Robert Caro Quotes

The New York City Ballet is obviously speaking to a whole new generation and bringing it the same wonder and beauty that it brought previous generations.

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.

When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.

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

Once you're in a musical, there is a huge opportunity for that, singing and dancing, 'Aha!' and 'Tada' at the end of the numbers; but it's a different kind of discipline you have to go through to maintain that kind of performance.

I don't want people to look back at my matches and say, 'When you did that move, it was good, and I liked it because it was cool.' I want people to sort of remember a rush of images and the emotion that they felt when they saw it. That's when I think you have a real masterpiece in your hands.

I always feel that the mark of a good ballet is that when you see it more than once, you get more out of it.

Ballet needs figures that people can recognize and relate to. People don't know ballet dancers as well as they know other artists.

I am particularly interested in creating a relationship between ideas of reception in conceptual art and theater.

What I want to give in the theatre is beauty, that's what I want to give.

I wanted to be a professional dancer for a period of time, and I did a lot of dancing and choreography and got paid for it.

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.

You open a section of 'The New York Times,' and there's a review or a story on a choreographer or a dancer, and there's an informative, clear image of a dancer. This is, in my view, not an interesting photograph.

The stage show is, in some sense, highly theatrical. It's definitely not just a band in jeans playing rock and roll.

Beauty does not linger; it only visits. Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm; it calls us to feel, think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life.

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

I've been interested in art and fashion for as long as I can remember because they are so visual. I am fascinated by the idea of visual creation from the ground up, which is a challenge in ballet when the audience has seen every show of yours, every other principal that you've shared a role with, and every different production.

I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.

In my theater, I'm not trying to change the world.

I began to fear that the Graham work was not in lots of ways sufficient for me. I suppose it came about from looking at other dancing and being involved with the ballet - something about the air and the way she thought about dancing.

I don't make records so I can sit down afterward and listen to them. I make them so other people can sit down and listen to them.

In Broadway, we do love jazz hands.

There are many different styles of, and approaches to, tap. My own leans towards a more intellectual view: tap dancing not just for the sake of entertainment but to educate and spark emotion.

In my case, I take part in performance-oriented music and believe it is my call to show the audience something that both their eyes and ears can enjoy.

Dancers are not like movie actresses. People look at our bodies, not our faces. They only recognise me when I sign my name on something and they say, 'Ah yes, Sylvie.'