathing evidence of a lost (to us) past—of what their dances were like but also of what they, as artists and people, believed in.

catalogued the downsides of parenthood, “son might turn out killer” would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this: 1. Hassle. 2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.) 3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid’s insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.) 4. Turning into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had

Don't pressure your daughter or your son to conform to gender stereotypes. If your son wants to take ballet classes, cheer him on. If your daughter wants to study marshal arts and computer programming, sign her up. Teach your son that there are all kinds of man in the world including men who excel at ballet and macrame. Teach your daughter that there are all kinds of women in the world, including women who are masters of karate and computer programming.

Is there another way to judge potential? NASA thought so. When they were soliciting applications for astronauts, they rejected people with pure histories of success and instead selected people who had had significant failures and bounced back from them. Jack Welch, the celebrated CEO of General Electric, chose executives on the basis of “runway,” their capacity for growth. And remember Marina Semyonova, the famed ballet teacher, who chose the students who were energized by criticism. They were all rejecting the idea of fixed ability and selecting instead for mindset.

It is often said, rather flatly, that Russian ballet was a mix of French, Scandinavian (through the teacher Johansson), and Italian sources—that Russia, through Petipa, absorbed all of these and made them her own. This is certainly true; but what really changed ballet was the way it became entwined with Imperial Russia herself. Serfdom and autocracy, St. Petersburg and the prestige of foreign culture, hierarchy, order, aristocratic ideals and their ongoing tension with more eastern folk forms: all of these things ran into ballet and made it a quintessentially Russian art.

1. Hassle. 2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.) 3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid’s insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.) 4. Turning into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had developed bulging varicose veins in her legs during pregnancy that never retreated, and the prospect of calves branched in blue tree roots mortified me more than I could say. So I didn’t say. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.) 5. Unnatural altruism: being forced to make decisions in accordance with what was best for someone else. (I’m a pig.) 6. Curtailment of my traveling. (Note curtailment. Not conclusion.) 7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.) 8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend’s five-year-old in the room.) 9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew—every woman, too, which is depressing—would take me less seriously.) 10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother could feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter’s life is hideous, too.)

Men traveling alone develop a romantic vertigo. Bech had already fallen in love with a freckled embassy wife in Russia, a buck-toothed chanteuse in Rumania, a stolid Mongolian sculptress in Kazakhstan. In the Tretyakov Gallery he had fallen in love with a recumbent statue, and at the Moscow Ballet School with an entire roomful of girls. Entering the room, he had been struck by the aroma, tenderly acrid, of young female sweat. Sixteen and seventeen, wearing patchy practice suits, the girls were twirling so strenuously their slippers were unraveling. Demure student faces crowned the unconscious insolence of their bodies. The room was doubled in depth by a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Bech was seated on a bench at its base. Staring above his head, each girl watched herself with frowning eyes frozen, for an instant in the turn, by the imperious delay and snap of her head. Bech tried to remember the lines of Rilke that expressed it, this snap and delay: did not the drawing remain/that the dark stroke of your eyebrow/swiftly wrote on the wall of its own turning? At one point the teacher, a shapeless old Ukrainian lady with gold canines, a prima of the thirties, had arisen and cried something translated to Bech as, “No, no, the arms free, free!” And in demonstration she had executed a rapid series of pirouettes with such proud effortlessness that all the girls, standing this way and that like deer along the wall, had applauded. Bech had loved them for that. In all his loves, there was an urge to rescue—to rescue the girls from the slavery of their exertions, the statue from the cold grip of its own marble, the embassy wife from her boring and unctuous husband, the chanteuse from her nightly humiliation (she could not sing), the Mongolian from her stolid race. But the Bulgarian poetess presented herself to him as needing nothing, as being complete, poised, satisfied, achieved. He was aroused and curious and, the next day, inquired about her of the man with the vaguely contemptuous mouth of a hare—a novelist turned playwright and scenarist, who accompanied him to the Rila Monastery. “She lives to write,” the playwright said. “I do not think it is healthy.

