How to be a makeup artist

What you’ll need: brushes, palette

Songlist: Lip Gloss by Lil’ Mama, Red Lipstick by Rihanna

Further reading: Making Faces by Kevyn Aucoin

Last night after my final performance of Zorro in the Land of Golden-Breasted Woodpecker, all the flamenco dancers and musicians went out to dinner, for which I kept my stage makeup on.

You see, I don’t normally do a lot of makeup. Usually a little blush and mascara. Maybe some lip gloss. Every once in a while, for a party or dinner, I might wear eye shadow as well (I know, getting crazy).

As a raven in the performance I had to go a little above and beyond my normal routines. I bought false eyelashes–a first for me–and blue and black sparkle eye liners. The six of us ravens lined our lips in black and filled them in with dark purple, and we lucked out that one of our fellow ravens is, in fact, a makeup artist. She created dramatic dark-blue swoops on our eyelids to mimic bird wings and made us dust our faces with plenty of sparkle powder. Though we joked that we looked more like drag queens than ravens, I think we were all excited by the dramatic transformation we all went through.

I’ve always wanted to be better at makeup. At slumber parties in elementary school, girlfriends and I would smear on the darkest blush we could find and bright red lipstick just to laugh at the effect. I still have the makeup kit for girls that my grandmother bought me when I was about 12 and, embarrassingly, I still use some of those items.

I kind of wish I had a makeup artist with me at all times, like last night’s Oscar winning team of Meryl Streep and J. Roy Helland who both mentioned their 37 years together. Failing that, though, I might just need to get better at it myself. Makeup is just too much fun not to play with.

 

Pas de deux

Let’s end on this note, shall we?

Goodnight.

On pointe

While the majority of a ballet dancer’s wardrobe–tutu, leotard, tights–is required mostly due to tradition, pointe shoes are an absolutely necessity. They are the only exterior tool a ballet dancer uses, and they must be perfect. Pointe shoes represent the entire paradox of ballet: something that looks so beautiful and light to the audience requires years of craftsmanship and is only perfected through physical distortion. And they are often only used in one performance before being discarded. The movie Center Stage shows what ballerinas do to mold shoes to their feet:

Colum McCann’s lovely and brutal novel Dancer, an account of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev’s life, is famous long sentences that make up entire chapters. I especially love the 6-page sentence that describes a ballet shoemaker’s work. Tom Ashford, master pointe shoe maker, shivers “to think how [Margot Fonteyn] handles his shoes once she gets them, shattering the shank to make it more pliable, banging the shoes against doors to soften the box, bending the shoe over and over so it feels perfect on her feet, as if she has worn it forever…”

My favorite part of this sentence is the last bit, as Tom is contemplating the sketches he’s just gotten for the forty pairs of shoes ordered by Nureyev:

“by the sketches alone [Tom] knows the life of this foot, raised in barefoot poverty and–from the unusual wideness of the bone structure–bare on concrete rather than grass, then squeezed into shoes that were too small, coming to dance later than usual given the smallness yet breadth of the foot, 7EEE, then a great violence done by excessive training, many hard angles, but a remarkable strength…”

I love the idea of an artisan understanding his craft so well that he becomes like a reverse fortune teller: instead of reading the future from a palm, he reads a man’s history from his foot.

A lamentation of swans

Exactly one week from right now, I’ll be suited up as a raven for the world premiere of a flamenco performance, Zorro in the Land of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker. This show is a mix of Spanish flamenco music with Ojibwa lore, in which ravens represent  message-bearers and truth-tellers. Six of us women form the raven chorus, or, as we like to call ourselves, the murder.

Just as a group of ravens is known as a murder, so a group of swans can be called a lamentation. Poetic, no?

Birds are a natural creature to portray through dance because of their symbolic qualities as well as their movements. (Our raven dances feature large black shawls–common to flamenco and Ojibwa dance, while also being representative of wings–and some of our choreography is meant to mimic the swooping of the flock). So it’s no wonder that one of the most famous ballets of all time is Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, made possibly even more famous by last year’s Best Picture Oscar nominee Black Swan.

