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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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" 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

Love

" At a certain point, you have to face the fact that you've turned into an old fart. "

" The Kirov is a great ballet company because it has so many terrific dancers, but it doesn't always know what to do with them. "

" Remember: TV is a format, film is a format, and books are a format. "

" 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. "

" 'Beloved Renegade' is a meditation on Walt Whitman, on tenderness, on dying. "

" 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. "

" The mystery of Christopher Wheeldon deepens. Yes, he's the most talented of the younger ballet choreographers - indeed, where's the competition? Yes, he's particularly good at nurturing dancers and identifying their essential qualities. "

" What really matters is that 'Black Swan' deploys and exaggerates all the cliches of earlier ballet movies, especially 'The Red Shoes,' another tale of a ballerina driven mad and suicidal. "

" Either 'Deuce Coupe' has aged badly, or I have. I suspect it's the latter. "

" A lot of people have a lot of faith in Karole Armitage. They see her as bold, inventive, indefatigable. 'America isn't working out? There's always Europe. Ballet? No? Go modern. Keep going! Show 'em!' "

" 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. "

" The 1920s brought not only the Charleston but the flat chest. "

" I don't like writing - it's so difficult to say what you mean. It's much easier to edit other people's writing and help them say what they mean. "

" The cows in Stella Gibbons's immortal 'Cold Comfort Farm' are named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless, and that more or less is the verdict on 'Ocean's Kingdom,' the wildly hyped and wildly uninteresting collaboration between Peter Martins and Paul McCartney. "

" You don't have to be a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to figure out that when you title a memoir of your parents 'Them,' you're performing an act of distancing. "

" I can almost always read a new manuscript overnight. "

" Dance Theatre of Harlem has done a lot of good things well, a lot of good things badly, and a lot of bad things - it doesn't matter how. "

" I have no problem selling ebooks for authors directly as an agent, but partnering with them is another matter. "

" 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

Dance

Together

" In 1998, Vanity Fair asked me to write a big piece for them on the 50th anniversary of the New York City Ballet. My life, to a great extent, had been spent at and with the New York City Ballet, and I decided to try it. It was very scary, writing about something I loved so much and had such strong opinions about. "

" 'Porgy and Bess' has never been thought of as a dance show, and yet it's filled with dance. It uses dance to punctuate the action, or as background, or as atmosphere; even when it's front and center, it isn't crucial. "

" Twyla Tharp is not going to take orders from anyone, not even Mozart! "

" 'The Leaves Are Fading' had something of a vogue when Antony Tudor made it in 1975, largely because of Gelsey Kirkland's ravishing performance. "

" The Iron Curtain may be a thing of the past, but Mother Russia is as mysterious as ever. "

" How do you rate works of genius? Partly by personal inclination, partly by accepted wisdom, partly by popularity. "

" Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil. "

" 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

" 'Eclipse' is overlong and overly self-conscious, but it isn't a fake or a zero; it just gets exhausting. It raises a crucial question: 'When does Concept morph into Gimmick?' "

" You can usually tell how healthy a ballet company is by the degree of your interest in the middle ranks of the dancers - the not-yet stars, the up-and-comers. "