Tag Archives: diversity

Link Roundup! – 1/16/16

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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Violet Newman is one of five young girls who make up the cast of Employee of the Year, one of the plays being featured at this year’s Under the Radar Festival. Maria Baranova/Courtesy of the Public Theater

NPR has a story about the Under The Radar festival and how the co-artistic directors of the festival approach their programming:

Meiyin Wang and Mark Russell, co-artistic directors of Under the Radar, crisscross the globe every year trying to answer a single question. “In this day,” Russell says, “when there’s all sorts of great ways of telling stories and everyone’s got a camera … we’re looking at: Why do theater now?”

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The LA Times interviewed the creator of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag after the Academy Award nominations were announced this past week:

Thursday morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for this year’s coveted golden statue. For the second year in a row, not one nominee in the four major acting categories is a person of color. Furthermore, people of color are virtually absent from all the other categories as well.

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Link Roundup! – 12/4/15

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, John R. Lewis, Catherine Castellanos and Tristan Cunningham during a rehearsal of California Shakespeare Theater’s production of “The Tempest.” Credit Alessandra Mello

The New York Times ran a feature on Ten Thousand Things and their radical approach to programming theatre for people on the margins of society:

“When you say you do theater for people in prisons and homeless shelters,” Ms. Hensley conceded, “people’s first reaction is: ‘That must be really awful theater. It must be skits about staying off drugs.’” It took a while, she said, to convince mainstream audiences, critics and funders that the experiences of those nontraditional audiences “mirror the extremes of the characters in the way that most upper-class audiences just don’t.”

Born in Iowa and educated at Princeton and U.C.L.A., Ms. Hensley, 57, quickly grew disillusioned with the idea of climbing the regional theater ladder. Living in Los Angeles in the 1980s, she observed the chasm between haves and have-nots and concluded that there was an audience hungry for high-quality theater that respected their humanity.

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The Art Works blog has a post about the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s exploration of how integrating the arts can benefit STEM fields:

Many examples exist (some were shared at the workshop) of scientific and technological endeavors that have benefited from artistic practice or pedagogy. “Design thinking” leaps to mind, but so do arts integration with medical training, or artists who help scientists visualize their data, especially to communicate a public health message. Indeed, scientists at the workshop—and at similar events I’ve attended in the past year—readily acknowledge that the infusion of the arts and humanities could awaken in scientists and engineers a capacity for emotional connections, creativity, and complex problem-solving that might lie dormant without such exposure.

My question: if we strive for full integration, then what new “habits of mind” (as one workshop participant called it today) should be cultivated by STEM-related training for arts/humanities students? Or is the relationship not in fact bi-directional?

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Link Roundup! – 11/20/15

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 Duchess of Malfi with Erika Miranda and Jalen Gilbert. Photo by Michael Brosilow

In HowlRound, Lavina Jadhwani examines what it means to be a color conscious director:

Since I first wrote about color-conscious casting, I’ve learned—by directing my own productions as well as casting plays that I did not direct—that color-conscious casting doesn’t guarantee a color-conscious production. Diverse casting is a cause; a more challenging and/or inclusive conversation is not inherently an effect.

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Boston Magazine continues the coverage of Boston’s arts space issues, with a particularly pointed look at Mayor Walsh’s participation in finding solutions:

Compare Walsh’s response with what happened in 2003, when the city faced another crisis in the Theater District. Back then, the Wang Center for the Performing Arts—now the Citi Performing Arts Center, the same one Citi is pulling out of—summarily booted the Boston Ballet’s beloved production of The Nutcracker to make room for a carpetbagging production of New York’s Rockettes in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. The next morning, Mayor Thomas Menino was on the phone trying to secure the Hynes Convention Center as a new home for the ballet. (Thankfully, that never happened—right sentiment, absolutely wrong venue.) Menino worked behind the scenes for months to seal a deal for the ballet, which leased the newly restored Boston Opera House at affordable rates and eventually took its toe shoes and tutus there for its entire season.

