"God gave us all exactly the same fingers, arms, legs, and feet, but in our different countries we divided them all a little differently as we feel it, do you understand?"
About this Quote
Ninette de Valois points to a paradox at the heart of art and culture: a shared human body animated by many different ways of understanding and organizing it. The anatomy is universal, but the lines, accents, and priorities we impose on it are products of taste, history, and national temperament. The remark carries the authority of someone who moved among multiple traditions. Trained in the Italian Cecchetti method, shaped by her work with Diaghilev, and founder of the Royal Ballet, she saw how Russian épaulement, French clarity, Italian bravura, Danish buoyancy, and the emerging English restraint could all spring from identical bones and muscles yet be codified into distinct systems.
To say we divided our limbs differently is to talk about technique as a cultural grammar. One school lengthens the ports de bras, another crisps the footwork; one values high extensions, another the quiet eloquence of musical phrasing. None of these choices is dictated by anatomy alone. They are decisions about emphasis, line, and feeling, sedimented over generations into pedagogy. Her phrasing as we feel it refuses the pretense of a single correct standard. Feeling here is not mere whim but the collective sensibility that shapes an art form within a country or company.
There is generosity in this view. It invites comparison without hierarchy, curiosity without conquest. A dancer trained in one system can respect and borrow from another, not because their own is lacking, but because the human instrument can be tuned to many scales. De Valois’s career embodied that synthesis, forging a British style that learned from continental schools while guarding its own accent.
At stake is more than ballet. The idea applies to language, craft, and ritual: shared capacities, locally partitioned. Uniformity would be easier, but art thrives on these small, felt differences, the divisions that reveal how many kinds of beauty the same body can carry.
To say we divided our limbs differently is to talk about technique as a cultural grammar. One school lengthens the ports de bras, another crisps the footwork; one values high extensions, another the quiet eloquence of musical phrasing. None of these choices is dictated by anatomy alone. They are decisions about emphasis, line, and feeling, sedimented over generations into pedagogy. Her phrasing as we feel it refuses the pretense of a single correct standard. Feeling here is not mere whim but the collective sensibility that shapes an art form within a country or company.
There is generosity in this view. It invites comparison without hierarchy, curiosity without conquest. A dancer trained in one system can respect and borrow from another, not because their own is lacking, but because the human instrument can be tuned to many scales. De Valois’s career embodied that synthesis, forging a British style that learned from continental schools while guarding its own accent.
At stake is more than ballet. The idea applies to language, craft, and ritual: shared capacities, locally partitioned. Uniformity would be easier, but art thrives on these small, felt differences, the divisions that reveal how many kinds of beauty the same body can carry.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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