Art & Creativity Quote by John Guare

Guare zeroes in on ballet as an almost coercive art form: it "makes us" look, listen, wonder. That repeated insistence matters. Ballet isn’t framed as a polite invitation or a decorative night out; it’s an apparatus that commandeers attention and trains perception. Coming from a playwright - someone obsessed with how an audience is guided, cornered, and released - the emphasis reads like a backstage confession about craft itself: control isn’t the enemy of feeling, it’s the delivery system.

The real sly move is how he pairs the bodily and the abstract. "Those bodies" is blunt, nearly clinical, pulling ballet away from its gauzy prestige and back to muscle, labor, strain. Then he pivots to "geometry" and "extraordinary space", the language of diagrams and architecture. In Guare’s framing, ballet’s seduction is that it turns physical limitation into pattern, and pattern into awe. The dancers "come together" like proof in motion - the emotional hit arrives not despite discipline, but because of it.

Subtextually, he’s describing a paradox at the heart of performance: the tighter the containment, the stronger the charge. "Space is controlled and given such emotional force" could just as easily describe stage blocking, tempo, silence, even the way a playwright parcels out revelation. Guare’s intent isn’t to romanticize ballet as ethereal; it’s to argue that art’s most overwhelming moments are engineered. The wonder is real, but it’s built.