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Link Roundup! – 11/13/15

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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Roxane Gay’s post in The New Republic does a good job detailing the recent student activism at Mizzou and Yale, as well as detailing the larger cultural forces behind the protests:

There is often condescension in examinations of these supposedly fragile young people who don’t understand the real world. College students do, however, understand the real world, because they aren’t just students: They do not abandon their class background or sexuality or race or ethnicity when they matriculate, and their issues do not vanish when they register for courses. We should not dismiss their valid concerns. To do so, to invalidate their experiences, would be to invalidate their diversity and ignore their hurt. American colleges and universities have always been incubators for the privileged, and the only people who continue to operate there with some guarantee of physical and emotional safety are white, heterosexual men. Is it any wonder, then, that students are demanding a basic guarantee of safety?

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WGBH Open Studio will be airing an episode tonight specifically about the recent changes in the Boston theatre landscape related to lack of space and resources. You can check out a preview HERE, and tune in at 8:30pm to catch the rest.

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#StaffChat: Diverse Hiring Practices

#StaffChat posts feature issues, articles, and news that the C1 team discusses as part of our weekly all-staff meeting. We’d love to hear your thoughts too — hit us up on Facebook or Twitter!

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This week we are exploring ways to make our company more inclusive and how to ensure we create a staff that is diverse and representative of our city. Here are a few articles we’ll be using to prompt our conversations:

— Thoughts on Diversity Part 2. Why Diversity is Difficult. via Medium
— Has ‘Diversity’ Lost Its Meaning? via New York Times Magazine
— You Want A Diverse Theatre? Prove it. via HowlRound

Illustration by Javier Jaén

The first article from Medium, written by former Twitter Engineering Manager Leslie Miley, is an interesting case study. Although his essay gives insight into workplace diversity issues in the tech world and not in an arts context, a lot of the problems at Twitter are present in workplaces of all kinds. In the piece, Miley details some of the problematic approaches to diversity he witnessed at Twitter:

Personally, a particularly low moment was having my question about what specific steps Twitter engineering was taking to increase diversity answered by the Sr. VP of Eng at the quarterly Engineering Leadership meeting. When he responded with “diversity is important, but we can’t lower the bar.” I then realized I was the only African-American in Eng leadership.

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Why wouldn’t there be a concerted effort to invite the few African American employees to these events? Is it because, as one colleague told me, “they forgot that you were black?” Is a prerequisite to working in tech as a minority that one is expected to, in the eyes of the majority, sublimate your racial identity to ensure a cultural fit? In attempting to achieve the appropriate level of blackness that makes me palatable to tech, had I unwittingly erased the importance of maintaining my blackness in a sea of white faces?

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Link Roundup! – 10/23/15

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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Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff

The Boston Globe has another article about local theatre space, this one addressing the role of Julie Burros on the issue:

But the lack of a robust public response from City Hall to recent developments has raised eyebrows. Is Burros just a figurehead, and how committed is Walsh to the arts?

“This is an opportunity for him to show he is a champion of the arts,” said Matt Wilson, the executive director of MASSCreative, a statewide advocacy group that made arts an issue in the Boston mayoral race. “We hope he seizes it.”

What people keep referencing is what Walsh’s predecessor Tom Menino did. Over two decades, Menino used his bully pulpit to get private and public partners to restore aging theaters, including the Paramount, Modern, and Opera House, which helped jumpstart the revitalization of Downtown Crossing.

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This post from The Guardian asks what theatre spaces might be like if they operated more like town squares:

But there are significant differences between the civic function of the theatres of almost 60 years ago and that of theatres in the 21st century. The days when every town thought it should have a theatre as a matter of pride, and to demonstrate how cultured it is, are long gone. Often, increasingly cash-strapped local authorities see their theatres as a drain on resources rather than an asset, and, quite rightly, they don’t see that what people really want and need is yet another revival of Private Lives. So how can those in the arts create new or better relationships with local authorities and other local partners, to ensure that the arts stay on the agenda and remain part of the conversation about who we are and how we live together?

