Daily Inspiration Quote by John Guare

Easter Sunday is doing double duty here: it’s not just a holiday image, it’s a dramaturgical claim about what Balanchine’s New York City Ballet sells night after night. Guare, a playwright steeped in the mechanics of entrances, exits, and second acts, reaches for resurrection because ballet is the rare art form built to make “again” feel like “now.” Every performance is a revival in the literal sense: the same steps reanimated by different bodies, the same music pulled out of silence and made physical. The company’s repertory model - cycling masterworks, returning seasons, repeating roles - makes return a structural principle, not a nostalgic one.

The sly pivot is the correction: “Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present.” That’s the subtextual flex. Resurrection implies a previous death, a before-and-after narrative. Guare argues NYC Ballet short-circuits that storyline. The stage doesn’t mourn what’s gone; it insists on perpetual immediacy. Dance, more than most forms, can’t be archived in a way that matters. You can film it, not preserve it. So the “constant present” is both aesthetic and existential: the art survives only by occurring, and it occurs only by risking failure in real time.

Contextually, this is also New York self-mythologizing: the city that reinvents itself, the institution that renews its legitimacy by repetition. Guare isn’t naïve about mortality; he’s naming the seductive illusion the ballet offers - that discipline and beauty can hold time in place, for an evening, as if decay were just another thing you can rehearse out of the body.