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" '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?' "

Robert Gottlieb

Just

Zero

Question

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" Like all editors, I assume, I'm a reactor. "

Robert Gottlieb

Editors

Assume

" 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. "

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

" '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. "

" When December comes, can 'The Nutcracker' be far behind? No, it can't - not in America, anyway. "

" 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. "

" Ballet Hispanico is a mixture of ethnic, ballet, social, jazz - you name it, it's doing it. The company has been going strong for more than 20 years, and you can see why: It may not be refined, but it's full of beans. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The first time the Kirov ballet was seen in America was on Sept. 11, 1961. The ballet was 'Swan Lake.' The ballerina was Inna Zubkovskaya. The place was the old Met, on what must have been one of the hottest nights of the year, and there was no air-conditioning. "

" 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

" City Ballet remains a great company in perpetual artistic crisis. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

People

Dance

" The first movement ballerina should be a paradigm of strength and authority. "

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

" Ballet in September used to be dead as a dodo. Now, with City Ballet's ingenious decision to give us four weeks of repertory in the early fall, having cut down on the relentlessly long spring season when dancers, critics and audiences droop on the vine, we wake up after the dog days of August with something to look at. "

" I hated Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' when it first turned up, and then when it was televised, and then when it returned. "

" 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. "

" It's always fascinating - and sometimes a little disquieting - when two first-rate critics violently disagree. "

" Every great dance company, even when it seems poised in perfect balance, needs constant renewal of both repertory and performers. "

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

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

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

" Ballet Hispanico is far from Irish, and, though it has strong dancers, its Spanishness has always left me unconvinced. "

Robert Gottlieb

Far

Dancers

" 'Black Swan' does what Hollywood movies have always done - it spends its energies on getting some surface things right while getting everything important wrong. Darren Aronofsky, the director, applies the same techniques and the same sensibility here as he did with 'The Wrestler,' only with a prettier protagonist. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 'Paquita' has a patchy history, beginning in 1846, and a patchy plot. "