Jennifer Homans > Quotes

“Words, moreover, can get in the way of dancing. They signal self-conscious thought, and the moment they play through a dancer's mind her concentration and the way she responds physically to music risk changing. Words can distance a dancer from the music and from her own impulses, and make her movement appear remote and flat.”
― Jennifer Homans, Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet

“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.”
― Jennifer Homans, Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet

“Ballet … was a system of movement as rigorous and complex as any language. Like Latin or ancient Greek, it had rules, conjugations, declensions. Its laws, moreover, were not arbitrary; they corresponded to the laws of nature. Getting it “right” was not a matter of opinion or tastes: ballet was a hard science with demonstrable physical facts. It was also, and just as appealingly, full of emotions and the feelings that come with music and movement...If the coordination and musicality, muscular impulse and timing were exactly right, the body would take over. I could let go. For all its rules and limits, [ballet is] an escape from the self. Being free.”
― Jennifer Homans, Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet

“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.”
― Jennifer Homans, Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet

“In the period from 1945 to 1960, the number of orchestras in the country doubled, book sales rose some 250 percent, and art museums opened in most major cities. Ballet was quick to catch up: between 1958 and 1969 the number of ballet companies nationwide with more than twenty members nearly tripled.”
― Jennifer Homans, Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet

“And as he separated the memories out over the course of his life, like wheat from chaff, all that was good and warm and childhood seemed to slide onto the imperial side of the ledger, and all that was violent, anguished, and upsetting piled up in a heap around the dark incidents that eventually led to the most inescapable disruptions of all: war and revolution. But his light-suffused memories stayed with him; they were the jewels he would sew into the hem of his mind and carry with him out of Russia. He had to remember them because no one else would.”
― Jennifer Homans, Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century

“Behind this populism, however, lay a serious purpose. Balanchine wanted nothing less than to build a new civic culture in America. In 1952 he wrote to Kirstein, explaining that it was vital to have free performances of ballet, drama, and opera for children: “The new generation which would come to the performances will be the future citizens of the United States.…We have to do something for their souls and minds.” Or as he later put it in an interview in which he complained about the country’s rampant commercialism, “Nobody advertises soul. Nobody even mentions it, and that’s what we lack.”
― Jennifer Homans, Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet