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" The early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art. "

Robert Gottlieb

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" Martha Graham, along with George Balanchine, is one of the two commanding figures in 20th-century American dance. For those much younger than I am, her genius as a performer will have to be taken on faith - and on the always-suspect evidence of film. What will last, if things go well, is her genius as a choreographer, as a woman of the theater. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 'Seven Sonatas,' with its flowing series of meetings between men and women in an identifiable emotional world, is in the mould of Jerome Robbins' glorious 'Dances at a Gathering.' "

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

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

Robert Gottlieb

" Nothing is harder to create than brilliant comic ballets, except maybe brilliant full-evening comic ballets. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" It's a crapshoot, publishing. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

" Just as I was turning fifteen, in the spring of 1946, my parents took me to see 'The Glass Menagerie,' well into its year-long run. I had seen a number of shows on Broadway by then, but nothing like this - because there was nothing like this on Broadway. "

Robert Gottlieb

" We see a new generation of Russian authors who are not divided from their Western contemporaries either culturally or philosophically. "

Robert Gottlieb

" I can't remember how many years it's been since I last saw a David Parsons program or what I saw whenever it was, but that isn't surprising, since I can't really remember the first half of a David Parsons program while I'm watching the second half. "

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

" 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

" Editing requires you to be always open, always responding. It is very important, for example, not to allow yourself to want the writer to write a certain kind of book. Sometimes that's hard. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

Robert Gottlieb

" Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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