Tag Archives: artists

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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perspective0306mag

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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Link Roundup! – 2/19/16

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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Pep Montserrat for The Boston Globe

Pep Montserrat for The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe has a feature on Boston’s new artist-in-residence program:

Imagine a dancer working with police officers to better interpret a suspect’s gait. Or a musician teaching a city parking clerk how to listen deeply. Or an abstract painter rearranging a tangle of contradictory street signs. That’s the idea behind Boston’s new artist-in-residence program, which will embed local artists inside city departments to promote creative thinking about municipal government.

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StageSource Executive Director (and recent C1 PlayLab guest speaker!) Julie Hennrikus wrote an editorial for the ARTery about arts space and funding in Boston:

We are in the midst of a social revolution right now, and cultural equity is part of it. Cultural equity requires acknowledging, addressing and dismantling the systemic and social inequities that are built into the fabric of our society. We can’t achieve what is possible unless we acknowledge that even in the arts, which are supposed to be a great equalizer, inequity persists.

Do we really care about cultural equity? That is an important conversation, and speaks to Boston’s history and its future. We have to care. The arts community has the opportunity to be a leader on this front in a way that would change the city. Could different funding streams help? When companies rely on ticket sales to the degree that they do in Boston, fear of change becomes ingrained. Rethinking offerings, audiences, locations, art forms — all of that requires change.

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Link Roundup! – 8/7/15

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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The 30th birthday party for the Guerrilla Girls at the Abrons Art Center in Manhattan in May. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

The 30th birthday party for the Guerrilla Girls at the Abrons Art Center in Manhattan in May. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

The New York Times feature about the Guerrilla Girls, “masked crusaders for gender and racial equality in the art world,” looks at their legacy and relevance today:

Today they seem prescient: They long ago took aim at issues that are flash points now, like gender bias in Hollywood, and racism in the gallery world (“Guerrilla Girls’ definition of a hypocrite?” read one poster. “An art collector who buys white male art at benefits for liberal causes, but never buys art by women or artists of color.”) Co-opting the look and feel of advertising, they were social media-friendly and selfie-ready before those terms existed. Though other activist groups, like the newly formed anonymous collective Pussy Galore, have taken up the cause, the Guerrilla Girls say their mission is far from over. “They’re as valid today, and needed today, as they were 30 years ago,” Mr. Kiehl said, “because what they’re talking about is still going on.”

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Students from Marin Academy and Richmond High School interviewed each other for the project. (Dominic Colacchio/KQED)

Students from Marin Academy and Richmond High School interviewed each other for the project. (Dominic Colacchio/KQED)

KQED news has a story about students from two different high schools, both with very different economic and racial backgrounds, who came together for a documentary theatre project:

Ives lives in Marin but drives every day across the bridge to teach at Richmond High School.

“Something I am so aware of since working in this school, how segregated the Bay Area is. It’s shocking to me, actually, to come over the bridge and work in this school every day and to come home, and almost everybody’s white where I live,” Ives said.

To create the play students had to break through that segregatio, which meant examining some big differences, even when those differences were uncomfortable. At one point in the play, Marin Academy student Georgia Spears performs as a Richmond High senior talking about receiving her college admissions letter.

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Link Roundup! – 4/18/15

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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In the most recent post on Bitter Gertrude, Melissa Hillman examines the negative online reactions that the photo below received and how it highlights the importance of engaging with young audiences on their own terms:

Photo by Alvaro Garnero

Photo by Alvaro Garnero

We talk a lot about wanting to engage the rising generation in theatre, and I’m seeing a lot of “what can we do about this?” commentary on this picture. Listen: If you want to engage the rising generation, the first thing you need to do is stop lying to yourself about them. You’ll fail to engage them if you don’t approach them with honesty…This is exactly why 99.999% of “audience engagement strategies” fail miserably to bring in young, diverse audiences. This is why “tweet seats” failed. We’re not looking at this generation honestly. Instead we look at studies designed from the outset to confirm our hypotheses. We make assumptions about how the rising generation thinks and feels based on how they make us think and feel. We refuse to engage them on their own terms, instead dictating the terms to them and then blaming them for boorishness when they fail to meet them.

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Seth Lepore’s HowlRound essay about the importance of entrepreneurship and the blind many college theatre programs have about it has been getting lots of online buzz this week:

The blind spot of most college professors needs to be understood for what it is. A lot of college teachers who are tenure track have been in school their whole lives. Creating their own work has been in the context of academia and the relationship to both process and theory. Practitioners in the academy always have a place to rehearse and develop new work. They don’t have to worry whether people attend the performance and if it will break even or not. When showing a new work, they are part of an infrastructure that already subsidizes them. The business skill set doesn’t seem to fit into “What Would Artaud Do?” They are focused on students building a performance skill set. I’ve actually heard some of these well-meaning professors say “If they want that information, they can take a course with the business school.”

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Link Roundup! – 3/13/15

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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Playwright Bess Wohl at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse. Photo: Cassandra Giraldo for The Wall Street Journal

Playwright Bess Wohl at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse. Photo: Cassandra Giraldo for The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal has an article up about playwrights who write for film and television, examining the way it allows for a more sustainable income than theatre:

In the nonprofit theater, playwrights like Ms. Wohl earn income from grants, commissions and in some cases fees from regional and international productions of their work. Only for a small handful does this accumulate to a living wage.

In TV, on the other hand, a complex system of generous minimums is in place to determine compensation for writers, whose salaries and fees vary based on a variety of factors, including a show’s length and where it is being broadcast or streamed.

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The Guardian takes a look at childcare and parent-friendly practices in theatre with their article “Parents in the arts need to stage a childcare revolution”: 

Of course it’s not just women who are affected by such responsibilities. But perhaps one of the reasons that there are fewer female theatre directors sustaining longer-term careers is that it’s hard to juggle family and directing. Plenty of women set out to be directors, but then when children come along, it is far harder to keep going alongside caring responsibilities which still often fall primarily upon women…Maybe that explains why only 29% of directors in big theatres are female.

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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

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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#blacklivesmatter: C1 Artists Respond

Since the Ferguson and Eric Garner grand jury decisions this fall, members of the C1 staff and many of our affiliated artists have found various ways to participate in the #blacklivesmatter movement. Whether by joining the protests happening around the country, responding through their art, or posting their perspectives on social media, artists are making their voices heard in important ways. We’ve collected some of those responses and perspectives here – they are an important reminder that the fight for equality and social justice must continue into the new year, and beyond.

Earlier this month, several local performers, including C1 affiliated artist Obehi Janice, organized the Creative Witness rally. Actor Brandon Green performed the piece below at the rally:

 

Post by Micah Eglinton-Woods.

 

Walter Sickert from The Army of Broken Toys, one of our SHOCKHEADED PETER collaborators, posted two images he created on Facebook (click to enlarge):

 

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DC Theatre Scene: A Living Wage is Our Right and Responsibility

This article from lighting designer Andrew Griffin is in response to Philly theatre artist Charlotte Ford’s interview, which we discussed on 5/26/14. In his article, Griffin talks about how artists devalue each other by accepting less money for hard, time-consuming work. Read the article here.