Tag Archives: boston

>>Imagining our Future: A Conversation with Summer L. Williams

Company One Theatre production Dramaturg Jessie Baxter sat down with Director Summer L. Williams to talk about the Revolt. She said. Revolt again. rehearsal process and what life might look like for women in a world without patriarchy.

What grabbed you when you first read the script and made you think, “This is a project I need to work on?” 

SLW: I love when I read something and it feels like I don’t actually know how to read anymore — that was my first experience reading this piece. On the page it made wonder who was meant to be speaking, and who I wanted to be speaking. It made me think about the bodies that the words inhabit, and the effect those bodies have on the words. I loved that it was so open, because I could create a vision for it in my head. It was so malleable that it was scary, and anything that’s super scary feels like the thing I want to do.

What do you think the expectations might be for audiences coming to see this play? What ideas do you hope to upend?

SLW: I think the expectation might be that this is a play about some badass women who are doing some badass things in the name of feminism or women’s rights. What one might not expect is the darkness that surrounds all that. I think Alice is offering an entry point into a conversation about what it means to be a woman, and the particular ways society feels women should behave, but that idea can’t actually be explored without including the nastiness behind all of it.

It’s about walking that line of confident badassery, but also showing the vulnerability. There has to be both.  

SLW: Right. This is not necessarily the emblem I hold highest for feminism, but the thing that struck me about Beyoncé’s recent, acclaimed visual album Lemonade was here she is, hot sauce in her bag, skipping around in her Oshun yellow dress, owning shit and kicking ass. But also, several moments later, she wants to reconcile with this man who hurt her so deeply, but who she loves so profoundly. And she understands that it’s cyclical, because she watched her father do the same thing to her mother, but understands the love they carried for each other and for their children. It’s a really full package, and we don’t always talk about how heavy that package is: to want to walk confidently and boldly in the world, but also needing to reconcile your heart within all of that too.

I think this play also asks us to think about what life as a woman looks like now, versus x-number of years from now. How are you thinking about that question?

SLW: It makes me think of a text exchange between a mother and daughter that recently went viral, where the mother prompts the daughter at the end of the exchange, “Which is why we…?” And the daughter responds, “SMASH THE PATRIARCHY.” That feels wildly new to me, and I’m not that old, so I know that means something about the time we’re in now and about the time that the play is maybe urging us towards. In thinking about the history of women, or the history of any group of people who have been marginalized or objectified in some way, there have been points in time where it feels like, “Now is the time to seize this new thing, to further whatever it is we are trying to do.” This feels like one of those moments to me, to smash the patriarchy. I don’t think I knew what patriarchy was when I was thirteen.

When we look at mainstream feminist history, and how it’s separated into waves, those waves were generally confined to a single generation. There’s something about this current moment, and I’m sure social media is a huge part of it, where women from different age groups, geographic regions, economic backgrounds, and racial backgrounds are connecting more than before. It feels like there’s a real conversation happening about what it means to be intersectional – to take race, class, and ability into account as we discuss gender dynamics – and I wonder how that will play out in the years to come. As we’ve been talking about that possible future in rehearsal, we’ve been exploring the ideas of AFROPUNK and AFROFUTURISM. Can you talk about why those concepts are important to this process?

SLW: Number one, it has a lot to do with my own lens, right? As a black woman, the first time I read the play I thought, “This is an awesome play, but I don’t hear or see myself in it.” I had to think about what I, conceptually, needed to be able to see or hear myself in it. That’s what brought me to afropunk and afrofuturism. The afrofuturism piece helps me see myself in it. I want to know that, even if we’re moving to a total dystopian future, I want to know that I’m there! I don’t want to be in District Eleven (the district where the black citizens live in The Hunger Games, a dystopian adventure trilogy of books and films). I want to know that I’m part of something; we’re all in something together.

Afrofuturism creates the opportunity to recognize how the past has influenced our path, and how we can make different choices to get to a better future. One of the core tenets in afropunk is there are no phobias; the idea is that you are welcome as the exact person you are in this moment, come as you are. That idea feels important to the feminist future and feels deeply resonant to me. One of the ways we all figure out who we are is in how we present ourselves to the outside world, in terms of our style and our choices. Some people want brightly colored hair, and some people want to wear skirts that are down to their ankles, right? And there has to be room for both to exist in the same space, without one being critical of the other.

One of the big questions we have been asking in this process is, what does the world look like if patriarchy doesn’t exist? What might a feminist utopia look like to you?  These are some big questions.

