Maurice Béjart Quotes

“A ballet dancer is half a boxer and half a nun.”

“A revolution that doesn't attack the base is just license.”

“Ballet is the most superfluous art, hence it is the most useful art. The useful is always superfluous.”

“Dance no longer has anything to say: it has a lot to say!”

“Dance, better than any other art, can give us the essence of myths.”

“Dance: A minimum of explanation, a minimum of anecdotes – and a maximum of sensations.”

“Escaping from one's own timeline is a joy that comes with dreams.”

“I believe that we always die on schedule. Time is counted differently for each of us, but we die on schedule...”

“I don't like the verb 'to convert'. I did not convert to Islam, but I met several masters to taught me their knowledge.”

“I don't want the qualifier 'French' to be attached to the word choreographer when I die.”

“I took life and threw it on stage. A double tradition: that of teaching and that of art. I'm not the revolutionary you think: I dusted off.”

“I'm horribly pessimistic. Wherever you turn, it's a catastrophe, a nightmare. It makes me sick to my stomach. At night I wake up and obsess about it.”

“In the dance, one finds the cinema, the comic strips, the Olympic hundred meters and swimming, and what's more, poetry, love and tenderness.”

“My ballets belong to my dancers and to the public. They can do with them what they will. I'm not an abusive father, or possessive. Anyway, I have no sense of property.”

“People need images, they need emotion, lyricism. Dance makes it possible to mix aesthetic pleasure, dynamic pleasure and emotional pleasure. A minimum of explanations, a minimum of anecdotes, and a maximum of sensations.”

“Putting a lot of money into culture isn't bad, it's smart. When a government, a nation disappears, only the culture remains.
Putting money into culture is like putting money into a life insurance policy.”

“The others are there to be taken care of.”

“The school is my passion. I pity any choreographer who doesn't have one. It's fundamental to be in permanent contact with young people.”

“There is only one public: those who come to love... If people come to love themselves or seek the reflection of old loves, contact does not take place.”

“There was sport, there was cinema. There was the body and the dream: the dance was going to propose sports performances, but by associating the physical movement, the performance, with an emotivity. And giving things to see. Images.”

“You know, how is freedom won? By shattering. But you have to know what to shatter.”

“You never actually give, that's nonsense. What you do is: exchange.”