Robert Gottlieb

Writer

1931-04-29

Quotes by Robert Gottlieb

• Nothing is real for me until I've read about it.

  Read quote

• Nothing is real for me until I've read about it.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• Raimund Hoghe is a little man with a spinal deformity who was once Pina Bausch's dramaturge.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 'Ocean's Kingdom' is a fairy story with no subtext, no resonance - it's not about anything except its water-logged plot.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• The first time the Kirov ballet was seen in America was on Sept. 11, 1961. The ballet was 'Swan Lake.' The ballerina was Inna Zubkovskaya. The place was the old Met, on what must have been one of the hottest nights of the year, and there was no air-conditioning.

  Read quote

• What really matters is that 'Black Swan' deploys and exaggerates all the cliches of earlier ballet movies, especially 'The Red Shoes,' another tale of a ballerina driven mad and suicidal.

  Read quote

• '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.

  Read quote

• I hated Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' when it first turned up, and then when it was televised, and then when it returned.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• Blood is the leitmotif of 'Black Swan.'

  Read quote

• '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.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• 'Beloved Renegade' is a meditation on Walt Whitman, on tenderness, on dying.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• You can approach 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study.

  Read quote