Yan Sham-Shackleton's Blog

#amwriting Was asked at which point I know to stop researching.

Until I know what my main character may be doing and feeling at any hour in the 9 month period where the book is set. She is a #ballet dancer, her life is seasonal, regimented, dependent on her work.

I need to know her schedule. Is she in class? Is she rehearsing? Is she on break? Is she practicing new choreography or performing? Was it orange alert? What day did Hong Kong shut down the schools so she can't go back to visit her parents? What week did she go to California? When did Allan and her have the fight? If I don't know what she is doing, how can I tell when something happened? What is she feeling? Where she is? At each point in the book something came before, and something will happen. She is feeling and thinking something which affects her actions at all times.

If I don't know what's going on. How can I write about her life?

I have worked everyday on this book for 5 months and 7 days, and cannot see the 3rd draft in my future. 

It is frightening.

My friend wrote me and said,

"I think novelists are more than just ordinary people.

The time.  The effort.  The stress.  The research.  The uncertainty.  The late payoff.

That takes a certain type of individual."

I think so too....  I hope I make it.

DJ Krush - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ishi was born in 1962 in Tokyo. Ishi dropped out of school at an early age and joined a local gang, and a few years later, the yakuza. Early into his career as a yakuza underling, Ishi discovered a severed finger wrapped in paper on his desk. Later, after discovering that it had belonged to his best friend, he decided to leave the yakuza and cut ties with the criminal underworld.^[1]

In the early 1980s, Ishi went to the movies with his girlfriend and saw the film Wild Style, the first hip hop motion picture directed by Charlie Ahearn. He was inspired to become a hip hop musician, and made the firm decision to become a DJ. The day after seeing this movie, he headed to instrument shops looking for equipment. At this time the term "mixer" was unknown to most of Tokyo's electronic store salesmen. After a hard time buying the things he needed, Ishi started his career as one of the first hip hop artists in Japan.

Aside from being considered one of the pioneers of Japanese hip hop,^[2] Ishi has established himself as one of the most respected artists and producers in the hip hop industry, both in Japan and abroad. Upon entering the industry, Ishi, with his experimental beats and instrumental sounds, changed the face of hip-hop at a time when it was dominated by the American rap scene.^[3] He is reluctant to identify his music with any particular genre, for it would place limits on his listeners and on his talents. He has been regarded as ambient, trip hop, some combination of the two, and hip hop. DJ Krush prefers to exercise an ideological distance from the genres he is usually grouped into, while maintaining a healthy appreciation for all music forms and styles.^[4] In 1996, DJ Krush contributed to the AIDS benefit album Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip produced by the Red Hot Organization.

via en.wikipedia.org

Kyle Abraham - Guest DJ Project on KCRW

Choreographer Kyle Abraham is a rising star in the dance world, integrating elements from his experiences as a black gay male growing up in Pittsburgh into his highly personal work. He knew he was meant to be a dancer after seeing the Joffrey ballet perform songs by Prince and music has had a huge impact on him ever since, from newcomer James Blake to Bill Evans.  His makes his California debut at REDCAT with “The Radio Show” this weekend.

via www.kcrw.com

Haze

Beijing Dance Theater
Choreography by Wang Yuanyuan

“One of China's ‘three queens’ of modern dance." —China Daily on Wang Yuanyuan

Led by acclaimed Chinese choreographer Wang Yuanyuan (Raise the Red Lantern, 2005 Next Wave), Beijing Dance Theater channels the tension between China’s complex struggle with centuries-old traditions and its headlong rush into the future. Internationally renowned for her synthesis of classical ballet and dance theater, Wang has crafted a work of courage and rapturous beauty in response to modern economic and environmental crises, accompanied by musical selections from Henryk Górecki (including the haunting, elegiac Third Symphony) and Biosphere’s ambient electronic soundscapes. Adding a rarely seen dimension to the movement, the dancers rise and fall in a world of shadows and ghostly stillness, creating an unsparing revelation of a culture in the grip of social and spiritual uncertainty.

via bam.org

#ballet. #Dance is the last of the tragic art forms. Everything else is #commercialized, resold, replayed, reproduced but dance happens only once. Even with the same choreography with the same dancers each performance is once in a lifetime. Missing it, means never seeing it.

Step-by-step guide to dance: Scottish Ballet | Stage | guardian.co.uk

Into the breach stepped Ashley Page, a dancer and choreographer at the Royal Ballet who had also worked in the independent contemporary dance sector and for Rambert Dance Company. At Scottish Ballet, Page was given a nine-month "dark period" during which he reauditioned and retrained the dancers. The leaner, new-look company was unveiled in 2003 to applause, acclaim and much relief. The technical standard is now much higher, and Page's adventurous programming has encompassed classical ballet, modern ballet, contemporary and postmodern dance – a range that you really don't find in other companies. Lucky Scotland.

via www.guardian.co.uk

Ashley Page and the Scottish Ballet revival | Music | The Guardian

His bottom line was that he had no interest in running a cut-price Kirov or Royal Ballet. He envisioned Scottish Ballet as a small, flexible ensemble capable of performing modern dance and contemporary classical works. He wanted to be able to stage the neoclassical masterworks of Balanchine at one extreme and the austerely postmodernist choreo-graphy of Trisha Brown at the other.

To drive this vision, however, Page insisted he would need a larger budget and "a major clearout of the existing dancers". Both were extreme requests and some companies might have dismissed Page's attitude as arrogance. Scottish Ballet, however, had spent the past decade mired in artistic compromise, and found his intransigence music to its ears.

via www.guardian.co.uk

Chinese ballet company stages banned erotic classic - Telegraph

Chinese ballet company stages banned erotic classic

One of China's most famous ballet directors is testing the very limits of the country's strait-laced attitudes by adapting a notoriously pornographic book for the stage.

 

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via www.telegraph.co.uk

Comment. : The New Yorker Ballet Cover

via www.newyorker.com

Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Barbican, London - FT.com

Then Second Hand, set to a piano score of numbing tedium by John Cage (Cunningham’s ally for the major part of his life), whose austerities make Erik Satie’s endeavours in this direction seem positively Wagnerian. It is ferociously cool, with a Cunningham-figure (a skilled impersonation by Robert Swinston) the focus of dance, which exhausts itself before it should.

Finally Antic Meet, a jape from 1958 – Cunningham danced with a chair tied to his back; there is the octopus-fashion pullover with four carefully knitted arms but no opening for the wearer’s head: all this owed to Robert Rauschenberg, and very jolly, too – with a Cage score in which manic noise is created from what are otherwise musical instruments. It was given with verve by this cast, and I thought Jennifer Goggans very fine in it.

via www.ft.com