I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes. So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, P.U. changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. I can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.

Ballet trained you to obey orders. Your job was to become your teacher’s vision. Nobody wanted a dancer with opinions.

Is there another way to judge potential? NASA thought so. When they were soliciting applications for astronauts, they rejected people with pure histories of success and instead selected people who had had significant failures and bounced back from them. Jack Welch, the celebrated CEO of General Electric, chose executives on the basis of “runway,” their capacity for growth. And remember Marina Semyonova, the famed ballet teacher, who chose the students who were energized by criticism. They were all rejecting the idea of fixed ability and selecting instead for mindset. Proving

In Singin’ in the Rain, Lina Lamont provides both an effective “beard” for Don and Cosmo and a foil, representing both the reason for Don’s “unattached” state and the basis for their mutual contempt for women. Yet the signs are all there to be read for those interested in reading them: Cosmo and Don performing as a burlesque team, in which they sit on each other’s laps and play each other’s violins; Cosmo’s comment to Lina after the premiere of The Royal Rascal, “Yeah, Lina, you looked pretty good for a girl”;30 and their bullying, in “Moses Supposes,” of the fogyish diction coach, figuratively drawn out of his closet only to be ridiculed as an asexual “pansy” who can’t sing and dance (thus both confirming and denying homosexuality at the same time).31 On a broader scale, Kelly’s career as a dancer, offering a more masculinized style of athletic dance (in opposition especially to the stylized grace of Fred Astaire), represented a similar balancing act between, in this case, the feminized occupation of balletic dance and a strong claim of heterosexual masculinity. Significantly, the process of exclusion they use with the diction coach is precisely what Cosmo proposes they apply to Lina in converting The Dueling Cavalier into a musical: “It’s easy to work the numbers. All you have to do is dance around Lina and teach her how to take a bow.” But they also apply the strategy to Kathy, who is only just learning to “dance” in this sense (conveniently so, since Debbie Reynolds had had but little dance training, as noted).32 Early on, we see her dance competently in “All I Do Is Dream of You,” but she then seems extremely tentative in “You Were Meant for Me,” immobile for much of the number, not joining in the singing, and dancing only as Don draws her in (which is, of course, consistent with her character’s development at this point). With “Good Mornin’,” though, she seems to “arrive” as part of the Don-Cosmo team, even though for part of the number she serves as a kind of mannequin—much like the voice teacher in “Moses Supposes,” except that she sings the song proper while Don and Cosmo “improvise” tongue-twisting elaborations between the lines. As the number evolves, their emerging positions within the group become clear. Thus, during their solo clownish dance bits, using their raincoats as props, Kathy and Don present themselves as fetishized love objects, Kathy as an “Island girl” and Don as a matador, while Cosmo dances with a “dummy,” recalling his earlier solo turn in “Make ’em Laugh.

Keynes’s ‘Open Letter’ to Roosevelt in 1933, sounded, writes Herbert Stein, ‘like the letter from a school teacher to the very rich father of a very dull pupil’. In Savannah, in March 1946, for the inaugural meeting of the International Monetary Fund, Keynes made a speech in which he hoped that ‘there is no malicious fairy, no Carabosse’ who had not been invited to the party. The reference was to Tchaikovsky’s ballet, Sleeping Beauty, but Frederic Vinson the US Secretary of the Treasury, took it personally. ‘I don’t mind being called malicious, but I do mind being called a fairy,’ he growled.

In the realm of school and activity-based accomplishments and achievements, it’s more loving and resilience-building to offer praise that is specific to the task accomplished. For example: (1) For a little kid—I like how you used all kinds of colors in that picture; (2) For an elementary schooler—I noticed how you pointed your toes throughout your whole ballet performance, just like your teacher asked; (3) For a middle schooler—You did a good job maneuvering the glue gun to make your school project. That can be so tricky; (4) For a high schooler—Your essay on Cyrano de Bergerac made such detailed references to Cyrano’s emotional turmoil. You really managed to get inside his head. Specific praise like this builds confidence because it shows we’ve paused for a moment to pay attention to what the kid has actually done.

