Director Sheldon Epps: “There is language in this play that you may have heard in a CNN report the night before. … It’s always been about racial issues; we’re just heightening what [the playwright] wrote about. He was specifically writing about how the American justice system is different for white Americans than it is for Americans of color.” — The Washington Post
Shortly Before Its Annual Conference, Workers At The Grantmakers In The Arts’ Hotel Went On Strike. What To Do?
It was a tough decision says Edwin Torres, the organization’s new leader. Do we live our values or not? So GIA arranged to move its sessions to cultural venues all over Oakland. It made, says Torres, for a more interesting experience… – Barry’s Blog
Research: On Engaging With Art And Who Is Doing It
“One of the strongest things that struck us was how many people leading these programmes have an authentic belief in social justice, democracy and building social and cultural capital. We anticipated hearing about the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of audience engagement, but we didn’t expect to hear quite so much about the ‘why’. Interviewees talked passionately about empathy, listening, sharing power, trust, transparency, honesty and patience. Many rejected the deficit model that suggests that communities are lacking in some way that arts and culture can solve, while others were acutely aware of their responsibility in places that have suffered decades of disinvestment and neglect.” – Arts Professional
The Power Of Theatre: “Hamilton” In Puerto Rico
In bringing “Hamilton” to Puerto Rico, Lin Manuel Miranda called international attention to the island’s progress and also to its daunting obstacles. The island, in return, projected both its hopes and its frustrations onto the show. – The New Yorker
Report: UK Publishing Industry Workforce Fails To Reflect The Population
The industry has failed to represent the working population of the capital, and continues to fail to connect with regions outside London. “The report shows we have a passionate industry full of people who are having to move away from their homes across the country in order to work in books – but we’ve also neglected to include the local population.” – The Guardian (UK)
Is It Problematic To Present All-Male Plays?
White, black, young and old: this is what an inclusive theatre looks like. That is absolutely what theatre should aspire to, but it does not mean that works of art should not tell stories that are rooted in specific communities. – The Stage
Boy With Allergy Denied Enrollment In Theatre Program, Igniting Conflict Over Access
The conflict that ensued over how the theater could accommodate Mason Wicks-Lim’s allergy eventually grew into a legal battle that created a rift in the community, highlighting the social struggles that people with food allergies often contend with, even as they fight for equal access. – The New York Times
Developing Authentic Disability Theatre, And Bringing It To The Public
“Theatre has the power to help us recognize the social forces that we have created as a society and allows us to envision how we can change them. To incite positive social change and critically alter the way society views differences, voices from the disability community must be included in what we present onstage.” Seattle dramaturg Andrea Kovich, who identifies as disabled, writes about two projects focused on the work of Deaf and disabled playwrights that she recently did with Sound Theatre Company. — HowlRound
Women Writers: Busting The Preconceptions For Commercial Success
Ann O’Loughlin: “All women writers face an uphill struggle to have their work recognised in the same way as their male counterparts, but for those of us writing bestselling commercial fiction, there is a mountain to trudge up every time.” – Irish Times
American Alliance Of Museums Launches Program To Diversify Museum Leadership
“The project, ‘Facing Change: Advancing Museum Board Diversity & Inclusion,’ will be supported by $4 million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alice L. Walton Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The funds will go toward training and resources over the next three years that will help museum leaders better reflect the communities they serve.” — The New York Times
The Disney Princess Body Proportion Issue
“Disney princesses have extremely small waist-to-hip ratios that are nearly impossible to achieve naturally,” write anthropologist Toe Aung of Pennsylvania State University and independent researcher Leah Williams. They argue that such characters “might heighten or reinforce our preference for lower waist-to-hip ratios, and the perception that physically attractive individuals with lower waist-to-hip ratios possess morally favorable qualities.” – Pacific Standard
Orange County Has Changed Politically. Its Stages Don’t Seem To Have Kept Up Demographically
“While our political transformation was reflected emphatically at the ballot box in 2016 and even more so in 2018, the effects of O.C.’s increasing diversity haven’t been felt everywhere. The local theater scene, for example, reflects only part of the new demographic reality.” – Voice of Orange County
Anonymous Was A Woman And Its No-Longer-Anonymous Funder
“Last year, 77-year-old artist Susan Unterberg revealed that she’s the patron behind this grantmaking outfit” — which selects ten female artists over 40 each year for $25,000 grants — “though the nominators and final award panel members will remain shrouded in mystery. … While supporting creative women constitutes a grantmaking niche, its focus on equity aligns well with the ongoing social justice trend in arts funding.” — Inside Philanthropy
In L.A. County, Using The Arts To Help Keep Kids Out Of Jail
“A one-year, $750,000 grant from the Ford Foundation’s Art for Justice Fund will help launch the Arts and Youth Development Project, intended to serve youth and families at risk of involvement or already involved with the juvenile justice system.” — Inside Philanthropy
Training A New Generation Of Arts Critics To Engage With Issues
The Seattle program empowers teens to thoughtfully engage in the arts and performance scene. Teens apply to be a part of the five-week PCI program on TeenTix.org. As a group, the kids attend shows, write reviews, and meet with local professional arts critics for workshops on the critic’s prospective arts discipline. After edits and discussions, the teens’ work is published on the TeenTix blog. The program was recently revamped to include a more intentional social-justice lens, with a goal of “disrupting systems of oppression within arts media that have kept marginalized voices out of arts journalism.” – Seattle Weekly
Billion-Dollar Foundation Dedicates Itself To Racial Equity. Founder’s Heirs Protest
Some of the 340 heirs of John Andrus, whose estate created Minnesota’s Surdna Foundation, back in the 1930s, are protesting the foundation’s funding of progressive causes and its decision to devote itself to racial equity. What would Andrus have wanted? – Chronicle of Philanthropy
Opera Roles Are Classified By Voice Types. Also Gender Types. Is This A Problem?
