Audiences love Paul Taylor, and so do I. Not everything, and not always, but year in, year out, he gives me more concentrated pleasure than I get from any other dance company.
— Robert Gottlieb
One of the odder byways of nonfiction is the dishy memoir by those who have served the great or the near-great.
When December comes, can 'The Nutcracker' be far behind? No, it can't - not in America, anyway.
In Georgia, apparently, men are men and women are women - at least in their folk dance.
How the English love playing at being naughty boys!
Ballet companies have their ups and downs, just like the rest of us.
Classics are constantly being re-imagined and transformed, and the originals are none the worse for it; they endure.
The mystery of Christopher Wheeldon deepens. Yes, he's the most talented of the younger ballet choreographers - indeed, where's the competition? Yes, he's particularly good at nurturing dancers and identifying their essential qualities.
'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.
'The Sleeping Beauty' is the greatest, most challenging and most vulnerable of classical ballets. Everything can go wrong with it, and all too often, everything does.
You may feel that Peter Martins' 'Beauty' is too compressed and inexpressive, but it's loyal to the text.
The heart of the classical repertory is the Tchaikovsky-Petipa 'Sleeping Beauty,' and no ballet is harder to get right.
Nobody could call the work of Noche Flamenca & Soledad Barrio pallid.
City Ballet remains a great company in perpetual artistic crisis.
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.
Has there ever been a dance career with more ups and downs than Twyla Tharp's? Or with more varied ambitions? Or larger ambition?
Schumann's 'Quintet in E flat for Piano and Strings' is one of the sublime moments in Romantic music.
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.
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.
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?
A steady diet of the higher truths might prove exhausting, but it's important that we acknowledge their validity and celebrate their survival.
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.
We know how Merce Cunningham works and how he thinks - we've been told, over and over again, by him and by others.
A lot of people have a lot of faith in Karole Armitage. They see her as bold, inventive, indefatigable. 'America isn't working out? There's always Europe. Ballet? No? Go modern. Keep going! Show 'em!'
'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is one of George Balanchine's greatest creations - and one of the greatest of all story ballets.
'Happy Feet' has many felicities.
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.
When you can't follow a ballet's action, you can always read the program notes.
Either 'Deuce Coupe' has aged badly, or I have. I suspect it's the latter.
You can usually tell how healthy a ballet company is by the degree of your interest in the middle ranks of the dancers - the not-yet stars, the up-and-comers.
We know that Diana Vishneva is a phenomenon of strength and style, and she certainly has earned the right to stretch her talents as best she can.
Of the great singing stars of the 1940s and '50s, only one - Nat King Cole - died young, at age 45.
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.
I first read 'An American Tragedy' in college, and in my entire life I had never read anything so painful.
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.
Ballet Hispanico is a mixture of ethnic, ballet, social, jazz - you name it, it's doing it. The company has been going strong for more than 20 years, and you can see why: It may not be refined, but it's full of beans.
There's no point pretending that all of Martha Graham's pieces are equally strong.
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.
There is no consolation for anyone in the Scott Peterson story, and no final illumination.
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 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.
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.
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.
It's always fascinating - and sometimes a little disquieting - when two first-rate critics violently disagree.
Ladies: You have to support an infant with a hand under its head.
Soledad Barrio is clearly a master - of thrilling steps and passionate movement. She stalks, she circles, she struts, she snaps her head - her feet drill the stage.
'Paquita' has a patchy history, beginning in 1846, and a patchy plot.
The finest chroniclers of the great and the near-great have often been courtiers - the Duc de Saint-Simon, for instance, or Lady Murasaki.
Twyla Tharp is not going to take orders from anyone, not even Mozart!
The 1920s brought not only the Charleston but the flat chest.
