“Dance – include me out. It was not for me … my girlfriend really, literally dragged me. And then I found myself on the edge of my seat, crying like a baby after five minutes, and crying through the entire thing. I was hopelessly, helplessly crying, and didn’t know what was happening. It was like lightning struck me.”
Tag: 01.14.12
Ballet San Jose Officially Fires Artistic Director Dennis Nahat
The company’s founder “confirmed this week that he has received a letter from Executive Director Stephanie Ziesel removing him as artistic director. ‘I am flabbergasted at how this has happened, Nahat said … ‘I don’t understand the rationale behind it, and I guess one cannot rationalize it at this point’.”
Playing Margaret Thatcher In Beijing
Melissa Rayworth on portraying the British prime minister in a Chinese government biopic of Deng Xiaoping: “They saw her not as a real person but as a cartoon bad guy – the embodiment of an empire that, in their eyes, had taken a piece of China more than a century before and held the Middle Kingdom hostage when it tried to get the island back. … How do you portray a world leader when the people who hired you see her as nothing more than a parody?”
In Pakistan, Literature Finds New Voices Risking It All To Tell Stories
“South Asia is suddenly awash in literary festivals – from Dhaka to Kerala, from Jaipur to right here in Karachi, next month – and Pakistani authors are headlining all of them, and pulling the big crowds.” But can those authors stay safe when their fiction mocks the Taliban?
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before: Julie Andrews To Direct Children In A Musical
No, we don’t mean “Doe: A Deer.” This is “The Great American Mousical,” a new musical based on a children’s book Andrews wrote about – what else? – a musical, and its leading lady, who happens to be a mouse.
Frederica Sagor Maas, 111, Scriptwriter For Silent Movies
“Mrs. Maas was one of the last living links to cinema’s silent era. She wrote dozens of stories, adaptations and scripts, sat with Greta Garbo at the famed long table in MGM’s commissary, and adapted to sound in the movies, and then to color. Perhaps most satisfying, Mrs. Maas outlived pretty much anybody who might have disagreed with her version of things.”
The White House Says No To Terrible Internet Privacy Bills
After weeks of a huge internet-based protest about the SOPA and PIPA bills (complete with threats from Google and others to shut down for a day), the administration said, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”