Aging & Wisdom Quote by Ninette de Valois

Recovery, in Ninette de Valois's telling, is less a heroic comeback than a humbling return to fundamentals. The line cuts against the glamour of ballet - the myth that artistry is all elevation and effortless flight. After an accident, she insists, you don't re-enter at the "top" because the body won't cooperate with the ego. You're "too weak". The bluntness matters: de Valois refuses sentimentality about injury, aging, or willpower. She treats weakness as a fact, not a failure.

The phrase "start with the easy things" carries subtext that dancers will recognize as both practical and existential. Technique isn't just a toolkit; it's memory stored in tendons, habits, and fear responses. Going back to what you did "when you were young" isn't nostalgia. It's retracing the earliest pathways - pliable, repeatable, reliable - until strength and confidence rebuild. That repetition is the real drama: the artist reduced to the student, the virtuoso returning to scales.

The triple "up up up" does the rhetorical work of a barre exercise: incremental, disciplined, almost metronomic. It implies that progress isn't linear inspiration but controlled accretion. Coming "up" is also a quiet rebuke to shortcut culture. De Valois, a founder of British ballet institutions, is speaking from a world where prestige is built on punishing standards - and where survival depends on accepting the unsexy truth that mastery is always recoverable only through rehearsal, not reputation.