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" Ballet companies have their ups and downs, just like the rest of us. "

Robert Gottlieb

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" Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it. "

Robert Gottlieb

" The mysteries and scandals of the Kremlin are nothing compared to the mysteries and scandals of the Bolshoi. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" All ballet galas are unbearable, but they're unbearable in different ways. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

" What guarantees - or at least semi-guarantees - good ballets is good choreographers, and they are thin on the ground. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 'Ocean's Kingdom' is a fairy story with no subtext, no resonance - it's not about anything except its water-logged plot. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

" 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

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

Robert Gottlieb

" '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

" Twyla Tharp set her sights on ballet, and ballet, hungry for major talent, succumbed. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" '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

" 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

" Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work. "

Robert Gottlieb

" One of the odder byways of nonfiction is the dishy memoir by those who have served the great or the near-great. "

Robert Gottlieb

" There's no point pretending that all of Martha Graham's pieces are equally strong. "

Robert Gottlieb

" I first read 'An American Tragedy' in college, and in my entire life I had never read anything so painful. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

" 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

" 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

" The heart of the classical repertory is the Tchaikovsky-Petipa 'Sleeping Beauty,' and no ballet is harder to get right. "

Robert Gottlieb

" If Tom Clancy didn't write any Op-Centers, he would be $60 million less rich. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Most writers are vulnerable and insecure, and Kay Graham was more so than most. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

" 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