Word: gao
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...after two years trapped in the Nobel's gilded cage, Gao is back at work on an ambitious production of his latest drama, Snow in August, which opens at Taipei's National Theatre on Dec. 19. Of course, the Nobel Prize does have its advantages. Thanks to Gao's literary celebrity, the production budget is unusually generous, allowing him 60 actors, a choir and a 70-member orchestra. All that manpower has created an unclassifiable theatrical experience. "It's not a drama, or a Peking opera, or modern dance, or Western opera," says Gao. It's all of the above...
Slouching behind his desk, director, playwright and Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian watches the rehearsal in dismay. The actors are tentative and uncertain, as if they don't quite know where they are going. The problem, in Gao's mind, is that they are complicating what should be simple. "Speak as you speak, listen as you listen," he orders. "Give me your true voice...
...writer who has endured China's spasms of oppression, it's a lesson Gao has learned through bitter experience. When Chinese authorities tried to squelch his voice in the early 1980s, he fled his home in Beijing, first into the rural wilds of China, later to exile in France, penning a sprawling novel, Soul Mountain, partially about his flight. In 2000, it helped him win an utterly unexpected Nobel Prize in Literature, the first by a Chinese author. To many writers, the Nobel has proved a curse, triggering furious envy from rivals, and intensifying crippling perfor-mance anxiety. And some...
...food poisoning from school meals have risen on average 10% each year, from 25 outbreaks in 1990 to 50 in 1999, sickening a total of 16,000 children across the country with everything from salmonella to hepatitis A, according to a report released by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) last spring. While undoubtedly unpleasant, most of those illnesses ran their course in a few days...
...report to Congress last spring, the GAO detailed a "patchwork structure" of school-food--safety regulations encumbered by red tape. The Food and Drug Administration and three separate agencies within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) share authority over school lunches. Yet none has the power to recall tainted foods. The ineptness of this bureaucracy was on display last month after 1.8 million lbs. of Wampler Foods turkey meat linked to listeria were distributed to schools as part of the National School Lunch Program. It took five days for officials to tell the Cumberland Valley School District in Mechanicsburg...