Best bets

The 14th Fina World Swimming Championship 2018

Date: Dec 12-16 - 9:30 am

Venue: Hangzhou Olympic and International Expo Center

The 14th Fina World Swimming Championship 2018 (25m) is one of the world's highest-level swimming events hosted by Fina. It is also listed as one of the three world swimming events together with the Olympic Swimming Competition and the World Swimming Championship. The swimming pool used for the championships is 25 meters long and is held every two years. The championships will include 46 items, over 1,000 top swimmers from more than 170 countries and regions, as well as more than 1,000 International Swimming Federation officials, leaders of national and regional associations, technical officials, coaches and business partners of Fina. During the championships, a series of press conferences and Fina technical meetings will be held.

Theatre des Bouffes du Nord: La Traviata

Date: Nov 24-25 - 7:30 pm

Venue: Shanghai Grand Theater

An overpowering and paradoxical perfume of dream and reality floats around La Traviata, as if life and death of this so-called stray woman seem more real and more elusive than those of other opera heroines. It is with this perfume, composed of rare flower essences, of alcohols, of prescription drugs, of skins caressed, of seemingly odorless money, that Giuseppe Verdi deeply impregnated his musical material, just at the time when the perfume of the story of the courtesan Marie Duplessis, who died in 1847, six years before the opera was created in Venice, was evaporating. In La Traviata, the audience is invited into Violetta's privacy to have a close look at the fire to which she abandons herself among the guests of this musical and phantasmagoric celebration that blends theater and opera, voices that speak and sing, and where the distinction between the instrumentalists and the singers becomes blurred, where Charles Baudelaire is seated next to Christophe Tarkos, and where the phantoms of this Paris in full industrial boom whose future we are living at present, sing and die.