{"id":35,"date":"2008-06-14T01:14:21","date_gmt":"2008-06-14T01:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp\/?p=35"},"modified":"2008-06-14T01:14:21","modified_gmt":"2008-06-14T01:14:21","slug":"im_not_there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/2008\/06\/im_not_there\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m Not There"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"whered.jpg\"<\/span>It only looks like I’m blogging here<\/a>. Really, this NPAC convention has kicked my butt, and I’m only thinking about a time when I’ll be sleeping, so I will make this quick. At the end of today’s general session, “Radical Ideas from Beyond Our Borders,” something a little unexpected happened in this otherwise astoundingly well-organized and congenial conference bubble: quiet protest. Initially, it seems, this “Radical Ideas” session had been billed as the chance to hear from Jose Antonio Abreu, the founder of El Sistema in\u00c2\u00a0Venezuela, and Madhusree Dutta who founded Majlis, a center for rights discourse and multi-cultural initiatives in Mumbai, India. Later, Dutta was replaced on the program by Germaine Acogny, the dancer, choreographer, and founder of the International Centre for Traditional and Contemporary African Dances in Senegal. Conductor Marin Alsop led inspiring chats with both guests with the aid of two truly impressive translators, and it left the audience thinking big about just how far the power of the arts can propel people even in the face of extreme social, economic, and political constraints.<\/form>\n
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Throughout the event, however, the occasional sign kept popping up. “Where is Madhusree Dutta?” they read. Abreu and Acogny had both been introduced to the audience by a short biographical film about their work, and it was announced from the stage after the session had ended (and a chorus of children had sung us “America the Beautiful”) that Dutta’s film had contained some material (related to Bush and the current wars) that she was asked to remove. It seems she instead declined to attend. Regardless of what the material was, during a conference at which the focus is on coming together across disciplines and listening with sensitivity to our colleagues about their own struggles and challenges, it was alarming to some of those gathered that Dutta was treated in this way. There’s probably a lot more to this story than the censorship angle presented to me, so I don’t mean to pass any kind of judgement here, but if that’s exactly what happened, in a way Madhusree Dutta made her point quite poetically by where she was not.\n<\/p>\n

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It only looks like I’m blogging here. Really, this NPAC convention has kicked my butt, and I’m only thinking about a time when I’ll be sleeping, so I will make this quick. At the end of today’s general session, “Radical Ideas from Beyond Our Borders,” something a little unexpected happened in this otherwise astoundingly well-organized […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-35","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}