SLW: I think my very simple answer is, if sometime in the not so distant future, every single female-born or female-decided person, from the moment of their conception, whatever that is for them, understands that their worth is not measured by anything that has to do with their body. That the value of their life doesn’t have to pass some sort of test. If every single person can feel, immediately and continually, that they were enough. That, as a start, is my feminist utopia. And that’s not to say that I don’t think men grapple with those issues, I believe that they do, but I think when women are grappling with those issues they tear themselves up inside. If we could just figure out how to eradicate the mechanisms that have been created that make us want to tear ourselves up inside, that would, in my mind, be the place we are trying to go. So it’s not at all about women and their relationships to men. It’s about edifying, fortifying women and their relationship to themselves, so they are able to hold the space they are in confidently, without external forces trying to chip away at it.

Great, I think we nailed it. Let’s go do that.

 REVOLT. SHE SAID. REVOLT AGAIN. By Alice Birch, Directed by Summer L. Williams. Oct. 21-Nov. 19. Company One Theatre. At Plaza Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts. 617-933-8600, www.companyone.org Tickets start at $15.

Link Roundup! – 7/22/16

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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Jones and DeGroat: “What’s RACE got to do with it?” Photo: Peter Irby

Jones and DeGroat: “What’s RACE got to do with it?” Photo: Peter Irby

Oregon Artswatch reports on a conversation about race and the arts held at Imago Theatre earlier this month:

The event was a conversation called “What’s RACE Got To Do With It?,” produced by the group The Color of NOW and hosted by Third Rail Repertory Theatre, which shares the Imago space. Part performance, part talk show and part back-and-forth with the audience, it included a monologue to an unborn child – a child who, given the state of the world and its racial volatility, would remain unborn, an idea derailed – by actor Joseph Gibson, and a little music from Ben Graves, and a long conversation about the nitty gritty of race in America and Oregon in particular with the actor, director, and activist Kevin Jones, artistic director of the August Wilson Red Door Project, an organization whose ambitious goal is to “change the racial ecology of Portland through the arts.” It’s a tall order, given the ratcheting of racial tensions across the nation and much of the rest of the world in recent times.

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Boston Globe has a feature about the city’s redevelopment efforts and how the arts are included in those plans:

First came Boston Creates, now comes Futurecity Massachusetts, a joint project of the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Boston Foundation that seeks to place arts and culture at the heart of redevelopment and revitalization efforts in the state’s three largest cities. The partnership, which is working with consultant Mark Davy’s London-based Futurecity, will focus on real estate projects in Boston’s Fenway Cultural District, the Springfield Central Cultural District, and Worcester’s Salisbury Cultural District.

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Link Roundup! – 6/17/16

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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Onlookers watch as the ZUMIX drum group of East Boston kicks off the third "town hall" forum in the Boston Creates planning process. (Jeremy D. Goodwin for WBUR)

Onlookers watch as the ZUMIX drum group of East Boston kicks off the third “town hall” forum in the Boston Creates planning process. (Jeremy D. Goodwin for WBUR)

The ARTery reports on the policy announcements surrounding the new cultural plan, which is being released today:

In what City Hall is billing as a major policy speech, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh was set to announce on Friday a series of initiatives aimed at bolstering the city’s arts scene.

In line with the recommendations of a newly minted master plan for the arts ecosphere, the measures include city-led efforts as well as partnerships with philanthropies, area museums and other outside groups. In some cases, specific dollar contributions are promised; in others, organizations are pledging in-kind donations in the form of facility space or professional expertise.

Included is a new grant-making program aimed at small arts organizations, with funds earmarked for the creation of new work.

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The Conversation examines the dialogue about diversity that surrounded this year’s Tony Awards:

It’s not clear whether the diversity represented in this season’s Tony Awards is a flash in the pan or a positive sign of things to come. It isn’t the first season to feature a number of diverse actors and casts. The 1996 Tony Award season included August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars,” the musical “Rent” and George C. Wolfe’s black history musical “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk.”

The next season, however, featured predominantly white shows: “A Doll’s House,” “Chicago,” “Titanic” and a Broadway revival of “The Gin Game.” Thus, without structural changes, this unusually diverse Broadway season is unlikely to continue. In fact, much of the diversity being touted is simply tied to one group, African-Americans. A closer look at the data shows that the diversity needle has actually regressed.

