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" Ballet companies have their ups and downs, just like the rest of us. "
Robert Gottlieb
Us
Ballet
Like
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" Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it. "
Robert Gottlieb
Nothing
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" The mysteries and scandals of the Kremlin are nothing compared to the mysteries and scandals of the Bolshoi. "
Robert Gottlieb
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" Almost the first thing you see after entering the Houdini exhibition at the Jewish Museum is a large-screen film of Harry Houdini hanging by his ankles upside-down from a tall building, high over a sea of men in fedoras, and thrashing his way out of a straitjacket. "
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You
Sea
See
" All ballet galas are unbearable, but they're unbearable in different ways. "
Robert Gottlieb
Ways
Different
Ballet
" Jodi Melnick is hotly self-absorbed. Her onstage musicians are much too loud, and like so many narcissistic performers, she goes on much too long: She's interested in herself; why wouldn't we be? "
Robert Gottlieb
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Why
She
" What guarantees - or at least semi-guarantees - good ballets is good choreographers, and they are thin on the ground. "
Robert Gottlieb
Least
Guarantees
Ground
" 'Ocean's Kingdom' is a fairy story with no subtext, no resonance - it's not about anything except its water-logged plot. "
Robert Gottlieb
Kingdom
Ocean
Story
" The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age. "
Robert Gottlieb
Life
Kindness
Hard Work
" You can approach 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study. "
Robert Gottlieb
Death
Life
You
" How do you rate works of genius? Partly by personal inclination, partly by accepted wisdom, partly by popularity. "
Robert Gottlieb
Rate
You
Wisdom
" 'Eclipse' is a concept piece, and its concept centers on 36 large light bulbs strung from above in a geometrical pattern and at different heights, some of them at times down below the dancers' chest level. "
Robert Gottlieb
Heights
Dancers
Different
" Twyla Tharp set her sights on ballet, and ballet, hungry for major talent, succumbed. "
Robert Gottlieb
Sights
Talent
Hungry
" Melissa Barak, an ex-City Ballet dancer and sometime choreographer, has put together an unspeakably dopey and incompetent mess called 'Call Me Ben,' combining ultra-generic dance, terrible dialogue and disastrous storytelling, about the founding of Las Vegas by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who insists, violently, on being addressed as 'Ben.' "
Robert Gottlieb
Me
Dance
Together
" As ye sow, so shall ye reap. When a ballet company spends a lot of money on gimmicky pieces, it's stuck with them for a while - they have to earn their keep. "
Robert Gottlieb
Keep
Company
Ballet
" You have to surrender to a book. If you do, when something in it seems to be going askew, you are wounded. The more you have surrendered to a book, the more jarring its errors appear. "
Robert Gottlieb
You
Book
More
" Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty. "
Robert Gottlieb
Unhappy
Way
Bad
" 'Empty Moves' is elegantly and coolly inventive. Two pairs of dancers shadow each other in slow, deliberate rearrangements and manipulations of legs and torsos, only occasionally switching partners or breaking free of the formal patterning. "
Robert Gottlieb
Dancers
Two
Slow
" What makes a publishing house great? The easy answer is the consistency with which it produces books of value over a lengthy period of time. "
Robert Gottlieb
Easy
Consistency
Time
" Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work. "
Robert Gottlieb
Wayne
Capable
Good
" One of the odder byways of nonfiction is the dishy memoir by those who have served the great or the near-great. "
Robert Gottlieb
Those
Memoir
Great
" There's no point pretending that all of Martha Graham's pieces are equally strong. "
Robert Gottlieb
Point
Pieces
Strong
" I first read 'An American Tragedy' in college, and in my entire life I had never read anything so painful. "
Robert Gottlieb
Life
Tragedy
College
" Many people say to me, particularly about my dance writing, 'It sounds just like you.' But it sounds just like me after I've made it sound like me. "
Robert Gottlieb
Me
People
Dance
" Writing happened to me. I didn't decide to start writing or to be a writer. I never wanted to be a writer. "
Robert Gottlieb
Decide
Start
Never
" The finest chroniclers of the great and the near-great have often been courtiers - the Duc de Saint-Simon, for instance, or Lady Murasaki. "
Robert Gottlieb
Been
Finest
Great
" The heart of the classical repertory is the Tchaikovsky-Petipa 'Sleeping Beauty,' and no ballet is harder to get right. "
Robert Gottlieb
Beauty
Sleeping
Ballet
" If Tom Clancy didn't write any Op-Centers, he would be $60 million less rich. "
Robert Gottlieb
Rich
Million
Write
" Most writers are vulnerable and insecure, and Kay Graham was more so than most. "
Robert Gottlieb
More
Insecure
Vulnerable
" When I was at Cambridge in the early fifties, there was a school nearby for training Army officers in Russian, and some imaginative genius came up with the idea of putting on Russian plays with the students to improve their language skills. "
Robert Gottlieb
Training
Army
Genius
" Audiences love Paul Taylor, and so do I. Not everything, and not always, but year in, year out, he gives me more concentrated pleasure than I get from any other dance company. "
Robert Gottlieb
Year
Me
Love