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" Despite the rigid classicism of the famous Paris Opera school and company, the French have done more than their share to unmoor la Danse from its traditions and standards. "

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" 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

" The finest chroniclers of the great and the near-great have often been courtiers - the Duc de Saint-Simon, for instance, or Lady Murasaki. "

" I can't claim to 'understand' 'Byzantium,' if any dance work can be 'understood,' but whenever I see it, I sense that it's charged with meaning. "

" 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

" What 'War and Peace' is to the novel and 'Hamlet' is to the theater, Swan Lake' is to ballet - that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form. "

" Acting has changed since the nineteen-forties. "

" There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again. "

" '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?' "

" 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. "

" We know how Merce Cunningham works and how he thinks - we've been told, over and over again, by him and by others. "

" The best seat in the house often depends on the ballet. For instance, much of the first act of 'The Nutcracker' is domestic and small scale, so it's great to sit up close. But the second act features elaborate scenery and choreography, which are better to observe from a distance. "

" As for the once-revolutionary 'Agon,' after more than half a century, its lessons and revelations have been so absorbed into the language of ballet that it now seems almost conventional. "

" 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. "

" How can educated and sophisticated viewers react so differently to a work of art? Is it just Kulture Klash? No, since most of the time there's no Klash at all. On the occasions when we disagree, it may be because we're looking for different things in dance. "

" For me, the real pleasure in writing is in having an excuse to pursue my curiosity about people who have meant something to me. "

" 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

" 'River of Light,' to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance. "

" Writing happened to me. I didn't decide to start writing or to be a writer. I never wanted to be a writer. "

" Dance stories, unlike those in opera, are usually simple. "

" The eternal and uneasy relationship between ballet and modern dance endures, but radically altered in tone and intensity. "

" Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance. "

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

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

" We all need each other in publishing to make publishing work for authors in a variety of formats now and in the future. Anyone who thinks publishers don't bring anything to the table has a very narrow view and lack of knowledge about the industry as a whole. "

" 'The Sleeping Beauty' is the greatest, most challenging and most vulnerable of classical ballets. Everything can go wrong with it, and all too often, everything does. "

Robert Gottlieb

Sleeping

Wrong

" Blood is the leitmotif of 'Black Swan.' "

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

" When you can't follow a ballet's action, you can always read the program notes. "

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

Robert Gottlieb

Insecure

Vulnerable

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