When I left the theater… I was thinking that I’d seen a classic of American dance. It confers a mythic dimension on ordinary aspects of our daily lives – it’s unfaked folk art. The dancers, crashing wave upon wave into those falls, have a happy insane spirit that recalls a unique moment in American life – the time we did the school play or we were ready to drown at a swimming meet. The last time most of us were happy in that way.

It is through strength of technique that the body stays in possession of music.

a masterpiece doesn't so much transcend its time as perpetuate it; it keeps its moment alive.

To think of criticism as a conversation is to think of it as a social act, something that puts you in touch with other people who may think the way you do.

Why are men impersonating women funny while women impersonating men are not? It is a matter of gravity. A heavy thing trying to become lighter is automatically funnier than a light thing trying to become heavy.

When I left the theater… I was thinking that I’d seen a classic of American dance. It confers a mythic dimension on ordinary aspects of our daily lives – it’s unfaked folk art. The dancers, crashing wave upon wave into those falls, have a happy insane spirit that recalls a unique moment in American life – the time we did the school play or we were ready to drown at a swimming meet. The last time most of us were happy in that way.

If Balanchine had any secret, it was one that has endured through two hundred years of classical ballet. It is that dancing correctly in three dimensions, on the music, creates the fourth dimension of meaning.