One can’t but help think of the gracefulness of swans when watching the long limbs of Gillian Murphy as Odette, the white swan:

The pas de quatre is similarly avian:

Natalie Portman gives her all as the black swan:

And then there’s this Chinese version of Swan Lake, which is just ridiculous. In all the best ways.

How to be a ballerina

What you’ll need: pointe shoes, long legs

Songlist: Swan Lake, Nutcracker Suite

Further reading: Dancer by Colum McCann

Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev

The other night my boyfriend and I were making dinner with Beethoven and Schubert playing in the background. Between chopping onions and putting the bread in the oven, I pirouetted around on stockinged feet and pretended to go on pointe. I ruefully commented to my boyfriend that I wished I’d stuck with ballet–it so beautifully expresses what I hear in classical music.

Like many young girls, I had dreams of becoming a ballerina. My mom took me to beginning ballet classes when I was four, but after a few months I complained that preschool tired me out too much, and I didn’t have the energy to dance. (I wonder what “dancing” consisted of at that stage–practicing feet and arm positions?)

My favorite movie in high school, Center Stage, convinced me that I’d made the right decision to quit ballet before I even really got going. Ballet itself is beautiful, but it’s incredibly difficult on the body and the movie highlights the intense competition that American dancers face to get to the top. I never would have made it–my legs aren’t long enough. Also, a professional ballet dancer is like any professional athlete, who, after submitting his or her body to the grueling workouts necessary to become the best of the best, only really has a few good years before the body gives out.

It wasn’t until after college that I tried dance classes again–flamenco, this time. Unlike ballerinas, flamenco dancers are thought to only become better with age, as the range of life’s experiences allow a dancer to fully express deep emotion via movement. I’m thankful that at 25 I’m still considered a spring chicken–I’m the youngest in our dance company–and I can imagine dancing flamenco for decades to come.

Still, sometimes I look at those dancers in my flamenco company who have a solid ballet background and admire their grace, the way the hold themselves at all times. You can tell when someone is or has been a ballet dancer–they sit differently, they walk differently. Ballet leaves its mark on muscles and bones. An art form that molds the performer to the dance: it’s a thought both terrifying and beautiful.

 

Degas's ballerinas

The future of physics

So, if you’re like me and you watched Brian Greene’s TED talk on string theory, you probably wonder how experiments on little strings vibrating in curled-up dimensions will affect our daily lives. In fact, there are plenty of ways, detailed in this list of how physics will change the future.

The first time I heard about the useful application of quantum mechanics was in the field of cryptography. As we store more and more of our personal information online, it’s that much more important for this data to remain well-encrypted. The race between code makers and code breakers has been close through the ages, but the cryptographers may finally win with the help of photons. Once quantum key distribution becomes the norm, it will be impossible for hackers to get into a system without announcing their presence, thereby defeating their purpose.

Quantum dots latched on to cancer cells

Cancer cells might not be able to go undetected anymore, either. Quantum “dots,” tiny semiconductor crystals, glow when exposed to ultraviolet radiation and, when coated with the right substance, latch on to cancer cells. Doctors can then pinpoint exactly which cells to target with treatment while leaving the rest of the healthy cells alone.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, scientists are using quantum physics to replicate turbulence in the lab so that someday we may be able to predict the chaotic swirls in gas and liquids. Flights will become smoother and weather reports more reliable.