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Link Roundup! – 6/10/16

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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A promotional photo from Profiles’s 2003 production of Blackbird. Darrell W. Cox starred as a Gulf War veteran spending Christmas with his girlfriend, a heroin-addicted former stripper./  PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: READER STAFF; PHOTO: “WAYNE KARL”

A promotional photo from Profiles’s 2003 production of Blackbird. Darrell W. Cox starred as a Gulf War veteran spending Christmas with his girlfriend, a heroin-addicted former stripper./ PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: READER STAFF; PHOTO: “WAYNE KARL”

Chicago Reader has a feature about Profiles Theatre, detailing a long history of abuse and reckless behavior toward actors:

But something troubling was occurring behind the scenes of Killer Joe, something that was part of a long-standing pattern of abusive conditions at Profiles for nearly two decades. In extensive interviews conducted over the past year, more than 30 former Profiles cast and crew members described in disturbingly similar terms what they suffered or witnessed while working at the theater. They alleged that, since the 1990s, Cox has physically and psychologically abused many of his costars, collaborators, unpaid crew members, and acting students, some of whom also became romantically involved with Cox while under his supervision at the theater. Others in key roles in the theater, they say, did little if anything to stop it or turned a blind eye altogether. Although the source material Profiles favored was often violent and misogynistic, the quality of its shows and the critical acclaim they garnered—coupled with a culture of fear and silence that developed inside the theater—allowed bad behavior to flourish behind the scenes, unbeknownst to audiences or the media.

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The Huntington Theatre announced, as reported by the Boston Globe, the deal that will allow them to keep their space on Huntington Ave:

Michael Maso, managing director of the Huntington Theatre, said that under the terms of the agreement with the development group QMG Huntington, LLC, which purchased the three buildings for $25 million, the Huntington will be responsible for restoring the theater, which will abut a new mixed-use development that comprises both retail and residential units.

“We have a great deal of planning to do, and then we will have a great deal of money to raise,” said Maso, who estimated the theater company will need between $60 million to $70 million. “We can and we will fulfill the vision that this agreement makes possible.”

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Link Roundup! – 5/20/16

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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ARTS AND CULTURE CHIEF JULIA BURROS. / PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER CHURCHILL

ARTS AND CULTURE CHIEF JULIA BURROS. / PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER CHURCHILL

Boston Magazine has a feature examining the ups and downs of the city’s cultural planning process to date:

But goals alone do not make a plan. Certainly, the effort was enormous, the aims lofty, the motives sincere. But let’s be blunt: The key issues were identified very early on in the process. It shouldn’t take more than a year of visioning exercises—at a cost of $1.4 million, almost the same as Burros’s fiscal year 2016 annual department budget of $1.7 million—to pinpoint challenges and strengths that have been evident in the arts community for years and years. Privately, people in the arts community have been wondering when all of those lofty goals will translate into action.

The answer wasn’t forthcoming when Burros presided over a town hall meeting at Bunker Hill Community College in March. Remember: The Boston Creates team had promised that the first draft of the actual plan would be released at this meeting. But Burros simply reiterated the five goals (which now include a specific focus on equity). No action items. No timeline. No metrics. No funding stream.

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This week’s Boston Globe also has an article looking at the funding details (or lack thereof) in the draft proposal of the cultural plan:

The authors write that Walsh has made “great strides” when it comes to arts funding, proposing a $2.3 million budget for the Office of Arts and Culture in fiscal year 2017. Nevertheless, they cede that the “possibility of further increases is severely limited. The city faces increasing fiscal pressure from different sources, including statutorily limited revenue tools, rising fixed costs, underfunding of charter school reimbursement, decreasing local aid, and the growing need for a wide range of city services.”

In other words, a push for dedicated arts funding in Boston — already a highly politicized venture as City Hall must sway state legislators — must also compete against other city needs, such as education, housing, and public safety.

Burros avoided discussing funding tactics, such as potential public-private partnerships, in detail last week, saying it was too early. “The creation of the plan and the implementation of the plan are really two different things,” she said, calling the draft a “milestone.” “When we’re at the final plan and we’re announcing implementation in June, there’ll be even more specifics.”

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Link Roundup! – 5/13/16

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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Julie Burros, Boston’s chief of arts and culture, during a Boston Creates town hall in March at Bunker Hill Community College. / Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe/file

Julie Burros, Boston’s chief of arts and culture, during a Boston Creates town hall in March at Bunker Hill Community College. / Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe/file

As reported in this week’s Boston Globe, the draft of the city’s Cultural Plan is now open to public comment — give your thoughts before the end of this weekend!

