The Boston-trained Royal Ballet principal says (among other things), “It doesn’t seem right. If children are doing seven hours of ballet a day by the age of 14, it puts a lot of stress on their bodies, and it narrows their outlook on life. It’s like starving their brain, denying them full nutrition.”
Tag: 01.12.13
Actors’ Secrets to Playing King Lear
“Ian McKellen dreaded it, Albert Finney dodged it. As Simon Russell Beale prepares to play Lear in Sam Mendes’s eagerly awaited production, Laura Barnett talks to five actors who risked their sanity (and their knees) to wear the crown.”
Has Innovation Stalled Out?
“It may come as a surprise that some in Silicon Valley think the place is stagnant, and that the rate of innovation has been slackening for decades.”
Video Games Take Off As Spectator Sport
“Professional gaming, or e-sports, exploded in popularity in the US and Europe last year. The scene has been big in Asia – particularly South Korea – for about a decade, with top players … earning six-figure salaries and competing for rock-star glory in Starcraft tournaments that attract audiences in the hundreds of thousands.
A Portrait Of Fascism As A Living, Breathing Person
László Krasznahorkai: “To be honest I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t knocked but beat at the door, or simply kicked the door in, but now that I hear the knocking, it’s clear there is no difference between his knocking and beating or kicking the door in, I mean really no difference, the point being that I am dead certain it is him, who else; he of whom I knew, and have always known would come.”
Meet Greece’s National Poet, ‘Feisty’ 81-Year-Old Kiki Dimoula
“Her poetry – spare, profound, unsentimental, effortlessly transforming the quotidian into the metaphysical, drawing on the powerful themes of time, fate and destiny, yet making them entirely her own – has earned her a near-cult following in Greece. One of her Greek writer contemporaries, Nikos Dimou, has called Ms. Dimoula ‘the best Greek woman poet since Sappho’.”
Those Who Don’t Learn From History …
“To my mind the one thing that would unquestionably be worth learning would be the law of unintended consequences.”
Can A Freelance Curator Change The Artistic Direction Of A Region?
“At age 42, [Yoko] Ott is one of a number of midcareer arts professionals in the Northwest deliberately setting out to make their mark on the region. These individuals are poised to take the reins from an earlier generation of artists and administrators.”
Video Game Makers Try To Fend Off Post-Newtown Legislation
“The $60 billion industry is facing intense political pressure from an unlikely alliance of critics who say that violent imagery in video games has contributed to a culture of violence.”
Evan Connell, Author of Mrs. Bridge and Son of the Morning Star, 88
“For most of his career, Connell had two reading publics: those folks who admired his fiction and those who admired his nonfiction. The first group scarcely kept him in supplies.”