The Winter's Tale
On Saturday, I flew to Toronto, and on Sunday, I flew back to Boston.
The sole purpose of my trip to Toronto was to see this:
I love the National Ballet of Canada; two of my favorite dancers dance there, and the entire company is incredible. I'm also really interested in how Shakespeare gets translated into ballet, so I've wanted to see The Winter's Tale since the Royal Ballet premiered it a year and a half ago. (I'll also be going back to Toronto twice next semester, first to see Romeo and Juliet and then to see Le Petit Prince.)
The ballet was absolutely worth the trip. Christopher Wheeldon's choreography is good for the entire company, with eight principal/soloist parts and strong corps choreography as well. Wheeldon is really good at having little pieces of choreography appear again and again to create continuity, sometimes very obviously but sometimes more subtly. Wheeldon also manages to build a culture, complete with understandable rituals, onstage in just an act, which I think is pretty amazing.
The dancing was amazing. One of the two favorite dancers I mentioned earlier is Heather Ogden, and I got to see her as Hermione. Her two best scenes are her trial and when she's revealed to be alive at the end, and there's actually a lot of common choreography between the two scenes, but the tone changes completely. Leontes was danced by McGee Maddox. His quality of movement had to change so much over the course of the ballet to reflect joy or jealousy or grief, and he executed those changes really well. But the character/dancer that most surprised me was Tanya Howard as Paulina. The story is very much about Leontes, but Paulina is present throughout it, making it happen. Everything collapses without her, and Howard was flawless.
One of my favorite things to watch for in Romeo and Juliet is the progression of the pas de deux in which Romeo and Juliet dance (sometimes together, sometimes not), and so I found myself looking at the pas between Florizel and Perdita in the same way. There's actually a more interesting progression for Leontes and Hermione, as their relationships change more through the ballet, but I loved Florizel and Perdita's pas because they were (mostly) normal young people in love that had developed over time. It's not something we get to see much in ballet! Dylan Tedaldi and Elena Lobsanova portrayed the characters' happiness together and dedication to each other, and the choreography showed how normal the relationship was. It wasn't mostly lust (cough R&J), and it wasn't sudden or desperate or doomed (most of the classical and romantic ballets), though they do have to run away. I enjoyed seeing that kind of relationship in dance. Lobsanova and Tedaldi also had amazing solos. Lobsanova's was very much a coming of age dance, and one of Tedaldi's had a petit allegro combination full of beats that I would really like to learn. He doesn't fly, but he's so clean and consistent.
Also, yes, there is "Exit, pursued by a bear," and it is wonderful.
APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting
I love scientific conferences, and fluid dynamics is my favorite part of mechanical engineering. I found out this summer that the DFD conference was going to be in Boston this year, so I went!
I spent most of the day looking at posters or attending talks in three types of sessions: geophysical flow, nonlinear dynamics, and cardiovascular flow. Geophysical flow is the area in which I'm most interested, though from a more mathematical perspective than a lot of what I saw yesterday. I'm still lacking in a lot of the atmospheric science vocabulary, so how much I could follow varied by talk. The nonlinear dynamics session was great, and there are a few papers from that session that I'm planning on reading/skimming. In general, the more mathematical a talk, the better I understood. I went to the cardiovascular flow session for two reasons. First, there was a talk that involved data assimilation, which is something I'm interested in and had no idea was applied to biological flows, and second, one of my friends was giving a presentation.
After the sessions yesterday, I went out to dinner with about 45 other people, all academic progeny along some line of the University of Texas Center for Nonlinear Dynamics. (My connection is through Brian, my SCOPE faculty advisor.) I was nervous about going, but I enjoyed it, and I talked to a lot of people!
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