What Do Young Ballet Dancers Need? More Interesting Ballets, Says Benjamin Millepied

“These ballet dancers are great and they’re ready and what they need is more interesting work. I feel people are playing it safe a lot. If anything, I think it’s the choreographers and the directors who need to make an effort for these dancers who have made this art form their passion, and to really be as daring or at least as relevant as some of our peers were when they were commissioning pieces a long time ago.”

How Opera Made The “Liabilities” In My Life Into Virtues

“The system of values that is manhood in the American south held up as its virtues firmness, reserve, self-containment, reticence, mastery of emotion. I longed to adhere to this system, but however hard I tried, I failed. I felt too much. I was prone to sudden rushes of emotion, to enthusiasms, affections, to tears… When I sang opera, the same things that had been sources of shame were sources of value. The gestures that embarrassed me in life made sense when I was on stage.”

When You Take Dance Out Of A Theatre, You Get… Lots Of Questions

“In taking dance out of the theatre, Is This a Waste Land? not only takes the theatre out of dance, but most of the dance too. We’re left with a kind of social choreography, and an open expanse of questions that can – like other projects that venture outside theatre’s contained space – revitalise our experience of performance, spectatorship, sometimes even the world itself. Like seeing a familiar landscape anew.”

Historian Gives The Real Story Of The Death Of Stalin – And Argues That A Film Comedy About It Was A Bad Idea

Richard Overy points out where Armando Ianucci’s new The Death of Stalin gets the history wrong but allows that cinematic license could be legitimate. But the caricature, he writes, is just wrong, and not only because Stalin’s victims deserve better: “The presentation of Stalin and his cronies as a collection of foul-mouthed misfits … will certainly not help to understand the Russia of the 1950s while it mocks by implication the Russia of today, a country still shaped in some ways by the legacy of Stalin’s modernisation drives and the operation of the Stalinist state.”

When Nazis Hired Jewish Intellectuals To Assemble A Yiddish Archive, The Scholars Hid The Best Stuff (Which Is Now Found)

“In one of their odder and more chilling moves, the Nazis occupying Lithuania once collected Yiddish and Hebrew books and documents, hoping to create a reference collection about a people they intended to annihilate. Even stranger, they appointed Jewish intellectuals and poets to select the choicest pearls for study.”

Sam Shepard’s Final Work To Be Published In December

The novel Spy of the First Person, on which the playwright/actor began working just after he was diagnosed with ALS (of which he died in July) and which his daughters and his old friend Patti Smith helped him complete, is “the story of an unnamed narrator who retraces the memories of his life as he undergoes treatment for a medical condition that renders him dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him.”