If you wanna dance, a windshield wiper'll do it-all you need is a beat.
I had danced with Janet Jackson and P. Diddy so I had done a bunch of hip hop. Really and truly my roots are in modern and ballet but, professionally, that's not really out there any more, unfortunately, so these artists aren't really having a lot of ballet dancers behind them so I had to learn hip hop really quick.
The music industry is so easy compared to the ballet world
I take class. I'm always ballet ready. I'm ready to go - got my tights and my shoes.
Ballet is the fairies baseball.
I do after-school ballet and also hip-hop and jazz.
I started taking ballet lessons when I was three and a half and I still take dance classes.
I came to New York to study ballet and English.
Baseball is a ballet without music. Drama without words.
Movements are as eloquent as words.
All dancers have a cumulative tendency, because each beat of the tom-tom has an almost irresistible appeal. Soon, those who were just spectators would dance too.
The hardest thing that I'll ever do, is ballet. Because you are either good or bad.
Mum, who had been a dancer with a small ballet company before she got married, was full of encouragement. She didn't say, "This is really good, you should do this", She just encouraged us to do whatever we liked.
I had seen the ballet of Swan Lake as a child but it was as an adult, when I saw a production featuring Erik Bruhn, that I first noticed how significant a part the ever-present threat of violence played. This juxtaposition of great beauty and grace with a backdrop of pure evil stayed with me for years.
I am not an educated person. I didn't come up through a ballet company. I came up through burlesque. So I have a lot of inferiority feelings concerning my own lack of education, my entry into show business. I'm not a Baryshnikov. I'm not a Nureyev. I came up in vaudeville. Strippers. So I've always had these feelings. But I think they've also helped me.
Hopefully, I'll be a part of ABT, in some way, forever. I think I'll always be a part of ballet and try to push diversity, for as long as I live.
True art consists in concealing art.
If the simple positions of ballet are demonstrated straight on, they seem quite dull and lifeless, but when put on a diagonal, they begin to take on all kinds of possibilities.
Without dancing you can never attain a perfectly graceful carriage, which is of the highest importance in life.
Flawless. . . Tightly choreographed. . . Shipstead gains entry into exclusive worlds and trains her opera glasses on private social rituals, as well as behind-the-scenes hanky panky. . . Similar to classic ballet, the power of Astonish Me arises out of the pairing of a melodramatic storyline with scrupulously executed range of movement. . . Shipstead sweeps you into this insider world of sweat, narcissism, and short-lived magic. . . Transcendent.