When I saw Beckanne performing Odette and Odile, there was one single moment in time that has forever left an impact on my mind. To be completely honest, I don’t remember much from the three hour ballet! Going into it I thought the legendary 32 fouettes and wild turning would stick in my mind or the high controlled extensions of her legs, but in the end it was a seemingly simple movement that stuck with me. It was towards the end of the ballet and Beckanne was down-stage in the right corner and was turning around to run to her prince. She fearlessly placed her toe and went up into a fourth pique arabesque rounding the corner as she floated. Though this step may look quite simple, the years of training, the blood, sweat, and tears that go into making simple steps like this look easy is so great! It seems like there are over a hundred things to be thinking about when doing a pique arabesque, but Beckanne’s mind seemed to be free in that second. The way she held onto that moment and the power within the music, it was like a connection of everything coming together at the same time. I breathed with her. I felt suspended in time. I felt alive! I wanted to stay there forever and capture that feeling to put it in a bottle! In a way, that is just what my mind did. When I think back on this moment, I can actually feel what I felt then now.
I’m writing about this today because I wanted to share how a seemingly simple movement can be huge for someone! I have dedicated my life to ballet since I was 14. It is hard and it is painful, but nothing else makes me feel like how I feel when I’m in ballet class or performing something I’ve worked hard for. I’ve still got a ways to go, and you never stop working or improving. But since my experience here with Beckanne Sisk as Odette, I want to put in the work it takes to be that good so that I can reach someone's soul the way she touched mine. This is the beauty of ballet, and the reason we sacrifice so much to train. You need to be that good first in order to really affect someone. Think about any skills! It could be baking, sports, painting, music, etc. If you really want to leave an impact, you first have to put in the time it takes to be phenomenal then continue finessing from there. My passion is ballet, but it has become more than that to me. I’ve made these dreams become reality and that is continuously my goal.
I encourage you to be passionate and to stick to something you love! It could even be multiple things. But remember that you won’t love it everyday, and sometimes things can get unbearably hard! But never forget why you started in the first place. Beckanne Sisk reminded me that night of why I love ballet, because you can reach people’s spirits. It’s a different kind of communication rather than words, so it hits differently. It’s a language that I’ve spent years learning yet ironically you don’t have to know a thing about it to feel what Beckanne made me feel. Thank you for letting me share my humanities moment with you today.
]]>Sitting on the red velvet seats at the stunning Capitol Theater in Salt Lake City, I was so ready to see the ballet Swan Lake for the first time. Not only was I watching one of my favorite ballets, none other than Beckanne Sisk herself was performing, a principal with Ballet West Academy and a gorgeous dancer! Swan Lake is a timeless love story that mixes magic, tragedy, and romance all into four acts. It features Prince Siegfried and a lovely swan princess named Odette. Under the spell of a sorcerer, Odette spends her days as a swan swimming in a lake of tears and her nights in her beautiful human form. The couple quickly falls in love. But now the sorcerer has more tricks to play. This brings his daughter Odile into the picture. Confusion, forgiveness, and a happy ending with Siefried and Odette together forever round off the ballet. A single prima ballerina (a principal like Beckanne) plays both Odette and Odile. It is one of the most challenging roles a dancer can take on in her career.
When I saw Beckanne performing Odette and Odile, there was one single moment in time that has forever left an impact on my mind. To be completely honest, I don’t remember much from the three hour ballet! Going into it I thought the legendary 32 fouettes and wild turning would stick in my mind or the high controlled extensions of her legs, but in the end it was a seemingly simple movement that stuck with me. It was towards the end of the ballet and Beckanne was down-stage in the right corner and was turning around to run to her prince. She fearlessly placed her toe and went up into a fourth pique arabesque rounding the corner as she floated. Though this step may look quite simple, the years of training, the blood, sweat, and tears that go into making simple steps like this look easy is so great! It seems like there are over a hundred things to be thinking about when doing a pique arabesque, but Beckanne’s mind seemed to be free in that second. The way she held onto that moment and the power within the music, it was like a connection of everything coming together at the same time. I breathed with her. I felt suspended in time. I felt alive! I wanted to stay there forever and capture that feeling to put it in a bottle! In a way, that is just what my mind did. When I think back on this moment, I can actually feel what I felt then now.