But then again, if you want to just skip the security lines altogether you can always invest in transportation research. Scientists have been able to scan molecules and reconstruct them elsewhere…but don’t recycle your 3 oz liquid bottles yet: these aren’t exact copies of the molecules, they are twins. In the process of teleportation the original is destroyed. Sound like a good plot line? It’s already been done; beautifully, in my opinion, in 2006’s The Prestige (it’s a great movie so if you don’t want the ending ruined don’t watch the following clip):

Dimension X

In honor of this biweekly theme I’ve been reading up on string theory, trying to make sense of it all. Finally, after pouring over papers and definitions on scientific websites, then regressing to wikipedia pages, in which every link-text word was just as completely unintelligible, I turned to a better resource: TED talks. You probably know this by now, but here’s the idea: the conference organizers for TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) invite experts to discuss a topic in 18 minutes or under in a manner that is both highly education and highly understandable. Here’s physicist Brian Greene telling you everything you need to know to start to understand string theory:

My only question: Mr. Greene’s talk is from February 2005 and he affirms that experiments within “the next 3 years, 5 years, 10 years” should show whether string theory is true. Granted, we’re still within the 10-year mark from his original talk, but I wonder what the status of the experiments are. Scientists in Italy announced their findings just last year of particles that moved faster than the speed of light. Does string theory account for that? Does it want to? The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland that Greene mentions is currently undergoing routine maintenance and will resume colliding particles in March. Stay tuned, I guess…

A billion heartbeats: On time

Time is such an integral element in our lives sometimes it’s hard to imagine it as a matter of debate, a dimension that is both exact and yet able to be perceived in multiple ways. I recently read an incredible list of facts we should all know about time. Here are the most interesting elements:

Time exists–this is certain. A little over a century ago, though, Einstein put forth his theory of relativity which distorted Newton’s classic physics model and thereby the previously accepted understanding of time. Einstein explained that times elapses differently near the speed of light and near black holes. No, most of us will not experience the passage of time in these circumstances, but we’re all familiar with the sensation that time starts to speed up as we get older. And indeed this phenomenon is representative of time being experientially relative.

And yet we are so dependent on time that it influences our cognitive development, communication, and decision processes. The ability to imagine alternative outcomes was necessary for early survival, while our linguistic tenses allow us to discuss these possibilities as a group.

Speaking of possibility, I had the epiphany in high school that all future events must be probabilistically implicit in the present moment. That is, every large and small event that happens in the future (whether I have a child several years down the road or whether I’m late to work tomorrow) will follow a discrete chain of occurrences, each one following the last because it is statistically possible. Granted, the probabilities of each event are infinitesimal past the events that happen in the next few minutes (whether I get up and refill my glass of wine or play my next move in Words With Friends), and yet they are there. (By the way, I just refilled my glass of wine and now there’s a slightly greater chance that I will be late for my 8 am meeting).

Why is this important? Because of this: the past and future are equally real. Whoa.

But what about the present? Our brains delay our experience by 80 milliseconds, about the blink of an eye, so as to compile the “present moment.” It was only after Janet Jackson’s halftime nip-slip that television broadcasters realized why this is important (who knows what hijinks Madonna would have gotten into during today’s Superbowl if we weren’t on a delayed broadcast). When I read this fact, I wondered if this aspect of consciousness has anything to do with flow, the mental process that artists and athletes describe that circumvents usual perception of time. If your muscles respond before you need to think how to react, does that 80-millisecond lag time get reduced? And if so, does that contribute to the sense that time is slowing down?

Having a heart to heart

Whether we live in the past or accept the future as real, though, time moves forward and so does the natural process of aging. Indeed, there are many scientific experiments in the works that may extend human life, and we have already increased lifespans through modern medicine and decreased threats such as predators, exposure to the elements, and other stressors common to early mankind. Yet studies show that the average number of heartbeats for any complex organism is constant, so long as it is not killed prematurely. The larger a creature is, the more efficiently its cells metabolize, the slower its heart, and the longer it lives. There’s a relatively simple scale that shows the magnitude of all these factors, which shows that each one of us, from hummingbird to elephant, has about 1.5 billion heartbeats.

If we only have a billion heartbeats then, let’s not waste them on worrying about what has happened or what may happen in the past, present, or future. Time to refill that wine glass once more.