Tobi Tobias got to understand over the years of watching Balanchine work that “how to bow, how to faint, how to waltz” were crucially important skills for his dancers to understand. “I came to understand that these skills were as important to the choreographer as a breathtaking mastery of the classical dance vocabulary he did so much to advance. I think it disturbed him at the core when dancers (even child dancers, because they represented his art’s future) couldn’t execute convincingly the moves that any citizen of civilization can perform almost instinctively…”