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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
City Ballet remains a great company in perpetual artistic crisis.
The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.
The New York City Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that.
What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then... it's gone.
Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.
I've always been excited by the strangeness of ballet, but I can't bear it when people just come forward and do a turn in the air for no reason.
Ballet has a very small audience, unfortunately.
I've got no plans to be a ballet dancer at the moment.
I have been very lucky to work in so many new ballets, but that is what a dancer's work is.
Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important.