FEAST OR FAMINE

New Year’s Town near Rose Revolution Square in Tbilisi, Georgia, is a festive area cordoned off for the public to enjoy 10 days of celebrations from 25 December 2015 to 3 January 2016.  A part of the road has been closed to enable the construction of a stage (for an evening concert), stalls, a skating rink, basketball hoops, trampolines, a puppet theatre, and food tents. The Movement Theatre is also performing acrobatics and calisthenics. Santa lives in New Year’s Town and is there every day.

Choosing a birth name may be inspired by celebrities, tradition, or the quest for something original and unique. However, many classical names might be facing extinction ( Daily Mirror , December 25, 2015). Boys’ names, such as Rodney, Derek, Donald, Ian, Darren, and Terry are ‘fading fast’ according to the Bounty Parenting Club’s annual report of over 340,000 baby names for children born in the United Kingdom in 2015. The biggest decrease in boys’ names include: Riley, Kian, Kai, Kayden and Jayden, as well as Harley, Tyler, Joey, and Rhys. New names on the rise for boys include: Nimrod, Jester, Boden, and Lion. There were also boys called Lovie, Lomond, and Golden. Other boys’ names increasing in popularity are Teddy, Jackson, and Hugo. The biggest increase in boys’ names include Arthur and Reggie. Girls’ names, such as Helen, Claire, Sally, Karen, and Susan are on the decline. The biggest decrease in girl’s names include: Lexi, Leah, and Lacey. Holly, Molly, Lola,...

Nijinsky (2013) is the biography of dancer Vaslav Fomich Nijinsky (1889-1950). Born in Kiev to professional dancers, Nijinsky had an older brother, Stanislav – who damaged his head in a fall at two years of age, was committed to an asylum at 16, and died at 31 in 1918 – and a younger sister, Bronia (1891-1972) – who danced with Nijinsky for much of his life. When his father left the marriage, Nijinsky’s mother travelled to Moscow to enrol him in the prestigious Imperial Theatre School (the Mariinksy Ballet). At nine years of age he was accepted in a class of six boys and 14 girls (from an application pool of 100 boys and 200 girls). Of the five other boys, four died tragically in their twenties. Only Anatole Bourman (1888-1962), the author of The Tragedy of Nijinsky (2010), outlived them. The Imperial Theatre School was convent-like, rigid, rigorous, competitive, and cut-throat. It was a time when girls were the focus, and boys were their ‘lifting’ partners. Ev...