Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Yes, bad or mediocre ballets can be useful to the dancers and temporarily fun for the audience, but in the long run, the lowering of standards can only erode the art form we all love. "

Robert Gottlieb

Fun

Run

Long

Related Quotes:

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

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

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

" 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? "

" 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. "

" Controversy sells books. "

" Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification. "

" 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

" City Ballet has to develop choreographers of stature and a new approach to coaching before everything we value about it fades away and, in the great tradition of the Cheshire Cat, there's nothing left but Peter Martins' smile. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

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

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

" Schumann's 'Quintet in E flat for Piano and Strings' is one of the sublime moments in Romantic music. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

You

Work

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Ladies: You have to support an infant with a hand under its head. "

" Diana Vishneva is not only a magnificent dancer but a magnificent actress - no one works harder or understands more. "

Robert Gottlieb

Magnificent

Harder

" '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.' "

" '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. "

" There is no consolation for anyone in the Scott Peterson story, and no final illumination. "

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

Robert Gottlieb

Ideal

World

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