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Kiri Te Kanawa
Beloved Opera Singer
I'd actually done the Countess, which was very important. I've actually done it on stage, yes, with a director. Yes, I worked for several weeks in Santa Fe, which was a wonderful experience. I mean, it was very precious, that experience. I look back and always remember that glorious time. That gave me the strength to do the Covent Garden one. Because I'd done it. I'd been there. And yet, I was in a more superior production of course. Everything was just super-super-duper. It was really fantastic.
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Kiri Te Kanawa
Beloved Opera Singer
First of all, of course, you've got to know the music. You've got to know all the different things. And so the music came, of course, first with me. Then you had to know what you were doing, then you have to know what your colleagues were doing. You had to know what they were talking about and how they were moving around you. And then you have to make sure that your timing -- and your colleague was not, as they say, upstaged during what you were doing. So you had to sort of take your place in the jigsaw puzzle. And the jigsaw puzzle was doing your job within the job. But yet, always being part of the action and having the energy behind all you were doing. So you all live with the same mission, was to complete the story and tell it to the audience. That was my thing all the time. Make sure the audience knows what we're doing. Of course, you know, surtitles and subtitles have come out. And I think that's wonderful. Because the audience, if they don't speak the language, they're right in it with you. You say, "I understood every word!" And I think, "Yes. Of course, you did." That's fantastic.
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Kiri Te Kanawa
Beloved Opera Singer
I do remember the preparations every night, and during the dress rehearsal, that the pianist would come to my room and we'd go up, walk up two or three flights above the dressing room. And I'd literally sing that aria four times through. And then I'd be in costume. And I'd walk. I'd have my costume on. I was all ready. And from that point of work, singing it through three or four times, very softly -- never sing full voice -- I walked straight down to the stage, sit in position and I was ready. And that's how I did it. And I continued to do that for many years, every time I did Figaro.
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Kiri Te Kanawa
Beloved Opera Singer
Kiri Te Kanawa: When I was singing opera, the day was always either a singing lesson or seriously going down to the opera house, wherever I could go, and either working through with an accompanist -- certainly, if it was any Mozart, I'd go through all the recits (recitatives), every single recit -- because those were the ones that were always the trickiest -- and do the whole recit through on the day. Then I'd normally take a singing lesson. If I was in England, I'd take a singing lesson with my singing teacher, then I'd go home, I'd have lunch, then I'd go back into the theater. And that was it. An hour and a half to London and an hour and a half back. I did that twice on performance day. And that's why I never went out to dinners afterwards. I would just go straight home, because another hour and a half back in the car, and I just was ready for bed, because I'm a very early riser. I don't sleep very well, so I'm normally awake by at least 6:00 in the morning. So I don't need to have late nights. I don't enjoy them.
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Kiri Te Kanawa
Beloved Opera Singer
I've said to so many people, all you do is you breathe and you sing. Now, it's how you breathe and how you sing on top of that is what you have to learn to do. But it's no more difficult than that. And that's all I do is I breathe and I sing. But it's how I do it, and where I put the breath and how high I use the breath, and how low I use the breath, and where I would quickly snatch a breath in order to have just enough to complete the phrase. How I would support when I'm running out of air and to support the next two notes that I'll need at the end of the phrase to take the next breath. Now, how do I breathe out in order to breathe in? So it's all those sorts of things that is "breathe and sing." But it's the complexities of how to breathe and sing. And as I say to them time and time again, to breathe out is as important as to breathe in, because you take away the tension to breathe out. To breathe in, you build up the breath to put the notes on top of the air. Then I say it's a bit like a ping pong ball. But the water and the ping pong balls are sitting on the top. That's where you should be singing.
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Twyla Tharp
Dancer and Choreographer
We thought that there were certain possibilities, in terms of physical movement, in terms of community, and in terms of what dance could address in our society. And those were the issues that we went after. And we worked with a great deal of rigor. Which is to say, we were very, very dedicated. We worked six days a week, we worked at least six hours every day. We did not perform much at all. It was really about the experience of learning and exploring and growing, for five years.
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Twyla Tharp
Dancer and Choreographer
I don't think politicians should be allowed into power who are not familiar with their bodies, because that's where our bottom line is. And I know that they would make totally different decisions if they felt responsible simply for their own bodies, for starters, for example. I think that anybody who wants to challenge their mind to operate -- any artists, any writer, any economist, any entrepreneur who wants their mind to function at a peak knows they have to work physically at something, whatever, on a daily basis. It is a necessary part of the human machine. We're a machine and we have to be worked in the same way we have to be fed. So it's not a question of being turned on, it's a question of respecting a necessity.
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Twyla Tharp
Dancer and Choreographer
I began ear training when I was about six months old. My mother was a concert pianist, and she started all of her children with music before they were a year old. Then she began to see that I had a musical gift, and that I should be tutored outside the house, because she didn't want it to become too much an amateur situation. She wanted it to be objectified. So I started formal piano training when I was four. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. German wasn't taught in the high school, so I had German. And shorthand, in case I ever needed to be a secretary or, if I didn't need to be a secretary, at least when I went to college I would be able to take all my lectures down verbatim, and then go back and see what the professor had said. That's the downside of my mother's education because she made no selections, and she made it seem as though one had a lifetime to do that. That's no true. A young person has to start making decisions for themselves at a much earlier age than an overbearing parent allows one. I think that in combination with the degree to which a childhood and the ability to socialize was taken away, was eradicated from my life. It was a stiff price to pay for the education that I received. But, you know, six of one, half-a-dozen of another. I have the wherewithal to challenge myself for my entire life. That's a great gift. The rest of the pieces I work at reassembling for myself.
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Michael Thornton
Congressional Medal of Honor
Your first eight weeks of training you go through a lot of physical -- I mean, harassing, harassing, harassing, harassment. Just everybody telling you you're worthless and you're not this. Doing push-ups, calisthenics, running. I mean, you don't go anywhere. You run everywhere, you know. You're the lowest animal in the world, you know, and you're right underneath a cockroach, you know, as far as they're -- and that's the way they treated you.
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Michael Thornton
Congressional Medal of Honor
Thomas Norris: You have to understand that we had a job to do, which we'd been trained very well to do. It was an unusual job, an unconventional job, a highly dangerous job, but you ran your missions because that's what you were sent there to do. And you never thought about, "Gosh, I almost didn't make it back from this one," or "Boy, I was successful on that one," or "We got ambushed on this one and we almost didn't make it out," you know, "Am I going to make it on the next one? Are my people going to make it back?" You don't think about those things. Each mission is an objective that you set out to accomplish and go after. Then you forget about that and you go on to the next one. How did this affect me? If you're asking me how did this affect me after the fact once I was wounded, obviously it changed my whole lifestyle and existence. I wanted to be a -- I mean, I no longer could stay in the Navy. I went into the hospital. I spent from 1972 to 1975 in surgeries. And after that until 1978 in minor surgeries, so I was going back and forth for repair work. The Navy retired me as a result of that, and wouldn't let me stay with the unit. So that part of my life totally changed. I was now -- I mean -- I had the injuries that I had to deal with. But some people look at you and say, "How did you make it through that?" And I think the reason I made it through was because of the type of training that I had way back when we went through basic DDT SEAL training. I mean there's an ingrown desire and determination that you're not going to quit no matter what. And the doctors even came in and said, "We didn't think we were ever going to save you." He said, "I don't know how you made it -- stayed alive and made it through but --" he said, "You just wouldn't give up."
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