Page 11 - Priorities #19 2002-July

What are you planning to do professionally now?
Miranda: I can dive as long as my back injury doesn’t hurt, but it’s just begun to bother me again, a lot. So I’m not sure...I’m sure I will keep diving until I get to college. I’m going to apply as an athlete and hopefully dive for the first year. After that, I’m not sure.
With diving, is the Olympics the peak of one’s career? There isn’t really a diving career outside that arena, is there?
Miranda: No. And I’ve been invited to train with the Chinese, who won the Olympics last time. But they train year round and I’m not willing to sacrifice my whole life, spend that much time working on diving technique, getting my body into that kind of shape, and have to live in China, also...College is the only thing that is motivating me right now.
Liz and Taylor? Do you have professional aspirations now?
Liz: I really can’t tell you at all right now. I’m just in this weird period where I’m sort of mulling over my options. It’s very nice. I miss it (ballet); it’s definitely my passion...I really have no way of forecasting my future.
Taylor: If something happened to me, and I couldn’t do music, I would compose music. Music is my life. There’s an orchestra in every musician’s head that they can, at will, just tap into....
I’ve learned a lot from the musicians I know as role models. I’m not going to just stay in jazz my whole life. I’m going to do that, expand as a jazz musician, and hopefully get some recognition for that, but then branch into other genres, combine things, and hopefully maybe some day make a new genre that is based on jazz but that people in the younger generation might check out.
You’ve all said in various ways that a lot of your friends, and people in general, don’t understand your field. What would you like them to know?
Taylor: I’dlikepeopletoknow a little bit about jazz music beforehand. I’d like them to understand that jazz is basic music, basic chords, with a musician doing whatever
he wants on top of that.
Making it sound cool.
Playing off of other people’s
ideas. Mind reading. More than
just that—it’s a story being created That’s the coolest part of jazz, I think.
on the spot.
Classical musicians are measured by how well they can interpret something someone else has written. In jazz, we’re measured by how good a spontaneous storyteller we are.
Liz: I’velearnedaworkethic,howtoworkhard, how to face disappointment. I may never take another ballet class in my whole life, but I’ve taken so much away as a human being! I’ve gained in ways that people who don’t do these sorts of things never could know. Like, I got to live in New York City by myself for a summer and dance with the best American ballet company there is. To me, that’s a lifetime accomplishment!
Miranda: Exactly! There’s so much more behind the sport. Not only the work—you can’t just walk out onto a diving board and be good. You have to do weight training and diving training and stretching and all that work that never shows. But what you take away is more than that.
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