One aspect of ‘modernism’ has been its effort to annihilate history, to create an art without precedent, to renovate sensibility, to canonize the New. We have had more than a half-century of newness, and suddenly it has aged....

Our century has licensed extremes of chaos and violence on the grandest scale known to man....The fragmentary, the nightmarish, the mad, exploited to their capacity of excess, have become mechanical, repetitive, deadened.
The essence of ballet, on the other hand, is order....

...The response of the audience to good dancing is a release of body and breath, a thanksgiving that is selfless, generous, complete, and leaves the spectator corroborated in the hope that, despite the world and its horrors, here somehow is a paradigm of perfection....

The whole operation of a ballet company is a microcosm of a civil condition. The frailty of its operation is that of any artistic or cultural institution in a civilization that prefers to spend its bounty on armaments and consumer goods. However, a ballet company, existing in the interstices of the community, almost vaunts its hardy frailty. In an infinitesimal way, each good performance clears a small area of menace, and for the moment reminds us of the possible which, if it is not perfection, approaches it.
—Lincoln Kirstein