Latest news with #OntheEdge
Winnipeg Free Press
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Emotional edge
Sahel Flora Pascual's dance career has taken her all over the world: Ballet Manila, the School of American Ballet in New York City, Ballet Austin in Texas and, for the upcoming 2025/26 season, London City Ballet. In April, it brought her to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Pascual, 22, is a choreographic fellow in the Pathways to Performance Choreographic Program at MoBBallet (Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet), which links ballet companies to Black choreographers and those of colour so they can engage in a meaningful way. Ryan-Rogocki photo Choreographer Sahel Pascual leads Aspirants students through her new piece. Pascual was commissioned by the RWB to choreograph an original work for the students in the Anna McCowan-Johnson Aspirant Program in the Professional Division at the RWB School. The piece will be performed as part of On the Edge, the Aspirants' mixed-rep showcase this week. Pascual participated in the inaugural MoBBallet Symposium in Philadelphia in 2019 as a dancer. Lately, though, she's been considering ways she could contribute to her art form as a choreographer. 'I've always seen choreography as a way, not only to create my own artistic vision and exercise my own authorship of my voice and my idea of what art can do, but as also a way to facilitate growth within the artistic community, whether that's through creating more holistic dance spaces for mental health or for diversity's sake,' she says from London, England, via Zoom. The as-yet-untitled work she created on the Aspirants was inspired by the barrier-breaking American-born French dancer, singer and actress Josephine Baker. It's a dialogue, she says, between Baker's legacy and her own experience, informed by her African American, Jamaican and Filipino heritage. 'My choreography draws from my own positionality as an expatriate artist and emerges as a physical meditation on displacement, trauma, discrimination and the reverberations of the colonial gaze,' she writes in her choreographer's note. 'What was really important to me was the piece itself is not a re-creation of her in any way, but it is a meditation on the things that were important to her, the parts of her that were significant, through the shared language of human emotion,' she says. Working in the studio with the Aspirants in the spring was 'truly just a beautiful experience.' 'They're young dancers, they're dancers of a lot of different backgrounds, and they want to engage. Something that was just lovely was that each one of those dancers wanted to engage with this work,' Pascual says. 'And it's difficult, because one would say, 'How can a group of dancers that does not have African American or Black heritage work within this framework that centres a Black woman?' And my response to that was,' Yes, it is about a Black woman, but each one of us, through whatever part of our life, can empathize in certain ways with her rebellion, with her love of not only people but of animals, of community, with her fieriness, with her desire to change things, with her desire to care and to break down barriers.'' Founded in 2015 by consultant, educator, advocate and former ballet dancer Theresa Ruth Howard, MoBBallet is an archive that preserves, presents and promotes Black ballet history. The RWB joined MoBBallet's Cultural Competency and Equity Coalition (C2EC), a membership-based organization that will see peers work collaboratively to become anti-racist, in 2022, and has previously commissioned works by MoBBallet Pathways fellows Meredith Rainey and Portia Adams. That commitment stands in contrast to what's happening south of the border, where many organizations are rolling back anti-racist and DEI initiatives. 'It's important for us to keep this relationship, because I have worked very hard on building that trust so when we bring choreographers in — it's a little bit cliché — but it's a safe place to be,' says Tara Birtwhistle, the RWB's associate artistic director. The fact that Pascual is working with the next generation of dancers on the precipice of their careers in the Aspirant Program is also significant. Wednesdays Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture. 'We talk a lot about changing the culture of ballet, and we can't just talk about it anymore. We have to do something about it, and really, to lean in to these young people who have so much to teach us and guide us through a different lens,' Birtwhistle says. Pascual would agree. 'Why it's important that these kinds of stories that choreographers like myself are being engaged with is because we are the art that is current. We are the people who are dancing. It is the population that we are dancing for,' she says. 'If you think about ballet's audience now, there are many conversations about how it's diminishing, and although that in some ways is true, I think what we've seen from the dance world and the art world as a whole is an understanding that the audience must be broadened, and that the art that is being encountered, that is being created, must reflect the world as a whole.' Jen ZorattiColumnist Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen. Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Vox
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
