“Now, in an era in which authenticity and representation have become entertainment industry watchwords, the presenters of some of the many theatrical adaptations that are staged every winter are rethinking who gets to play this iconic role … In London, the casting call for the role made it clear: ‘Applicants without a disability will not be considered.’ In New York, the language was subtler: ‘Performers with disabilities are encouraged to audition.'” – The New York Times
New Documentary Play Takes On Human Trafficking
“At a table reading of Live Bodies for Sale, a new docudrama about human trafficking in Northeast Ohio, playwright Christopher Johnston addresses the assembled cast and crew. ‘Everybody in this play is real,’ he says. ‘The characters, their monologues, are all taken from what these people have said to me in the time I’ve spent with them. We want to tell their stories.'” – American Theatre
Bloomberg Philanthropies Launches Asphalt Art Initiative, Providing Cities How-To Guidance to Transform Streets and Public Spaces with Artwork
“Bloomberg Philanthropies today announced the launch of the Asphalt Art Initiative which will assist cities looking to use art and design to improve street safety, revitalize public spaces, and engage their communities. The Initiative includes the publication of the Asphalt Art Guide, with case studies and best practices from cities around the world, as well as the awarding of grants up to $25,000 to 10 small and mid-sized U.S. cities to implement their own transformative projects.” – Bloomberg Philanthropies
Continuing Embrace of Equity: Bonfils-Stanton’s Journey
Eddy Torres: “I am honored to have this opportunity to interview Gary Steuer, president and CEO of the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation. Gary is a respected colleague, a member of Grantmakers in the Arts’ board of directors, and co-chair of the GIA Denver Conference Planning Committee for the upcoming annual conference. I am pleased to note that Bonfils-Stanton has been embracing equity in their support of Denver’s nonprofit community, including its arts organizations.” – Grantmakers in the Arts
This artist brings Native folklore to life with artwork you can touch
“With wall-sized scrolls of coloring-book panels, [RYAN! Feddersen] shares her modern take on traditional Native American Coyote stories. (Coyote is addicted to technology; Coyote gets caught up in Russian propaganda online.) In the lore of the Interior Salish peoples, she explains, ‘When Coyote is killed at the end of the story, all it takes is a scrap of bone or fur to bring him back to life.’ An enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation (her heritage includes Okanogan and Arrow Lakes), Feddersen sees a connection between Coyote’s immortality trick and contemporary Native American identity. ‘As long as we continue to wield our creativity,’ she says, ‘our culture will stay alive.'” – PBS NewsHour
An outsider artist’s unblinking look at racial terror
“Much of [Mary Frances] Whitfield’s work depicts these stories from the days of slavery] — of picking cotton, singing songs, and other images of life for black Americans in days past. But Whitefield’s art shifted when she made a trip to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in the early 1990s, where she saw images of lynching and the Ku Klux Klan. Whitfield could not shake the images and the feelings they produced in her mind. So she began to exorcise them the only way she knew how: by painting them.” – PBS NewsHour
Why Are There So Many Asian-American Hip-Hop Dance Crews? Community
“In many Asian countries, hip-hop rose to popularity as a form of self-expression and resistance, sometimes in the face of colonialism and oppressive regimes. … But the contemporary boom of Asian Americans in hip-hop seems born out of a different impulse — one of finding belonging and connecting with others who share your unique experience.” – Vice
Inside The 1811 Louisiana Slave Rebellion Re-Enactment
“It took years [for the organizer, artist Dread Scott,] to raise the funds of over $1m, which included money from 500 individual donations, to pull off the spectacle. But as word of mouth about the project got out, African Americans from all over the country signed up.” Reporter Oliver Laughland joined the re-enactors as they marched 26 miles from the LaPlace, La. plantation where the original rebellion started to the center of New Orleans. – The Guardian
Douglas Q. Barnett, Seattle’s Black Theatre Founder And African American Theatre History Author, Has Died At 88
The Greta Thunberg Of The Theatre
Isabella Madrigal, a tribally enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians in California, and a 17-year-old, figured out, as she had a hard time finding good roles, that she could shape her own narrative. She explains, “if there is a lack of Native actors, it’s because there’s a lack of Indigenous storytellers. This lack of representation goes beyond just not seeing a Native face in the media. That’s certainly part of the issue, but it’s not the entire thing because our defining stories are also missing from the national narrative.” – The Desert Sun (Palm Springs)
A Bookstore With A Mission, Surviving In The Midst Of Book Business Upheaval
Must be nice to be able to say that people wanting bestsellers can just “ge them elsewhere.” Another Story Bookshop in Toronto was founded with a mission of social justice, with the purpose of getting “diverse books into diverse hands” – and though the founder died two years ago, the new owners are continuing the mission despite Toronto’s rising real estate market and, of course, the ever-present threat of Amazon. – The New York Times
Artist Dread Scott Is Re-Enacting The United States’ Largest Slave Rebellion
Scott first became (in)famous 30 years ago with his installation What is the Proper Way to Display the American Flag?, which has incited controversy virtually every time it has been exhibited since 1989. This weekend will see his largest-scale project: a re-enactment of the 1811 German Coast Uprising, in which up to 500 enslaved people marched on New Orleans from nearby sugar plantations. Perhaps surprisingly, Scott is doing this with the support of Louisiana officials. – The New York Times
‘Slave Play’ Author Jeremy O. Harris Has Made For Himself A ‘For Colored Girls’-Style ‘Choreopoem’