Seventeen years ago, I made a promise to my first ballet teacher, Grace—who is now my sister-in-law—that I wouldn’t stop dancing for as long as it made me happy. For as long as it made my heart feel lighter. I’ve kept that promise all this time.

In her mothering years, he lived in undying amazement of Lucy. She looked at every paper, bored in until she’d heard every the teacher asked at school. She knew by heart what was on the lunch menu, the name of every friend and whether she or he was a good influence, even if the kid had never set foot inside their home. She’d memorized every trumpet note or ballet turn. She hit the laundry room at 6 a.m., because she knew what clothes they’d want to wear, right down to the undies. Her children’s lives were so thoroughly understood, digested, imagined, so thoroughly her own, that other women often seemed to freeze over in shame. But all of that allowed Lucy to avoid wondering about herself.

Dean, Maya’s just a little girl. She has a lot of energy and needs,” his mother went on. “We just can’t give that to her. You’re young and Silver Bell Falls is a wonderful place for her to grow up.

Dean? Are you okay?” “Huh? What?” “Are you okay?” she repeated, taking a step closer to him. “You sort of zoned out there for a moment and had a strange look on your face.” Before he could second-guess himself or chicken out, he took a step closer – closing the gap between them. “I’m fine,” he said gruffly. “But I need to do this.” And then he lowered his head and claimed her lips with his.

Someone got in trouble at ballet for dropping the f-bomb,” she says. Paul’s face falls. He looks over the counter and into his daughter’s face. “You dropped an f-bomb?” Hayley looks up into Kelly’s face, her brows furrowed. “I didn’t drop a bomb. I just called the teacher a fu—” Kelly slaps a hand over her mouth. “You don’t need to repeat it. We get the idea.” She looks at Paul. “Talk to her?” “We’ll talk about it,” he assures her. “Oh, and she has a recital next week!” She rushes out the door. “I’ll be there,” Paul says to her back. The door closes, and Paul sits down on his haunches in front of Hayley. “What did we say about that word?” She hangs her head and goes into her room. She comes back with a quarter and holds it up. Paul takes it and puts it in a jar on top of the fridge. I give him a crazy look. “The swear jar,” he whispers. “Every time she says a bad word, she has to put in a quarter. And if she catches me saying a bad word, I have to put in a quarter.” I see a ten-dollar bill in there. He laughs. “Sam paid in advance.” “I’m going to go broke,” I say. I do watch my mouth around Hayley, although that’s really the only time I even think about what a potty mouth I have. “Probably.

Antigone," he told the dark-haired woman, "I'd like you to meet Flavia de Luce." I knew for a fact that she was going to say, "Oh, yes, my husband has mentioned you," and she would say it with that little smirk that tells you so much about the amused conversation that had followed. "I'm so pleased to meet you, Flavia," she said, putting out the most beautiful hand in the world and giving me a good solid shake, "and to find that you share my love of marionettes." If she'd told me to "fetch" I would have done it. "I love your name," I managed. "Do you? My father was Greek and my mother Italian. She was a ballet teacher and he was a fishmonger, so I grew up dancing in the streets of Billingsgate." With her dark hair and sea green eyes, she was the image of Botticelli's Flora, whose features adorned the back of a hand mirror at Buckshaw that Father had once given to Harriet.