“Imagine a soprano who has just changed her voice type from mezzo-soprano to soprano. She’s immediately at a disadvantage if she lists every role that she’s performed on her resume, because it will immediately cause the review panel to question the legitimacy of her soprano-ness. The next inevitable step is that they’ll question her ability to sing the role for which she’s currently auditioning. This isn’t a gender issue any longer, but rather an issue of the current classification system’s inability to handle change.” – NewMusicBox
Fractured Atlas Committed Itself To Racial Equity. Here’s How It’s Going
The arts service organization produced a thoughtful (and well-documented) declaration of its principles a few years ago. Now FA reports on what it’s done and how it’s going… – Fractured Atlas
Why The 87-Year-Old Founder Of Philadanco Dance Wants To Start A New School
Joan Myers Brown: “We started talking about how children are no longer interested in training. They see So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars and want to do ‘trick, trick, trick,’ rather than putting in the hours honing proper technique.“We wanted to change the system of teaching dance in their schools.” – Philadelphia Inquirer
Think Cultural Criticism Doesn’t Matter At A Time Like This? Think Again
Todd VanDerWerff: “We need cultural criticism not just to tell us which movies to go see and which ones to avoid, but to tell us things we already knew but didn’t know how to express. If reporting can explain the world to us, cultural criticism can explain us to us.” — Vox
A Choreographer Creates An Homage To Fluidity, Biculturalism, And A Classic Third-Wave Feminist Book
That’s right, choreographer Miguel Gutierrez titled his new dance after the classic anthology This Bridge Called My Back – but with the word “ass” instead of back in his title. “‘What underlies ‘This Bridge,’ Mr. Gutierrez said, is a consideration of something that has long piqued him: ‘the perception that artists of color are always doing content work’ — dealing with identity politics — ‘and white artists are only doing form and line.'” – The New York Times
The Architecture Research That Is Changing, And Charging Up, Human Rights
Research architecture is the name for an organized movement of investigative journalists, AI experts, archaeologists, lawyers, and others who are engaged in “the politics of space, especially how it is manipulated by states and corporations against civilians and the environment – from drone strikes in Pakistan to mining in the Amazon.” – The Guardian (UK)
Ballet Isn’t Only Women – It’s Also Trans, Nonbinary, And Genderqueer Dancers
At least, that’s one push for 2019 from the dancers themselves, who are ready, whether the classical ballet world is or not, for more than just partner training for male-identified dancers and pointe training for those who identify as female. – Pointe Magazine
What Does It Mean To Be A “Teaching Artist”?
Eric Booth: “Teachings artistry lives in the hybrid zone, where two essential human realms meet—art and learning—to enrich one another and create the most fecund human space. Indeed, there is a tidal element to a teaching artist’s career as it ebbs and flows between the two kinds of projects.”
Creating Ability-Positive Theatre for Children
“Stories that are ability-positive center around real or fictional characters with different ability statuses, not for dramatic reasons, like an abled character experiencing a new struggle, but simply to show humans, in all their complexities, who make up the fabric of our world.” Tim Collingwood, an actor-playwright-activist who identifies as having Asperger’s syndrome, writes about how he was inspired to meet the ability-positive ideal with an adaptation of The Ugly Duckling. — HowlRound
In Brazil, Female Readers Band Together To Support Female Writers (And They’re All Going To Need Each Other Now)
Book clubs with names such as “Read Women” have been growing in Brazilian cities, pushing for including more work by women authors in publishers’ lists, bookstores’ inventory, and even school curricula. Now those writers and their supporters worry about whether the new president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his far-right followers will undo the progress of recent years. — Public Radio International
Artist Ai Wei Wei On The Need To Strengthen Human Rights
“If we truly believe in values that we can all identify with and aspire to – a recognition of truth, an understanding of science, an appreciation of the self, a respect for life and a faith in society – then we need to eliminate obstacles to understanding, uphold the fundamental definition of humanity, affirm the shared value of human lives and other lives, and acknowledge the symbiotic interdependency of human beings and the environment.” – The Guardian
Indigenous Performing Artists From All Over North America And Australia Gather In New York (Just In Time For APAP)
“In drawing attention to the breadth of contemporary Indigenous performance — with works spanning dance, theater, performance art and genres in between — the [First Nations Dialogues New York/Lenapehoking] are something rare for New York, if not unprecedented. Describing what to expect is not easy and not intended to be.” — The New York Times
Huntington Library Reimagines Its Collection In Social Relevance
The series initiated in 2016, when the Huntington invited scientists from NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to build a sound installation that represented the movement of the International Space Station. The next year, the Huntington’s hushed halls filled with the tumult caused by artists affiliated with the Los Angeles–based Women’s Center for Creative Work. For that exhibition, Jheanelle Garriques responded to the Huntington’s Anglomaniac bent by curating a bluestocking storytelling, letter-writing, and dance event; Kiki Loveday reacted to the library’s rich holdings of classical images through her creation of a Sapphic and queer florilegium of ephemera. Now, it’s Caycedo and Ybarra’s turn to shake the Huntington down to its foundations with their interventions. – Artsy
Using Theatre To Provoke Debate
“Wise Fool, founded in Santa Fe almost 20 years ago as both a performing arts and social justice advocacy organization, combines clowning and circus artistry with storytelling in its popular productions, some of which have become holiday traditions — such as the Circus Luminous show held at the Lensic Performing Arts Center each year on the weekend after Thanksgiving.” – Santa Fe New Mexican