“The new work, Black Exhibition” — which he developed under the pseudonym @GaryXXXFisher — “is described in the script as an attempt ‘to look at a queer black male psyche through the lens of its literary influences'” — those being, among others, Kathy Acker, Samuel R. Delany and Yukio Mishima. – The New York Times
Why Jeremy O. Harris Had A Special Performance Of His ‘Slave Play’ For A Black Audience
“That was me being able to look certain people in the face and say: ‘You’re wrong.’ So many people have dictated what my intentions were with Slave Play. One of the things they’ve always articulated is that I wrote Slave Play for white people and that it’s not written for a black audience. That’s so bizarre to me. … It was amazing to sit in a 99.9% black audience and see that 99.9% of the play worked. And the parts that exhilarated the audience on other nights still exhilarated the audience that night.” – The Guardian
What It’s Like To Study Ballet While Black
Felicia Fitzpatrick: “With its European roots, ballet has always valued Eurocentric body shapes and skin color, leaving little opportunity for Black ballerinas to even attempt to engage with the art form. Even if they were allowed to participate, they were still othered and singled out for their race.” – Zora
Playwright William B. Branch Dead At 92
“As a playwright Mr. Branch delved into the black experience, both in the 20th century and earlier, in Off-Broadway plays like A Medal for Willie, about the bitterness that ensues when a black World War II veteran who had been mistreated in the service is decorated posthumously; A Wreath for Udomo, with its theme of colonial oppression in South Africa; and In Splendid Error, about the tangled relationship between the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and John Brown.” – The New York Times
Ernest J. Gaines, Author Of ‘Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman’ And ‘A Lesson Before Dying’, Dead At 86
“Mr. Gaines, who spent his first 15 years on a plantation near Baton Rouge, later moved with his family to Northern California, but in many ways he never left the landscape, rhythms and painful history of his childhood. … In eight novels and many short stories, Mr. Gaines created a fictional world surrounding a town called Bayonne, in St. Raphael Parish, not unlike his boyhood home.” – The Washington Post
Howard Sherman: Seeing a favourite show performed in Sing Sing gave it a fresh meaning
“At this moment, when the US is deep in the throes of an impeachment investigation, it is startling and bracing to be immersed in the debate over the country’s founding principles, however simplified and with musical accompaniment.” (The show is Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s 1776.) “But the added layer of who performs that story transcends the present-day politics in unexpected ways. Phrases from our founding document, such as: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ spoken on a makeshift stage by a cast predominantly made up of black and Hispanic men, becomes a personal declaration, not simply a national aspiration, one often ignored in these days of closing borders and shallow nationalism.” – The Stage
‘Public art is propaganda, frankly’: Hank Willis Thomas discusses gun violence and the urgent need for alternative memorials
“Hank Willis Thomas is making some of the most urgent, timely art in the US. With a knack for adopting popular icons and signs, whether in the form of sporting imagery or memorable photographs of historic events, he takes on key issues, including racial injustice and gun violence, and the historic events underpinning them, like colonialism and slavery.” – The Art Newspaper
How this dance studio connects adopted children to their native roots
“Every year, families from across the country gather for a heritage camp where adopted Indian and Nepalese children come to learn about their roots. Mudra Dance Studio has been part of the annual camp for over 20 years. Founder Namita Khanna Nariani said the mission of the studio is to ‘celebrate diversity through the universal language of dance and music and to expose the world to the beautiful cultural fabric that India brings to our culture here [in the United States].'” – PBS NewsHour
Baltimore Museum Of Art Remaking American Art History
“The Baltimore Museum of Art doesn’t wish to renovate American art history by placing more black artists in leading roles. The BMA wants to take a wrecking ball to American art history, rebuilding it from the ground up with black artists serving as load-bearing walls.” – Forbes
Wendell Pierce: ‘I Still Have Fear, But Now I Have Courage’
On playing Willy Loman: “I knew that it would challenge me like no other role. It is the American Hamlet. And now that I’ve done it, I’m going down the list of all the roles that I want to do: Richard III and Walter Lee (A Raisin in the Sun). I want to do Astrov (Uncle Vanya) again. I’m ready to do my Othello, and look forward in the years to come to do a Lear. I’d love to do Invisible Man if there was an interpretation of that. I still have fear, but now I have courage.” – The New York Times
In Miami, the Murals Are the Message
“Bright, colorful murals are turning up all over town on the walls of office buildings, warehouses, condos, corner stores, laundromats, and even public schools, sports stadiums and a police station. … Often, the work carries a strong social message on subjects from environmental degradation to poverty and wealth, immigration, education, gender, and racial and ethnic diversity. … Sometimes, the messages shout. Sometimes, they are more like a whisper. Here is a selection.” – The New York Times
In the #MeToo Era, Museums Celebrate Women
“Women of Progress: Early Camera Portraits, an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, [is] one of several major exhibitions in the nation’s capital that celebrate women — from the battle for voting rights, spurred by the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, to artworks by feminist icons who embody the challenging issues of their epochs.” – The New York Times
Ed Bereal Brings Edgy to Bellingham
“Over the decades, the artist has only become more confrontational, exploring such themes as gun violence, racism, police brutality and corporate greed.” – The New York Times