Word: balletically
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...Other historical figures play bit parts in Li's Zelig-like life story. In 1981, Li was permitted to study for a year overseas at the Houston Ballet Academy-he defected, only to be captured by Chinese diplomats who locked him in the consulate building in Houston until his release was secured by then U.S. Vice President George H.W. Bush. Li remained in the West and went on to become a principal performer for the Houston Ballet and then the Australian Ballet...
...performers to edify the masses through highly politicized operas and films, such as the epic revolutionary musical The East is Red. She also revived the once outlawed Beijing Dance Academy, filling dance slippers with the feet of peasant children groomed to be stalwarts of a fiercely proletarian Chinese ballet style. Among them was Li, plucked from grade school because, he surmises, he had long toes. Talent scouts dispatched to the villages believed digit size to be an important physical asset for a dancer. "For me, a peasant boy, communism truly was great," Li writes...
...luck allowed him to escape starvation, but ballet school during the Cultural Revolution was not all tutus and toe shoes. Beloved teachers cleaned toilets; students spent their summers toiling alongside farmers or factory workers; and more class time was devoted to the study of political movements than to dance movements. At Madame Mao's insistence, kung fu kicks and death stares were introduced to mincing ballet routines. "The dancing looked all right," she once observed during a visit to the school, "but where are the guns? Where are the grenades...
Alexis F. Bernstein ’05, a former director of the Harvard Ballet Company, said she worries that making arts opportunities count for credit could change students’ reasons for participating in the arts...
...work") or in the house he recently bought overlooking the sea on Spain's Costa Brava. Next year alone, he has projects in Denver, Los Angeles, Melbourne, London and, of course, New York. But first he has another big premiere coming up on June 4, for Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Ballet, and it's a daunting one: a new version of Swan Lake. The production sounds like typical Wheeldon. The traditionalist in him is embracing the work's essence as a "grand, epic fantasy, the Lord of the Rings of its day." At the same time, the innovator has, he says...