I’m writing about this today because I wanted to share how a seemingly simple movement can be huge for someone! I have dedicated my life to ballet since I was 14. It is hard and it is painful, but nothing else makes me feel like how I feel when I’m in ballet class or performing something I’ve worked hard for. I’ve still got a ways to go, and you never stop working or improving. But since my experience here with Beckanne Sisk as Odette, I want to put in the work it takes to be that good so that I can reach someone's soul the way she touched mine. This is the beauty of ballet, and the reason we sacrifice so much to train. You need to be that good first in order to really affect someone. Think about any skills! It could be baking, sports, painting, music, etc. If you really want to leave an impact, you first have to put in the time it takes to be phenomenal then continue finessing from there. My passion is ballet, but it has become more than that to me. I’ve made these dreams become reality and that is continuously my goal.
I encourage you to be passionate and to stick to something you love! It could even be multiple things. But remember that you won’t love it everyday, and sometimes things can get unbearably hard! But never forget why you started in the first place. Beckanne Sisk reminded me that night of why I love ballet, because you can reach people’s spirits. It’s a different kind of communication rather than words, so it hits differently. It’s a language that I’ve spent years learning yet ironically you don’t have to know a thing about it to feel what Beckanne made me feel. Thank you for letting me share my humanities moment with you today.
Across generations, cultural divides, venues, and artistic voices, the power of lyric poetry to capture and convey powerful feeling is undeniable. And when poetry is performed and embodied, “brought to life” if you will, its capacity to create change is palpable.
]]>Thomas Scherer describes two related encounters which speak to the power of hearing poetry performed aloud. The first is an explanatory talk and poetry reading by the great literary scholar M. H. Abrams at the National Humanities Center; the second is hearing Lin-Manuel Miranda discuss his award-winning rap musical, Hamilton.
Across generations, cultural divides, venues, and artistic voices, the power of lyric poetry to capture and convey powerful feeling is undeniable. And when poetry is performed and embodied, “brought to life” if you will, its capacity to create change is palpable.
A very early memory: perhaps at the age of six or seven, I became mesmerized by Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” and repeatedly played it on the phonograph (several 78 discs), deeply affected by the contrast between the brooding, dark and the happier, lighter themes.
Quite obviously, I was drawn to classical music. Some five or six years later, I had my heart set to hear Rudolph Serkin perform Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. An ear infection, quite painful, almost prevented the experience. Against doctor’s orders, my aunt took me. I clearly recall how thrilled I was by the crescendo-decrescendo passage in the last movement—leaving the concert hall pain-free with the infection gone!
During these early years, I was somewhat of a bookworm, transported to different times and places by books which provided delight, wonderment and a number of deeply poignant moments. Initially, adventure stories such as James Fennimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island were my fare, followed by Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Willa Cather’s evocative novels My Antonia and O Pioneers!
I also had the good fortune of being taken to theater in my pre-adolescent years, thrilling to the performances of Ethel Barrymore in How Green Was My Valley, Walter Hampton in The Patriots and a bit later, José Ferrer in Edmond Rostand’s romantic masterpiece, Cyrano de Bergerac. In my later adolescence, I experienced unforgettable performances of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in back-to-back performances of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. I was bowled over by Vivien Leigh playing Cleopatra as the young, adoring female in awe of Julius Caesar in the Shaw play and her brilliantly played, contrasting characterization as a mature and majestic woman facing her demise in Shakespeare.
A life of theater-going has followed. Naturally, the works of the Bard—Henry V, Macbeth, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello and King Lear—have been at the core. Perhaps one of my most memorable nights of theater-going was a performance by the great husband-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit—a dramatization of greed, revenge and the power of money among people of rectitude.
