Robert Gottlieb

“'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.”

“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.”

“'Happy Feet' has many felicities.”

“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.”

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

“Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable.”

“When December comes, can 'The Nutcracker' be far behind? No, it can't - not in America, anyway.”

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

“In today's world, it never looks good when you're suing somebody who earned $20,000 for writing a book over a period of a year or two.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“'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.'”

“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.”

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

“At a certain point, you have to face the fact that you've turned into an old fart.”

“Acting has changed since the nineteen-forties.”

“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.”