Link Roundup! – 3/4/16

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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Mayor Marty Walsh has an Opinion piece is the Boston Globe this week:

If Boston is going to be a thriving, healthy, and innovative city, we need our artists to flourish. Artists can help solve big problems and heal old wounds. Artists embody the creativity that fuels innovation, and innovation is part of the fabric of Boston. Their work expresses our histories and our values. It communicates our fears, hopes, and dreams. Art brings people together. We see this in the crowds that gathered around the Echelman sculpture on the Greenway last summer,  in Illuminus at Fenway, where percussionists “played” the Green Monster, and in our neighborhood festivals and parades. From the beginning of this administration, we identified the arts as a top priority. And we recognized that supporting the arts begins with supporting artists’ work. Without our artists, we aren’t Boston.

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American Theatre has a feature about the Write With Us program at Soho Rep, which allows the public to come in for writing workshops led by Soho Rep playwrights:

Martin and Benson invited the participating writers—which also included Annie Baker, Greg Moss, and Daniel Alexander Jones—to format their three-hour workshop however they wanted. César Alvarez had attendees write lyrics, to which he would compose a melody and start to craft a song, while Anne Washburn conducted her entire workshop in the dark and had students bring flashlights. “It was this very sort of sonic experience,” says Benson, who attended all of the writer’s workshops.

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Casting Call, The Project, started by three NYC-based artists, features women reading aloud the descriptions of women in real casting calls:

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An exciting new app developed by the Black Women’s Playwright Group plans to highlight the writing of women of color in a new way:

And I certainly have gotten this response of, “Who do you think you are?” from people who think it is outrageous that a woman of color would want to create this app. For theater, women of color represent less than 2% of productions across the country. So, for me, this offers an opportunity for women of color to be produced, albeit in a slightly different setting, but still gather an audience. That’s important to me because they’re such wonderful playwrights. The fact that there are so many beautiful words left unread and unseen is just heartbreaking to me.

One of the things I love about this app is that it can act as a discovery tool for people who may live in a place where women of color or other underrepresented voices aren’t being produced this app can be a place for those voices to be heard.