Daily Inspiration Quote by Graeme Murphy

Murphy’s sentence lands with the dry self-awareness of someone who knows he’s playing with a loaded tradition. He calls it “fairly bizarre” that a life steeped in contemporary dance would pivot to offering audiences “a white classical ballet,” and that little aside does a lot of work: it signals both irony and calculation. He’s not confessing confusion so much as acknowledging the cultural expectations that still cling to ballet as a prestige object - one that reads as “proper” when it is pale, symmetrical, and “pure.”

The phrase “give people” is telling. It frames ballet not as an artistic necessity but as a kind of service, even a concession: audiences, donors, institutions still hunger for the reassuring silhouette of the canonical. Murphy positions himself as someone fluent in the present but willing to deliver the past, almost like a bilingual performer translating modern sensibilities into an old dialect.

Then there’s the charged specificity of “white.” He doesn’t say “traditional” or “19th-century.” He names the visual and racial coding baked into classical ballet’s history: whiteness as aesthetic, as uniformity, as a default. Calling it “very pure” doubles down on the ideology of cleanliness and control that ballet has long fetishized - purity of line, purity of style, purity of body. In 2026, that word can’t help sounding like a wink at the exclusion that “purity” often masks.

Murphy’s intent reads as both homage and critique: to stage the form at its most pristine so we can feel its seduction - and maybe notice the cost of what gets erased to achieve it.