Ballet Quotations | Page 4

I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.

I was embarrassed that I even wanted to become an actress because coming from L.A., with two older sisters in the business and a mom who had been a ballet dancer, it was such a cliche.

I was born in Toronto and studied with the National Ballet of Canada. I went to school to study dance, slept on the floor, ate nothing, waitressed - and then there was a Mary J. Blige audition.

Look at where I lived! Four blocks from Lincoln Center. I used to play in the fountain. And then I started taking dance lessons. I was in 'The Nutcracker' for the N.Y. City Ballet when I was 8 and dancing in 'The Firebird' for George Balanchine when I was 9. Believe me, that's something you don't ever forget.

My mum took me to the ballet at three, and that was the only time I sat still, with jaw open, mesmerised. She brought me home, and I wouldn't stop dancing.

You don?t see many full-length ballets being made like this, because the risk is so great.

So many people report to be contemporary dancers, and they're not. They are sort of jazz dancers that feel like they're throwing a bit of classical in there. I mean, a true contemporary dancer has got ballet as their base and classical ballet, and that is their base. And then they choose to extemporize on that and go into a contemporary world.

The big thing about the season is the festival. I'm excited because it's going to include many parts of the community, for example Donald Byrd's Spectrum Dance, and Oregon Ballet Theater.

Ballet might be too formal of a title for the type of dance I do, but I love to dance. I love to draw and paint; I do ceramics and photography. I'm interested in a lot of creative stuff.

Ballet is just a vocabulary like English. Most classical ballets emphasize how high a woman can hold her leg, how skinny she is and all the tricks she can do. She may not ever have to express anything but extreme happiness or sadness. These ballets rarely interpret life. They are fables with princesses and fairies.