The draft plan describes five primary goals for arts and culture in the city, including creating “fertile ground” for the arts by encouraging the formation of more funding and venues for arts groups, supporting efforts and policies to keep individual artists in Boston, and cultivating a civic climate where all cultural traditions “are respected, promoted and equitably resourced.” Other overarching goals include integrating the arts throughout the city and creating partnerships to support the city’s arts and culture sector.

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HowlRound’s livestream of the Breaking the Binary symposium is now available to watch:

Breaking the Binary was conceived, organized, and will be hosted by Lisa Evans and SK Kerastas who recognize a strong need for education around this issue in our field—even amongst theatre professionals working from a social justice base. This past year alone there were multiple instances of well-intentioned theaters around the county receiving backlash from trans* communities for their handlings of productions with trans* material. Building on a national movement for equity in our work, SK and Lisa want to provide some holistic support to theatre organizations and artists making this kind of work.

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Link Roundup! – 4/15/16

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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Olivia D'Ambrosio, producing artistic director of Bridge Repertory Theater, reaches for a play among a pile of books in her home office. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)

Olivia D’Ambrosio, producing artistic director of Bridge Repertory Theater, reaches for a play among a pile of books in her home office. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)

The ARTery examines gender parity in theatre, nationally and locally, with some shout-out’s to C1:

Anecdotal observations are backed up by some stark statistics. A study released by the League of Professional Theatre Women in October, focusing on New York City theaters, found that divisions of labor at theater companies appear to be highly gendered. In the past five years, women accounted for 72 percent of the stage managers and assistant stage managers tallied; just 33 percent of directors were female.

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HowlRound posted the text of Todd London’s keynote address from the Association of Performing Arts Service Organizations earlier this month:

The etymology of the word service points in two directions. In Old English, service means religious devotion; in the Old French and Latin it denotes slavery. It’s a big word, service, calling to mind food and kindness, military duty, patriotic honor, and sex. I want to stay with the two-headed root, though: dedication to a life of spirit this way; indenture that. To the right, we have the arts service community’s saint-like fanaticism. To the left, its feelings of unappreciated servitude. Sometimes we serve glorious missions; sometimes we serve the self-serving. “You have given your life to a beautiful cause,” the angel on one shoulder whispers. The devil on the other laughs, “Nobody sees or knows what you do. It’s not worth it. Fuck it. Go make some money.”

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>>STUDIO SESSIONS | WE’RE GONNA DIE REMIX

Date: Wednesday, April 6th
Time: 7:30 – 9:30PM
Location: The Urbano Project (29 Germania Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130)
FREE snacks // $5 drinks

The band’s all here and ready to rock out about the one thing we all have in common … Join the cast of WE’RE GONNA DIE at Urbano in Jamaica Plain for a night of revelry — and a remixed preview performance! Click here to RSVP. 

Link Roundup! – 3/18/16

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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wiggs_Theatre_476388The Boston Globe has a piece about the Performing Arts Facilities Assessment, which is part of the Boston Creates plan:

Formally known as the Performing Arts Facilities Assessment, the online survey is part of a broader facilities study the mayor announced last November following a series of rapid-fire shifts in the city’s performing arts landscape involving the Colonial Theatre, Citi Performing Arts Center, and BU Theatre. Calling the survey an “essential component” of that broader study, city officials said it would allow them to hear directly from Boston’s performing arts community — both performers and those who provide performance and rehearsal venues.

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HowlRound has a post by the Latina/o Theatre Commons about cultural microaggressions in arts reviews:

Unintentional or not, cultural microaggressions in reviews should be called out and examined for the harm they cause to a cultural community and to the field of theatrical criticism. Michael Sommers’ musing that Ropes has “no Latino flavor or content” is part of a larger pattern seen in American theatre criticism in which the reviewer imposes their own mistaken expectations onto an artist of color (see the highlighted sections in: Jeffrey Gantz on Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them by A. Rey Pamatmat, Charles Isherwood on Mala Hierba by Tanya Saracho and Destiny of Desire by Karen Zacarías, and Charles McNulty on Lydia by Octavio Solis). Such reviews suggest that, for instance, playwrights can only write about culturally specific issues or have characters that fit into the reviewer’s assumptions about that cultural community, of which they are not a part.

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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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