Art & Creativity Quote by John Guare

Possibility is Guare's favorite drug, and here he slips it into ballet like a note passed under the proscenium. The New York City Ballet becomes less an institution than a lab for imagining: not just virtuosity for its own sake, but the question of where the body stops and the spirit starts. That pairing matters. Guare, a playwright, knows the stage is always negotiating the same bargain: audiences arrive to watch limits get tested, then to feel those limits redraw themselves inside their own lives.

The line works because it refuses the usual pieties about "beauty" and "tradition". Instead it frames NYCB as an engine of futurity, a place where technique is valuable precisely because it expands the map of the possible. The subtext is quietly democratic: you don't need to be a dancer to be implicated. If the human body can do more than we thought, maybe so can our ordinary days. Ballet becomes a civic metaphor, New York's ambition translated into muscle and timing.

Then Guare pivots to "listening", a sly corrective to the myth of ballet as purely visual spectacle. He foregrounds response, not display: dancers as interpreters, audiences as co-creators, everyone tethered to "remarkable music" that demands attention. Coming from someone who writes language for living bodies, this is also a statement about collaboration. Theatre and ballet alike are group arts that punish ego and reward attunement. In an age of distraction, "listening" reads like a moral stance: discipline as a form of openness, virtuosity as a kind of humility.