Word: operas
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Zhang Shuang, a cheerful twenty-something from Liaoning, China, isn't typical pop-star material. She doesn't sing or dance or suffer wardrobe malfunctions. Her principal talent, to which she has devoted her life, is playing the pipa, a lutelike Chinese instrument more at home in Peking opera than Top-40 countdowns. Growing up, Zhang was realistic about how far that specialty might take her. "I thought that if I was lucky," she says, "I could join a traditional ensemble and do some teaching on the side...
Forget the national Opera?today's up-and-coming performers would rather be heard on the subway. Paris' transit authority RATP is fast becoming a hotly contested sound stage. Since 1997, Antoine Naso, a 21-year RATP veteran and the authority's self-designated artistic director, has selected a range of entertainers to fill the Metro's tentacular halls with world music, rock and jazz standards or classical melodies...
...proper can't-give-it-away ending. "I really like the idea of songs that talk to each other," Skinner explains. "I felt like I wanted to make an album that would feel incomplete unless you had the whole thing." The album is sort of a stoned soap opera. On Blinded by the Light we swim in Skinner's stream of consciousness - in a club, on his own, taking his first ecstasy pill of the night: "Right, I'm going to plan/ I wish the bouncers would go away/ Borrow water off this man/ Here goes nothing...
DUNSTER HOUSE OPERA SOCIETY...
...extravagant runway shows are legendary; he once transformed Paris' Gare d'Austerlitz into a North African suq and hired an antique steam engine to transport models into the station. He gave an Edwardian garden party at the Bagatelle and re-created a turn-of-the-century gala at the Opera Garnier. But more important, he has changed the way we dress, the very proportions of our clothes, cutting dresses and jackets on the bias--against the grain of the fabric--so that they spiral around the body and give women a sinuous, sexier shape...