She found some solace in her love of dancing inviting the West Heath school pianist, the late Lily Snipp and Wendy Mitchell, her dance teacher, to Buckingham Palace to give her private lessons. For forty minutes Diana, dressed in a black leotard, went through a routine that combined ballet with tap dancing. During those momentous days Miss Snipp kept a diary which gives a first-hand feeling of the misgivings felt by Lady Diana Spencer as the wedding-day approached. The first entry in Miss Snipp’s diary, on Friday June 5, 1981, recorded details of Diana’s first lesson. She wrote: “To Buckingham Palace to play for Lady Diana. We all worked hard the lesson, no time wasted. When the lesson was over Lady Diana, with her tongue in her cheek, said: “I suppose Miss Snipp will now go direct to Fleet Street.” She has a good sense of humour--she will need it in the years to come.

Fascia knows where you are in the world; it's loaded with position sensors that contribute to your sense of balance and feeds those bearings directly to that fear-conditioning corner of your brain, the amygdala. Any movement grooved into the fascia feels soothing, gratifying, efficient; try to unlearn it, as any batting coach or ballet teacher will tell you, and you're in for a struggle. New movements, no matter how necessary or logical, just feel wrong.

In our family, we live by the Hard Thing Rule. It has three parts. The first is that everyone—including Mom and Dad—has to do a hard thing. A hard thing is something that requires daily deliberate practice. I’ve told my kids that psychological research is my hard thing, but I also practice yoga. Dad tries to get better and better at being a real estate developer; he does the same with running. My oldest daughter, Amanda, has chosen playing the piano as her hard thing. She did ballet for years, but later quit. So did Lucy. This brings me to the second part of the Hard Thing Rule: You can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other “natural” stopping point has arrived. You must, at least for the interval to which you’ve committed yourself, finish whatever you begin. In other words, you can’t quit on a day when your teacher yells at you, or you lose a race, or you have to miss a sleepover because of a recital the next morning. You can’t quit on a bad day. And, finally, the Hard Thing Rule states that you get to pick your hard thing. Nobody picks it for you because, after all, it would make no sense to do a hard thing you’re not even vaguely interested in. Even the decision to try ballet came after a discussion of various other classes my daughters could have chosen instead. Lucy, in fact, cycled through a half-dozen hard things. She started each with enthusiasm but eventually discovered that she didn’t want to keep going with ballet, gymnastics, track, handicrafts, or piano. In the end, she landed on viola. She’s been at it for three years, during which time her interest has waxed rather than waned. Last year, she joined the school and all-city orchestras, and when I asked her recently if she wanted to switch her hard thing to something else, she looked at me like I was crazy. Next year, Amanda will be in high school. Her sister will follow the year after. At that point, the Hard Thing Rule will change. A fourth requirement will be added: each girl must commit to at least one activity, either something new or the piano and viola they’ve already started, for at least two years. Tyrannical? I don’t believe it is. And if Lucy’s and Amanda’s recent comments on the topic aren’t disguised apple-polishing, neither do my daughters. They’d like to grow grittier as they get older, and, like any skill, they know grit takes practice. They know they’re fortunate to have the opportunity to do so. For parents who would like to encourage grit without obliterating their children’s capacity to choose their own path, I recommend the Hard Thing Rule.

I remember how we clung to our Russia even as she slipped through our fingers like so many grains of sand at the shore where we used to spend the summer. Through it all, I danced, I danced—I was young and impossibly strong. I am called Anastasiya—the springtime, new life. I have created myself again and again, as the phoenix rises from the ashes. But I grow tired. I could go back now, but for what? Everything I loved is gone. I have no country anymore. Our Russia is dead, her people are dead. Perhaps even the melting snows no longer smell the same. She lives within me, perhaps only within me. Those laughing faces, those poignant songs, they have floated up with the incense, disappearing from human recollection. We were all so young!" -- from "Madame Anastasiya" by Emily Lapisardi (2020)

Why here? Why this far from home? Why here? Why alone? Why, why, why? Why so nostalgic about those days? Why those songs? Why so comforting to reminisce? Why so fond am I? Why so old now? Why so hard to die? Why waiting? Why then, and not now? Why, why, why? Why lessons? Why teachers - students? Why books? Why work and no play? Why tomorrow and not today?