Daily Inspiration Quote by John Guare

Guare’s line moves like a good pas de deux: it starts with mortality and ends with endurance. “The life of a dancer is tragically short” isn’t just about injury, aging, and the brutal clock on the body; it’s an admission that ballet is built on a disappearing act. The art form asks for peak physicality and then offers, at best, a few decades before gravity, economics, and taste start bargaining you down.

Then Guare pivots to the institutional magic trick. New York City Ballet “makes us forget that” by converting fragile human time into repeatable public experience. The subtext is almost theatrical (fitting for a playwright): NYCB doesn’t deny the dancer’s ephemerality; it stages its own version of permanence. Repertory, tradition, and a recognizable house style become a kind of narrative continuity, allowing audiences to experience “ballet” as something stable even when the people doing it are replaceable by necessity.

“Because it keeps the ballet alive” lands with quiet provocation. Not “keeps dancers alive,” not “keeps careers long,” but the form itself. It’s a gentle indictment of how institutions metabolize individuals: the company survives by cycling bodies through roles, like a repertory theatre swapping casts while the play remains. Coming from Guare, whose work often probes performance, identity, and American ambition, the praise carries a shadow. The miracle is real, but so is the cost: our forgetting is part of the bargain.