Tag Archives: diveristy

Link Roundup! – 4/8/16

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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Playwright Kirsten Greenidge will be joining the Company One staff as a playwright-in-residence as part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s National Playwright Residency Program (NPRP) — we are so thrilled!

The purpose of embedding residents into theaters of varying sizes and locales is to provide playwrights the time and space to write without distraction, to offer playwrights regular access to the theaters’ extensive resources and to their artistic leaders, and to encourage institutional practices at theaters that are more inclusive of artists’ ideas and needs. The expectation is that these arrangements will foster the creation and production of theatrically ambitious plays that lend themselves to more effective engagement with audiences and communities.

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Forbes is doing a series of posts about representation, including articles on Broadway’s lack of diversity and how the Tony Awards compare to the Oscars:

Both the Tonys and the Oscars recognize white artists by an overwhelming majority. Whites make up 95.5% of all Tony nominees, and 96.4% of all Oscar nominees, a difference of only .9% between them. This doesn’t take into account when people were nominated, however – minority recognition is becoming more frequent as the years go on. The results also don’t account for the Tonys starting two decades after the Oscars. But we did the math on that, too: if we ignore the first 20 years of Academy Awards, the numbers would be even closer together, with the Tonys being only .43% more diverse.

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Link Roundup! – 2/26/16

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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The playwright Kirsten Greenidge, whose “Baltimore” is a beneficiary of the Big Ten New Play Initiative. Credit Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

The New York Times highlights C1 playwright alum Kirsten Greenidge in a story about the Big Ten New Play Initiative:

Giving more such practice to female undergraduates is a major objective of the program that commissioned “Baltimore” and is rolling it out in productions at several universities this academic year. The Big Ten New Play Initiative — yes, schools better known for football or basketball are behind it — has begun seeding the canon with a fresh crop of works by women.

Naomi Iizuka, Rebecca Gilman and Madeleine George are the other playwrights tapped so far for the project, which is intended in part to address one of American theater’s most pressing concerns: the need to put more plays by women onstage. But the initiative goes a significant step further. Each script is bound by just one rule, said Alan MacVey, who oversees the $10,000 commissions: It must include at least six substantial roles for young women.

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A group of 27 women and people of color talk about what it’s like to work in Hollywood for a huge feature for the New York Times:

In 1985, I’m sitting in the casting office of a major studio. The head of casting said, “I couldn’t put you in a Shakespeare movie, because they didn’t have black people then.” He literally said that. I told that casting director: “You ever heard of Othello? Shakespeare couldn’t just make up black people. He saw them.” I started carrying around a postcard of Rubens’s “Studies of the Head of a Negro.” The casting director actually was very kind to me. He referred me to my first agent.

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Link Roundup! – 9/4/15

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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From left, Carlo Albán, Jack Willis, Kevin Kenerly, Terri McMahon, Kimberly Scott and K. T. Vogt in “Sweat.” Credit Jenny Graham

This New York Times story on Oregon Shakespeare Festival highlights their new work program and diversity initiatives:

As for diversifying the audience and drawing in more minorities, progress has been made, but it’s a slow process. At some shows I have seen, like Ms. Nottage’s “Sweat,” I couldn’t help but notice that the people onstage were far more ethnically diverse than those in the audience.

“I know that the largest diversity comes from our student audiences,” Mr. Rauch said, while admitting that the theater has a ways to go in terms of reaching out to ethnically diverse audiences. To that end, he and other members of the staff created an Audience Development Manifesto in 2010 meant to address the problem. This document noted that at the time minorities — aside from students — represented just 10 percent of the festival’s audiences; since then it has moved up to 16 percent. It was in 2013 that the company made its website bilingual.

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This Guardian post looks at the rise in visibility and training of artists with disabilities in the UK, and ways to continue making theatre accessible:

I want disabled artists to be able to make work that matters to them and connects with an audience, however that audience is defined. I want to see personal stories, work that addresses the experiences of being disabled, and work that’s just anything a disabled artist wants to make. I want to see very divergent points of view – from those who want to celebrate being different and move away from any sense of disability, to those who absolutely identify as disabled.

I would like to suggest a view that draws on the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, where something can appear to be both itself and its opposite. Sometimes disability arts might need to be seen as a single entity – a movement rich in diversity. At other times it might need separating out, for example when delving into the aesthetics of the work of some learning disabled artists, where the discourse might need to develop differently than that which has already evolved around work made by some artists with physical and/or sensory disabilities.

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