It was never a question of loving it. It was a question of living with loving it.
Dropping Out to Find the New You
In January, when Sergei Polunin walked out on the Romanian ballerina Alina Cojocaru, the highly talented perfectionist left a golden career at the Londoner Royal Ballet for good. In a notoriously fickle artistic environment with short-lived careers –even for the most gifted - few people would have his guts to quit at the drop of the hat.
Especially in times, where not only Denmark’s economy is threatened by something rotten, most of us average mortals would share a boat with Hamlet, paralyzed by indecision and the crippling fear of the unknown, and adhere the old proverb better the devil you know. With the spectre of the Euro crisis looming ever larger and ever more imminent over the Southern and Eastern Euro-zone, cultural budgets are the first to be sacrificed at the alter erect for Ackermann and his disciples. For policy makers saving the bank seems to have become more important than saving a culture and the Greeks in the streets of Athens would agree. Not all of us protested violently with Molotov cocktails in the 1960s, only to become foreign ministers in the 1990s under Gerhardt Schröder. Not all of us can major in physics only to be mentored by former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. And the question remains, what about those artsy types and cultural idealists, the writers and liberal arts majors, tomorrow’s Van Gogh or even a future James Joyce.
We were competitively trained to become the best and obsessed with the creation of a new academic and cultural elite; we believed in the fairy tales of a bright future, filled dreamlike opportunities but the bad banks returned my check marked insufficient funds. The cultural vaults are drained and policy makers default on Bologna’s promissory note. So we stick with what we know, suffer through it and, in the end, are disillusioned because the promised Eden really turns out to be a junkyard grown over with weeds.
I too had a dream and I clung to it for dear life, now, locked up in the Bologna glass coffin my demons called failure, indecision and fear crowd my nightmares. Still, I remember the gust of the wind of change from four years ago reaching our shores and the elation of a yes, we can moment. In the Brothers original story, Snow White was a damsel-in-distress type of character that needed her Prince Charming, this 21st century version of Snow White 2.0 was raised in a post-feminist home, to be a strong, independent and self-reliant - her very own knight in shining armour. She had cough up that piece of poisoned apple, wake up and crawl out of the woods to find seven new friends and work on making her life better in a post-modern myriad of co-existing realities. It seems the question is not if you love what you do, because ultimately those reasons you cited for studying Literature, Arts, Dance, Theatre, Acting and not Law, Medicine or Astrophysics are still as valid today as they were at the beginning of your university career. The question has always been about living with loving it.
This is the link to an article in the The Guardian titled "What's really behind Sergei Polunin's Royal BAllet emergency exit?" from back in January when the story first broke. And of course there is a ton of videos on Youtube if you are interested.
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