Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.
Ladies: You have to support an infant with a hand under its head.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Young women today, as in the fifties, find themselves entering the big world and having to make choices.
There is no consolation for anyone in the Scott Peterson story, and no final illumination.
‘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.
‘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?’
I hated Matthew Bourne’s ‘Swan Lake’ when it first turned up, and then when it was televised, and then when it returned.
Why movie and dance critics are taking ‘The Company’ seriously, I can’t imagine. Are they impressed by Altman’s reputation and naive sincerity? By the fluid semi-documentary approach?
Paris, as always, is swarming with Americans, and these days, it’s also swarming with hamburgers. Oddly, though, it’s not typically the Americans who are pursuing the perfect burger on the perfect bun with the obligatory side of perfect coleslaw; the Americans are pursuing the perfect blanquette de veau.
I first read ‘An American Tragedy’ in college, and in my entire life I had never read anything so painful.
‘River of Light,’ to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance.
It’s often the case that the most strained moments in books are the very beginning and the very end – the getting in and the getting out. The ending, especially: it’s awkward, as if the writer doesn’t know when the book is over and nervously says it all again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The best thing you can say about Hubbard Street is that if you were a dancer, this is a company you’d fight to get into.
In Georgia, apparently, men are men and women are women – at least in their folk dance.
What guarantees – or at least semi-guarantees – good ballets is good choreographers, and they are thin on the ground.
Dance Theatre of Harlem has done a lot of good things well, a lot of good things badly, and a lot of bad things – it doesn’t matter how.
‘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.
One of the odder byways of nonfiction is the dishy memoir by those who have served the great or the near-great.
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.
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.
Like all editors, I assume, I’m a reactor.
Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.
We see a new generation of Russian authors who are not divided from their Western contemporaries either culturally or philosophically.
‘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.
Raimund Hoghe is a little man with a spinal deformity who was once Pina Bausch’s dramaturge.
The heart of the classical repertory is the Tchaikovsky-Petipa ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ and no ballet is harder to get right.
Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, ‘The Tempest’ loses much of its resonance.
When you can’t follow a ballet’s action, you can always read the program notes.
Nothing is harder to create than brilliant comic ballets, except maybe brilliant full-evening comic ballets.
When December comes, can ‘The Nutcracker’ be far behind? No, it can’t – not in America, anyway.
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