Christopher Gable on artistic integrity

You must be doing it for the people. That isn't to say you allow them to dictate artistic terms to you, or indeed, any terms at all. You are doing it for yourself and the person you're working with in that you are trying to find the deepest, richest truth you can. Oh, all these things sound so crappy. I'm sorry, but they are the facts. That truth is entirely for yourself and personal, because it has to do with your artistic integrity. But having found it, it's no use to anybody unless you can share it with the people who come to watch.

Ah, but the audience and the critics are quite, quite different. The critics are nothing whatever to do with the audience, and I never listened to them. I listened very carefully to a handful of people whose judgment I valued and whose artistic integrity I respected; primarily Lynn [Seymour], I suppose, but there were two or three others. But certainly not the critics -- last of all, them. Because if I spend three, four months preparing a ballet, as we did with Romeo, and then I spend two years refining it, changing it, adjusting, working, and thinking, I don't consider that somebody who walks into a theatre has the right -- with the price of that ticket -- to tell me how to do anything. They haven't put in anything like the thought, time, care, love, concern that I've put in. They have no voice at all.

I listened to my family too, and to all kinds of totally arbitrary people I would meet at parties. I was always very interested in what they thought, because ordinary people aren't diffused by what they think is expertise or by what they think they ought to say. Neither are they concerned with projecting their own sensitivity and awareness onto what they're seeing, or displaying their own gifts.

Striking a Balance: Dancers talk about Dancing by Barbara Newman. 1982. Page 283-4.