The visual arts, particularly painting, was an important part of my childhood, which continues to be nurtured by museum-going in my own city and around the world. Collecting has also been a joyous endeavor, centered on prints with a focus on Ukiyo-e. Two most memorable moments were encountering Goya’s paintings and prints in the Prado Museum in Madrid. These works riveted me, and I spent a whole day with them alone. Some years apart on a visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I found myself in a small gallery, just five paintings by Rembrandt—four self-portraits and one of his mother. I was overcome and could not contain tears—they spoke so deeply of the human condition.
Coming back to adolescent years and literature, Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, O’Henry, Herman Hesse, again Twain, were sources of adventure and insights to the human condition and heart. College years introduced me to Homer, the Greek playwrights, and the Roman poets, particularly Virgil, Horace and Catullus. A lifetime of reading followed—English and American novelists and essayists, German, Italian, French, Japanese and Russian authors, particularly Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Pages and pages of humanities moments!!
Did he appear because I fell asleep thinking of him? If only I’d known I was dreaming, I’d never have wakened. |
I thought to pick the flower of forgetting for myself, but I found it already growing in his heart. |
Philosophy I came to in college through the suggestion of my father. What better introduction than Plato’s Apology and Phaedo? Socrates’ acceptance of the Athenian Assembly’s death sentence and later his refusal to delay drinking the hemlock spoke to me of transcendent self-possession and wisdom.
These stoic strains were fully developed over the ensuing five hundred years and come full-blown with the appearance of the stoic philosophers—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. How can one forget the admonishment in the Enchiridion of Epictetus to behave in private as one would want to be seen in public, and later the Roman Emperor Aurelius in his Meditations advising, “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” These words speak deeply to such as myself who has been so greatly privileged. I went on to major in philosophy and have continued my interest over a lifetime, initially with special focus on Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and in later life centered on political and moral questions.
As can be surmised, music—orchestral, chamber, vocal and opera—has been my greatest passion. As I entered my adolescent years, my musical horizons were expanding, particularly with my introduction to Baroque music—J.S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli and Telemann. Handel’s Messiah was an early favorite, and the joy I felt on hearing the aria and chorus “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion” is indescribable. This lead to Bach cantatas, his Passions, the Mass in B minor and the Christmas Oratorio with its joyful and triumphant opening chorus. No Christmas is complete without that ringing in my ears, and who cannot be moved by the opening aria, “Ich habe Genug” from the Cantata of the same name.
Then came opera, with a proliferation of humanities moments:
Finally, in my more adult years, I am blessed to hear and play (violin) chamber music—string quartets, piano trios, various combinations of strings, winds and keyboard. The list of profound and touching moments is endless. I have only to mention Mozart’s Viola Quintets K.415 & 416, Beethoven’s late string quartets Op. 127-135; and Schubert’s quintessential Cello Quintet in C major as examples.
How fortunate am I to have lived, from earliest memory to present old age, a life filled with such a richness of Humanities Moments!
]]>Some years ago, I was asked to give a lecture to students enrolled in a small university’s humanities program describing the personal epiphany I experienced which led to my passion for the humanities. Try as I might, I could not think of an isolated, single experience but rather a series of moments that stretch back to my childhood and have “stuck to my ribs” over a lifetime.
A very early memory: perhaps at the age of six or seven, I became mesmerized by Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” and repeatedly played it on the phonograph (several 78 discs), deeply affected by the contrast between the brooding, dark and the happier, lighter themes.
Quite obviously, I was drawn to classical music. Some five or six years later, I had my heart set to hear Rudolph Serkin perform Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. An ear infection, quite painful, almost prevented the experience. Against doctor’s orders, my aunt took me. I clearly recall how thrilled I was by the crescendo-decrescendo passage in the last movement—leaving the concert hall pain-free with the infection gone!
During these early years, I was somewhat of a bookworm, transported to different times and places by books which provided delight, wonderment and a number of deeply poignant moments. Initially, adventure stories such as James Fennimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island were my fare, followed by Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Willa Cather’s evocative novels My Antonia and O Pioneers!
