Time & Perspective Quote by Ninette de Valois

Survival, de Valois suggests, is not a reward for good intentions or even competent teaching; it is a prize for distinctive identity. Coming from the founder of The Royal Ballet and a maker of institutions, the line has the crisp practicality of someone who watched arts organizations bloom, calcify, and vanish. “Left alive” lands with a dancer’s unsentimental ear: schools are living things, subject to fatigue, fashion, funding, and the quiet brutality of irrelevance.

The intent is partly instructional, partly warning. De Valois isn’t romanticizing originality as self-expression; she’s talking about a recognizable “something special” that can outlast personnel changes and shifting tastes. The subtext is that tradition alone won’t save you. Ballet, especially in 20th-century Britain, was built through importation and imitation: Russian pedagogy, Continental prestige, borrowed repertory. Her point is that mimicry can establish a school, but it can’t secure its future. To endure, a school must metabolize influence into a signature: a particular musicality, a way of using épaulement, a relationship to narrative, a training philosophy that produces dancers audiences can identify in a single phrase.

Context matters: de Valois was shaping a national ballet culture in a period when “legitimacy” was constantly contested. The line reads like institutional wisdom earned by attrition. It also carries a veiled critique of homogenization. When every curriculum chases the same competition-ready technique, “special” becomes the only defensible moat. Not uniqueness for its own sake, but a coherent aesthetic spine that makes survival feel earned rather than accidental.