Daily Inspiration Quote by Ninette de Valois

A dancer’s eye turns history into choreography: you don’t inherit an art form (or a culture) in one clunky block, you edit it into something you can move with. Ninette de Valois is blunt about the generational bargain. We like to posture as rebels, but our rebellion is usually curated. We raid the last era for what flatters us - its innovations, its glamour, its hard-won freedoms - and quietly leave behind the compromises, the failures, the embarrassing tastes.

The line works because it punctures the fantasy of clean breaks. “Hardly any generation” is a sly deflation: not “no one,” not a moral indictment, just an observation from someone who spent a century watching movements repeat with different costumes. “Wants” is the tell. This isn’t about what we know; it’s about what we desire. We don’t want the whole inheritance because the whole inheritance includes obligation: the ugly politics that financed the beautiful work, the discipline behind the effortless performance, the blind spots baked into the “golden age” we romanticize.

De Valois, who helped build British ballet institutions, understood canon-making as selection. Ballet itself survives by keeping “best bits” - a distilled repertoire, a technique refined through ruthless preference. Her subtext is both practical and wary: that selective borrowing is how culture progresses, but also how it lies to itself. Each generation congratulates itself on discernment while smuggling in the past through the stage door, edited for applause.