Robert Gottlieb Work Quotations

Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty.

Nobody could call the work of Noche Flamenca & Soledad Barrio pallid.

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

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.

How can educated and sophisticated viewers react so differently to a work of art? Is it just Kulture Klash? No, since most of the time there's no Klash at all. On the occasions when we disagree, it may be because we're looking for different things in dance.

It was a basic story -- three or four or five girls start off together, one finds love, one goes crazy and/or dies, and one of them becomes a huge success -- but Rona's take was very up-to-date. What made it work for the time was that it had a fresh young-career-women-in-New York quality with a fillip of shock.

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.

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

What I love about Paul's work is the combination of the endless invention with a strong dramatic imagination.

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.

We all need each other in publishing to make publishing work for authors in a variety of formats now and in the future. Anyone who thinks publishers don't bring anything to the table has a very narrow view and lack of knowledge about the industry as a whole.

One of the eternal mysteries of ballet is how untalented choreographers find backers for their work, and then find good dancers to perform in it. Is it irresistible charm? Chutzpah? Pure determination? Blackmail? Or are so many supposedly knowledgeable people just plain blind?

Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work.

How do you rate works of genius? Partly by personal inclination, partly by accepted wisdom, partly by popularity.

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.