'Help me find a new author with the same vibe as my old favorite'
Welcome to Ask a Book Critic, a members-only feature packed with personalized book recommendations from senior correspondent and resident book critic Constance Grady . To get your own recommendation, ask Constance here , and subscribe to the newsletter here . I'm a person who wants to read more fiction, but I get regularly (not a bad thing I guess) sucked into the big nonfiction book for the policy/chronically online zeitgeist. For example, I am reading On the Edge by Nate Silver now, and I read Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here and Recoding America before that. But I was a big fan of I'm a Fan by Sheena Patel. For we, the chronically online, I can only recommend Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This , the great novel of what pre-Musk Twitter looked like. Lockwood, a poet, was an early adopter of what we used to call Weird Twitter, and that's the mode in which she writes her novel: perverse, darkly funny, unnervingly sincere when you don't expect it to be. No One Is Talking About This features an unnamed narrator who has become famous for having tweeted, 'Can a dog be twins?' Now, her project is to write a book about 'the stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own,' a consciousness 'that you participate in, but that also acts upon you,' which is to say, the hive consciousness of Twitter. But the narrator is forced off the internet when her niece is born with severe birth defects, and her entire life is shaken up with love. This book is tender and beautiful, and it will have the side effect of not making you feel guilty for being online so much as aware of it — aware of how it feels, why it pulls to us, and how it molds our minds and bodies. I love books with unconventional female narrators, whether they are morally compromised or socially awkward/strange. For example, I've recently read Yellowface , Convenience Store Woman , and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine . While these range in subject matter, I'd love recommendations for books that feature strong first-person narration (the stranger and believably unlikeable the better) and the kinds of critiques on societal expectations these had. I keep having to rewrite this sentence because I am so excited that I can't stop myself from lapsing into capslock, but GET READY for Susan Choi's Trust Exercise . WHAT A BOOK! It's a tricky one to talk about, though. Let's keep it as simple as we can. In part one, Trust Exercise is a lovely little bittersweet tale about a high school romance gone wrong between two theater kids in the 1980s, told by both lovers in alternating perspectives. In part two, we learn that much of what we read in part one is heavily fictionalized from the events that our new narrator assures us really happened, which were much darker. (You're going to love this narrator, by the way — incredibly spiky, incredibly angry, all the while constantly asserting that she is absolutely not mad.) In part three, we finally get to something that might resemble the truth, and it is devastating. (It is also infamously confusing, but rest assured, we've got an explainer for that. Don't read it until you've finished the book!) I've really enjoyed a few Jennifer Egan books recently — Visit From the Goon Squad and its sequel Candy House and most recently her debut The Invisible Circus . I'm wondering if you could recommend another author or book worth exploring with similar vibes. I've been in a bit of a rut with reading until this trio of books and had been falling back on murder mysteries as a crutch. Don't get me wrong, I love a cozy murder mystery in the winter. But something that's literary and readable is more the mix I'm aiming for right now. Thank you! When I think of Jennifer Egan books, I think of: formal experimentation, a deep interest in how technology shapes human connections, and a preoccupation with time and its ravages and redemptions. For two other perspectives on these issues, your best bet is probably either Gary Shteyngart or George Saunders. Of the two, Shteyngart is the cynic. His protagonists tend to be losers, middle-aged men who are either beaten down by capitalism or have so internalized its logic that it has destroyed their minds. Shteyngart is never shy about making jokes at their expense. Their subsequent attempts to form connections forms the core of his witty, tricky novels. Start with Super Sad True Love Story , the 2010 dystopian novel that has only become more plausible with time. Saunders is a more straightforwardly empathetic writer, particularly in his only novel, Lincoln in the Bardo . (The bulk of Saunders's work is in short stories.) Lincoln is about Abraham Lincoln's son, 11-year-old Willie, who died of typhus while the Civil War was raging and who has, in this novel, become trapped in the bardo, the in-between place straddling life and afterlife. Willie must pass on to the next stage of being or lose his soul. It is only the great empathy Lincoln feels for the dead — as the man whose decisions have meant death for so many — that rouses the other ghosts of the bardo to guide Willie onward. It's a beautiful, word-drunk novel. If you like it, go from there straight to Saunders's great short story collection The Tenth of December and then just keep going.
