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

Robert Gottlieb

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" '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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Gelsey Kirkland has had more than her share of demons, as her two distressing memoirs - and her violently checkered career - attest. "

Robert Gottlieb

" For Russians, to whom Pushkin's poem 'Eugene Onegin' is sacred text, the ballet's story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, 'Romeo' and 'Hamlet' are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante. "

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

" If you like being battered, the work of Savion Glover - one-time child prodigy - should be up your alley. I don't, and it isn't up mine. "

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

" 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

" With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

" No agent/publisher is in a position to create across a spectrum of media and distribution what major publishers can accomplish for authors. "

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

" Who would have thought that a tap-dancing penguin would outpoint James Bond at the box office? And deserve to? Not that there's anything wrong with 'Casino Royale.' But 'Happy Feet' - written and directed by George Miller - is a complete charmer, even if, in the way of most family fare, it can't resist straying into the Inspirational. "

Robert Gottlieb

" You may feel that Peter Martins' 'Beauty' is too compressed and inexpressive, but it's loyal to the text. "

Robert Gottlieb

" In traditional 'Swan Lakes,' it's Prince Siegfried's 21st-birthday celebration, his coming-of-age. The entire court, from his mother the Queen on down, is on hand. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

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

Robert Gottlieb

" Dickens was born in 1812 and died in 1870, having produced fifteen novels, many of which can confidently be called great, as well as having accomplished outstanding work in activities into which his insatiable need to expend his vast energies - to achieve, to prevail - carried him: journalism, editing, acting, social reform. "

Robert Gottlieb

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

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

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

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

" Young women today, as in the fifties, find themselves entering the big world and having to make choices. "

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

" 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

" Some readers took 'Heaven's My Destination' as a satire on Christianity and the Midwest, but today it reads like a loving comedy. "

Robert Gottlieb

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

Robert Gottlieb

" '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. "

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