Robert Gottlieb Quotes

Sometimes you feel like people go, 'Oh, he just does funny dances,' or 'That's cute.' It drives me a little crazy when someone does a dance number where all they do is kick to their head for five minutes, and everyone's like, 'That choreography is amazing.' It takes a lot to choreograph a number that also gets laughs in it.

The costumes had to serve the choreography.

If anyone is calling me to choreograph a dance, they know my style, and they know I am a taskmaster. They want to present themselves as a good dancer before their fans, and that is why they want me to choreograph.

For the 'Heaven' stage, the dancers and I don't use wires so we are slowly slipping down the stage if you see us up close.

Dance has always just been an extension of music for me. It's about putting my music into motion. It's just another dimension that I tap into with my music that not many artists do anymore.

Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.

The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.

The first dance performance I saw was Joffrey Ballet doing 'Billboards' to Prince.

I've choreographed all of my movies.

There's nothing like the force and challenge of a new ballet to galvanize everyone involved in bringing it to life.

Choreography is amazing. I'm still a dancer, yet I transitioned into choreography then as a Creative Director. All of these creative elements are brought out of being a dancer. Directing is something that comes out of understanding movement and choreography. Directing movement is directing a dance piece.

Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.

There are bound to be differences in any artistic collaboration with landscape elements, or theater, of lighting elements.

Obviously I always wanted to do a contemporary piece.

I was performing in this burlesque group, and we would go to dance rehearsals every day. You'd use every part of your body. Even though some of it is slow, it takes a lot of muscle to be able to dip down and come back up.

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.

Seeing 'Revelations' made me want to be a professional dancer.

'The Dance Scene' is basically the most amazing dance show in the world, and it follows me as a creative director. You see how I maintain that creativity.

I wanted to give people - which is fairly bizarre considering my whole life is contemporary dance really - I wanted to give people a really fulfilling sense that they had seen a white classical ballet - in a very pure form.

When I was a dancer, I was acting.

'River of Light,' to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance.

For me, a dancer is part of an artist's entertainment - 'backup dancer' isn't even in my vocabulary.

'The Leaves Are Fading' had something of a vogue when Antony Tudor made it in 1975, largely because of Gelsey Kirkland's ravishing performance.

Dancers are a work of art - they are the canvas on which their work is painted.

I had always choreographed a little, beginning in high school. And I leaned toward choreography. I always had an overview of what was going on.