I also had the good fortune of being taken to theater in my pre-adolescent years, thrilling to the performances of Ethel Barrymore in How Green Was My Valley, Walter Hampton in The Patriots and a bit later, José Ferrer in Edmond Rostand’s romantic masterpiece, Cyrano de Bergerac. In my later adolescence, I experienced unforgettable performances of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in back-to-back performances of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. I was bowled over by Vivien Leigh playing Cleopatra as the young, adoring female in awe of Julius Caesar in the Shaw play and her brilliantly played, contrasting characterization as a mature and majestic woman facing her demise in Shakespeare.
A life of theater-going has followed. Naturally, the works of the Bard—Henry V, Macbeth, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello and King Lear—have been at the core. Perhaps one of my most memorable nights of theater-going was a performance by the great husband-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit—a dramatization of greed, revenge and the power of money among people of rectitude.
The visual arts, particularly painting, was an important part of my childhood, which continues to be nurtured by museum-going in my own city and around the world. Collecting has also been a joyous endeavor, centered on prints with a focus on Ukiyo-e. Two most memorable moments were encountering Goya’s paintings and prints in the Prado Museum in Madrid. These works riveted me, and I spent a whole day with them alone. Some years apart on a visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I found myself in a small gallery, just five paintings by Rembrandt—four self-portraits and one of his mother. I was overcome and could not contain tears—they spoke so deeply of the human condition.
Coming back to adolescent years and literature, Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, O’Henry, Herman Hesse, again Twain, were sources of adventure and insights to the human condition and heart. College years introduced me to Homer, the Greek playwrights, and the Roman poets, particularly Virgil, Horace and Catullus. A lifetime of reading followed—English and American novelists and essayists, German, Italian, French, Japanese and Russian authors, particularly Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Pages and pages of humanities moments!!
Did he appear because I fell asleep thinking of him? If only I’d known I was dreaming, I’d never have wakened. |
I thought to pick the flower of forgetting for myself, but I found it already growing in his heart. |
Philosophy I came to in college through the suggestion of my father. What better introduction than Plato’s Apology and Phaedo? Socrates’ acceptance of the Athenian Assembly’s death sentence and later his refusal to delay drinking the hemlock spoke to me of transcendent self-possession and wisdom.
These stoic strains were fully developed over the ensuing five hundred years and come full-blown with the appearance of the stoic philosophers—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. How can one forget the admonishment in the Enchiridion of Epictetus to behave in private as one would want to be seen in public, and later the Roman Emperor Aurelius in his Meditations advising, “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” These words speak deeply to such as myself who has been so greatly privileged. I went on to major in philosophy and have continued my interest over a lifetime, initially with special focus on Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and in later life centered on political and moral questions.
As can be surmised, music—orchestral, chamber, vocal and opera—has been my greatest passion. As I entered my adolescent years, my musical horizons were expanding, particularly with my introduction to Baroque music—J.S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli and Telemann. Handel’s Messiah was an early favorite, and the joy I felt on hearing the aria and chorus “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion” is indescribable. This lead to Bach cantatas, his Passions, the Mass in B minor and the Christmas Oratorio with its joyful and triumphant opening chorus. No Christmas is complete without that ringing in my ears, and who cannot be moved by the opening aria, “Ich habe Genug” from the Cantata of the same name.
Then came opera, with a proliferation of humanities moments:
Finally, in my more adult years, I am blessed to hear and play (violin) chamber music—string quartets, piano trios, various combinations of strings, winds and keyboard. The list of profound and touching moments is endless. I have only to mention Mozart’s Viola Quintets K.415 & 416, Beethoven’s late string quartets Op. 127-135; and Schubert’s quintessential Cello Quintet in C major as examples.
How fortunate am I to have lived, from earliest memory to present old age, a life filled with such a richness of Humanities Moments!
To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit California Humanities: We Are the Humanities.
]]>Juan Felipe Herrera, a performance artist, activist, and U.S. poet laureate in 2015, recalls how his third-grade teacher’s compliment on his singing voice led to his lifelong belief in using his voice to encourage the beauty in the voices, stories, and, experiences of others. He goes on to speak about the power of the humanities to warm communities, create peace, and, move hearts.
To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit California Humanities: We Are the Humanities.