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Link Roundup! – 1/30/15
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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Chenjerai Kumanyika, Photo by Linda Tindal
Buzzfeed featured a story this week by Chenjerai Kumanyika, a public radio producer, about his struggle to reconcile how his non-white voice sounds compared to other public radio hosts:
As I read the script back to myself while editing, I realized that as I was speaking aloud I was also imagining someone else’s voice saying my piece. The voice I was hearing and gradually beginning to imitate was something in between the voice of 99% Invisible host Roman Mars and Serial host Sarah Koenig.
Those two very different voices have many complex and wonderful qualities and I’m a fan of those shows. They also sound like white people. My natural voice — the voice that I use when I am most comfortable — doesn’t sound like that. Thinking about this, I suddenly became self-conscious about the way that I instinctively alter my voice and way of speaking in certain conversational contexts, and I realized that I didn’t want to do that for my first public radio-style piece.
For another take on public radio voice, last week’s This American Life featured a segment on the various criticism the show’s female reporters receive about their speaking voices.
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This essay from Salon brings up some important factors impacting how creative people get the time and resources to create their work
In my opinion, we do an enormous “let them eat cake” disservice to our community when we obfuscate the circumstances that help us write, publish and in some way succeed. I can’t claim the wealth of the first author (not even close); nor do I have the connections of the second. I don’t have their fame either. But I do have a huge advantage over the writer who is living paycheck to paycheck, or lonely and isolated, or dealing with a medical condition, or working a full-time job.
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Tamir Kalifa/AP
NPR’s CodeSwitch blog has a piece, in response to Jonathan Chait’s recent essay on “PC Culture,” that examines a study from Cornell about how mixed gender groups work together after establishing a PC environment:
The researchers found that groups that had both men and women and had been exposed to the PC norm went on to generate more ideas — and more novel ideas — for how to use the vacant lot than the mixed-gender groups that hadn’t discussed political correctness. (The ideas were graded for “novelty” by an independent panel, based on how much an idea diverged from the rest.)
The researchers’ takeaway: By imposing a PC environment, they had made it easier for men and women to speak their minds in mixed company. They had “reduced the uncertainty” that can come with interacting with someone from the opposite sex.
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HowlRound’s recent post about creating effective post-show discussions has some good take aways:
Post-show discussions are not easy to facilitate. Facilitators are juggling many different priorities all at once. Without a firm structure and adherence to it, discussions can easily get away from the facilitator and ultimately benefit no one. On the other hand, well-structured and skillfully presented post-show discussions build a stronger theatrical community and enhance the theatre-going experience for all participants.