Saturday Matinee

Sorry for the lack of posts! I still have a lot to write about, but just haven’t had the time. I’m preparing for my PhD thesis defense, so I’ve been up to my neck in neuroscience-related things. D-Day is December 7, and it ends at noon (not that I’m counting).

Anyways, I was on NPR today! It was just to ask a question though. I know how bad it is – 30 minutes before I was to give a talk, I’m supposed to be preparing for my highly intellectual talk on synaptogenesis in the brain. Instead, I’m huddled in my car on my cell phone in the parking lot, my thoughts wandering on ballet programming and Ballet Russe instead of my talk. It was such an interesting radio show – I caught snippets of it before and after my car oil change, about the San Francisco Ballet, some of its specific dancers, Michael Smuin’s legacy, boys and its association with being “sissies”, and a lot of inherent homophobia that runs through callers and even experts’ comments that really startled me. I’ll need to listen to it more carefully, and then will blog more later, I’m sure. Anyways, I thought I’d share my exciting and exceedingly fleeting time on the radio by sharing the link. It’s super short because I was trying to limit my words in order to decrease my chances of screwing up on the air – I wanted to say hello though to Janice Ross, who was my dance history and dance criticism professor at Stanford. (Her classes were one of my most memorable ever, and my friends and I still argue about dance and “the gendered view”.) I’m about 10 minutes from the end, after “Lenore”. I asked a question about how SFB has been adapting its programming in order to attract younger and newer audiences, and in short, the answer was “cutting edge choreography”. (I even got a “that’s a very good question”! How exciting~)

NPR should have more shows like this!! It was so much fun for me to listen to. Let me know what you guys think!

KQED Forum with Michael Krasny: San Francisco Ballet’s 75th Anniversary