The Ballet Manila Archives is the repository of documents, print, photographic, audio and video materials and memorabilia relating to the history of Ballet Manila and the life and career of its founder, prima ballerina Lisa Macuja-Elizalde. This site is powered by Ms. Elizalde and Project Art, Inc.
All in Talk About Dance
Dancing is like breathing — missing a day doing either is very bad.
Dance is meditation in movement, a walking into silence where every movement becomes prayer.
Ballet is created on beautiful lines and shapes. If what you hear and what you see mesh, there's a very thrilling experience.
Dancing makes me see everything clearer and it is a challenge that you make with yourself to keep improving every day. In ballet you are never good enough, you are constantly trying to be better, I love that!
In classical ballet there are certain rules. I can’t be an ordinary contemporary woman. I can only be a princess.
Ballet is not just movement, not simply abstract. It’s something beautiful.
I think most dancers would agree that the art of ballet chooses the dancer, not the other way around.
At the ballet, you really feel like you're in the presence of something outside the rest of your life. Higher than the rest of your life.
There was something in her movements that made you think she never walked but always danced.
The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
Anytime someone has said to me, ‘You can’t do that,’ I have answered, ‘Watch me.’”
Dance training can't be separate from life training. Everything that comes into our lives is training.
You can’t be afraid of stepping on toes if you want to go dancing.
A real ballerina must fill her space with her own personality.
Ballet is purifying, every movement physically honed and essential, with no superfluity or excess.
