A lot of my work involves criss-crossing London to visit the many hundreds of projects, theaters, galleries, museums and groups that comprise the capital's astonishingly rich cultural life.
The minute we don't finance the arts, the accountants, attorneys and politicians keep taking the cream of money off the top and it doesn't trickle down unless all of society understands that we must support the arts, whether it's ballet, opera, fashion. Fashion is like opera, is like ballet, is like theatre. It's a visual theatre.
New York. It's home to opera, Broadway, museums, the ballet and orchestra - everything that I love. The most real people in the world live there.
There are so many great galleries and museums in London, but they can be very crowded during the day.
I grew up going to the theater. That was one of the nice things my mom did was she took us to plays and symphony concerts and to the museums. Theater captured my imagination. I just loved the idea of that box, which is essentially what a stage is from a certain distance, a box with all this life going on in it. So, I was eleven when I wrote my first play. Of course, it was horrible.
All of our lives are enriched by our culture, from blockbuster films, best-selling video games, independent music, and internationally-renowned museums and art collections, to theatre, opera, ballet, literary festivals and performance poetry.
God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity.
I knew I wanted to be a ballet dancer, but what kind, I wasn't sure. My two dream companies had been New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater.
There aren't that many galleries in Havana. There are a few state galleries and an ever-increasing but still limited number of independent galleries; there's no comparison with the number in New York.
I see fashion as going on par with all the other cultural institutions here. Ballet, theater, opera - I don't see fashion differently.
Rock music has always embraced - and even represented - rebellion, rowdiness, and a robust disdain for social decorum. But along with more classical art forms like theater, opera, and the symphony, it's suffering from the distracted, smartphone-carrying audiences of the digital age.
Since babyhood, I've always evolved from one thing to another. My mother gave me ballet lessons at 6 as part of her enthusiasm for the arts and for life. We went to museums, to the theater. While her own talent was untapped, she worked for church causes.
I want the type of career where I can come back to theater. Theater is my home. Theater, to me, is like ballet for dancers. It's my foundation.
I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera.
I don't plan out my visits rigorously, but I do have a list of about 125 New York galleries, alternative spaces, museums, and so forth that I visit regularly. That's the closest thing I have to a strategy: I go to a lot of places, many that artists don't visit.
Sometime when I was in my mid-twenties I noticed, "Hey, even I don't go into too many art galleries. Why? Because I don't like the vibe in them. If even I'm not going into galleries, then who goes into art galleries in the first place?" It's just a certain, very narrow percentage of the population.