I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.
I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.
I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. I played their game, pretending. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB. Horrifying.
I want to do exactly what I want to do. I'd rather gamble on the box office than beg for a grant.
You cannot be happy with your family while being personally unhappy with your work. It's a Catch-22 kind of thing.
I go a lot to see young people downtown in little theaters. It's great. If you start somebody's career, it's so exciting.
I feel very uneasy with a lot of aspects of the Russian life and the Russian people.
It's weird when you see pieces of choreography that were done for you 15 or 20 years ago and now they are being done by another dance company.
Creative Artists Agency put together a project of extraordinary mediocrity and colossal stupidity. Otherwise, it was great.
I was kind of amused, and shocked. At first I was watching it with my children. Then I said 'Children, OUT
I have some Russian friends. But probably only 10 percent. I don't hang out usually in the big Russian communities in Brooklyn and New Jersey.
People of art should never get married and have children, because it's a selfish experience.
I really reject that kind of comparison that says, Oh, he is the best. This is the second best. There is no such thing.
I am not the first straight dancer or the last.
I can see one guy doing what we call an 'air flare' ... and I'll see 30 other individuals do the same move in a competition. Not one of those b-boys did anything to try to twist it and make it their own.
I think art education, especially in this country, which government pretty much ignores, is so important for young people.
Dancing is my obsession. My life.
I have been very lucky to work in so many new ballets, but that is what a dancer's work is.
There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something out.
Dancers are stripped enough onstage. You don't have to know more about them than they've given you already.
To achieve some depth in your field requires a lot of sacrifices. Want to or not, you're thinking about what you're doing in life-in my case, dancing.
It's what's left in life, to work with interesting people.
I cannot belong to a nonprofit organization because when you receive grants, you have to make such great compromises with your artistic plans.
I get speeding ticket like everybody else. If the restaurant is full I'm waiting in line like everybody else.
To walk across the street is a risk.
No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.
Astaire was not a sexual animal, but he made his partners look so extraordinarily related to him.
Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important.
The Russian people get so insanely close to each other as friends. Their lives are interrelated so much on an everyday basis.
I kind of lost interest in the classical dance. I was very much interested in the modern choreography.
Acting is not my language at all.
Working is living to me.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories