Balanchine Said.(George Balanchine's quotations)

Balanchine was much quoted. He had a typically Russian penchant for philosophizing and a verbal wit that, in his unpolished English, came off as folk wisdom. When he stopped his class to talk or when he gave an interview, he always had something to say that people remembered, and he left the impression that these rough-hewn nuggets of his were as spontaneous as they were abundant. ("By George Balanchine," a booklet of quotations, was published in 1984, the year after he died.) He could be practical ("My muse must come to me on union time"), peremptory ("There are no mothers-in-law in ballet"), or cryptic ("I am not a man, but a cloud in trousers"). The one thing he did not care to be was original. Many of Balanchine's most memorable sayings were quotations, produced from a storehouse of sources: Pushkin, Goethe, Shakespeare, the Bible, the Greek Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, Paul Valery. The range gives some indication of Balanchine's erudition, especially remarkable for a dancer. He was not a reader, like his good friends Stravinsky and Tchelitchev--his schedule did not leave much time for reading--but then he was not the kind of person who needed to read in order to absorb information. As a student in Petrograd before and just after the revolutions of 1917, he fed his curiosity on the richness of Russian culture and thrived on its assimilation of commonly disdained arts, such as dance, film, and the circus. Without this background and the subsequent involvement with the Monte Carlo-based Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev, not even a dancer of genius could have picked up as much as Balanchine already had by 1928, when, at the age of twenty-four, he choreographed "Apollo" for Diaghilev.

Balanchine's quotations were usually delivered to the best of his memory in his own words. Sometimes he varied the wording intentionally; at other times, he quoted verbatim. "A cloud in trousers" is straight from Mayakovsky:

If you really want, I'll be irreproachably sweet:, not a man but a cloud in trousers.

Balanchine told Solomon Volkov, one of his biographers, that he used this line to impress girls--just what Mayakovsky said about it. But Balanchine would also refer to himself in interviews as a cloud in trousers, by which I think he meant that he was a ballet-maker, a creator of airy ephemera.

"My muse must come to me on union time" is a variation on Tchaikovsky's "My muse must come to me when I call her." The motto of the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, "A realibus ad realiora" ("From the real to the more real"), was revised by Balanchine to describe his job: "To make the beautiful more beautiful." (Ivanov's motto as it stands could also have been Balanchine's.) His well-known advice to the mentally agitated dancer, "Don't think, dear, do," comes from Valery's poem "Ebauche d'un Serpent": "Danse, cher corps. . . . Ne pense pas!" One of the most celebrated Balanchinisms, "God creates, man assembles," is an adaptation of a saying attributed to Glinka, "Nations create music, composers only arrange it," and it is a question whether Balanchine or Stravinsky said it first. The word "assemble" is a synonym for "compose," which literally means "put together." Balanchine was speaking not only for composers and choreographers but for all "creative" human beings. We put things together that already exist; we cannot create out of nothing--only God creates ex nihilo. It is the thought expressed in John 1:3: "Without Him was made nothing that has been made."

In countless interviews, Balanchine deplored the tendency of some members of the audience to attach meanings to dance gesture, and he always used the same metaphor:

When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, "What do you mean? What is your significance?" Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful. We're like flowers. A flower doesn't tell you a story. It's in itself a beautiful thing.