This week in PostMag: senior ballerinas, Canadian-Chinese fusion and more
Age is no barrier to new adventures, as HK Ballet’s Silver Ballet programme shows. Plus, creative home solutions and Indian palaces reimagined as hotels
With all the 40 under 40 lists (don’t get me started on 30 under 30) and the perennial spotlight on “emerging” talent, it’s easy to feel like you’re late to the party. At least, it’s a constant battle I fight. It’s not even a question of “am I too late for my big break?” but “am I too old to try something new?”
This issue’s cover feature is a welcome reminder that no, it’s not. “My muscles were sleeping until I was 60,” one of the senior dancers in Hong Kong Ballet’s Silver Ballet community outreach programme tells Andrew Sun. For those aged 55 and older, the programme has opened up a new world for people who never thought they’d have the chance to learn ballet.
When I lived in Beijing and Shanghai, I always thought I could never leave, if only because the food was too good. As someone coming from abroad, the breadth and depth of Chinese cuisine (or, if we’re being accurate, “cuisines”) felt limitless and unlike nearly anywhere else in the world. It was a whole new, exciting landscape of flavours to explore. Canadian writer Matthew Bossons has found a hack. He and his family are adapting their favourite Chinese dishes to the Yukon’s own bounty of wild ingredients. Lanzhou lamian with moose, anyone?
It’s an adaptability I find inspiring. “Make the best of what you have” may be a tired phrase but in all clichés, there is a truth. Hongkongers are doing the same with their spaces, finds Peta Tomlinson, as she tracks the trend of residents in compact homes spending to make them truly meet their needs. I was particularly delighted by the inventive design solutions, such as a tabletop that pulls out from a shoe cabinet and a fingerboard for rock-climbing training hidden in the ceiling above the bed. What ingenuity.
Across India, the latest generation of royalty are transforming spaces for the modern day, too, discovers Kalpana Sunder. Former palaces are being restored and reimagined into boutique luxury hotels evocative of their local histories and traditions – each one a gorgeous property you wouldn’t have to ask me twice to stay at.