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Link Roundup! – 9/25/15

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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Joy Mead’s great article about unconscious bias for American Theatre is a must-read:

Implicit biases can lead us to interpret plays by female and nonwhite writers through the lens of our stereotypes, which can impair our ability to see them accurately. Scientists who study cognition have found that stereotypes prime us with expectations and assumptions, and then confirmation bias motivates us to focus on anything that confirms our preconceptions and overlook the rest.

There are regular examples of this dynamic in theatre. For example, in a recent Boston Globe review of A. Rey Pamatmat’s Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them at Company One Theatre, critic Jeffrey Gantz wished the Filipino-American characters’ “culture [was] on display” and complained “it seems odd they have no racial problems at school.” Gantz assumed the playwright’s identity was the most relevant context for his work and looked so hard for the play he expected that he missed the one actually before him. Playwright Mike Lew calls this phenomenon the “anthropological gaze,” noting that it can be a serious obstacle to production. “How do you distinguish the singularity of your voice when your voice isn’t really being heard to begin with?” Lew asks.

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Speaking of A. Rey Pamatmat, his recent 2amt post is also another good read about representation on stage:

If you’re telling me the only way to preserve an enduring work of art is by performing it in a way that is racist and outdated, then you’re telling me that white supremacy is so central to the work that it’s not an enduring piece of art. Enduring art can be revisited and reconceived to speak to people of a different time and in a different context than the ones in which it was created — you know, it can endure. Frankly, I don’t believe white supremacy is so central to the works of Gilbert and Sullivan or to The Mikado specifically that it’s reworking would mean nothing of value would be left in the show. It could be produced in a way that speaks to the broader audience of people that make up New York theatregoers. The most important thing to preserve in The Mikado is not the fact that it was conceived from ideas of white supremacy in a time and place of unchallenged white supremacy. The important things to preserve are catchy tunes and some poo jokes.

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Link Roundup! – 8/28/15

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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Caleen Sinnette Jennings, left, and Karen Zacarias are two of the playwrights whose works are being presented during the Women’s Voices Theater Festival. (Kirstin Franko)

The Washington Post has a feature about the upcoming Women’s Voices Theatre Festival in D.C:

That throat-clearing you hear is the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, an unprecedented wave of world premiere plays by women that has already begun to take over Washington’s stages. It’s a coordinated attack on the nagging gender gap that no city has tried before, with 46 theaters offering 52 full productions of new works by women.

“As far as I know,” says festival co-producer Nan Barnett, “there’s never been anything this intensely focused, in this kind of time period, on full productions.”

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Vu Lee’s post on equitable funding on the Nonprofit with Balls blog has some good insight into the funding process and what makes grant applications accessible to organizations of all levels:

For the past few years, everyone has been talking about Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Cultural Competency. This is good. But when these things do not actually come with profound changes in systems and processes, they can actually cause more harm. Equity, in particular, has been a shiny new concept adopted by many funders. A basic tenet of equity in our line of work is that the communities that are most affected by societal problems are leading the efforts to address these challenges. And yet, many foundations’ application process is deeply inequitable, leaving behind the people and communities who are most affected by the injustices we as a sector are trying to address.

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Link Roundup! – 7/31/15

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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Two students from the creative:connection project collaborate on a piece of music. Photograph: Create

The Guardian has a story about how theatre and the arts can connect youth with disabilities with non-disabled kids:

National statistics show that 65% of people avoid disabled people because they don’t know how to act around them, while 67% say they feel uncomfortable when talking to a disabled person. A survey by Scope and Mumsnet also found that four in 10 parents said their disabled child rarely or never had the opportunity to socialise with non-disabled children.

This project has been designed to bring disabled and non-disabled students together to create friendships and a shared understanding. Not all communication is verbal – which the creative arts are a great way to show. By encouraging these young people to work together, listen to one another and explore communication through sound, music, art and movement, we’re breaking down some of those social barriers and strengthening bonds between disabled and non-disabled people.

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This past month, the Globe and Mail has been running a series following the theatre program of a Canadian high school as they rehearse and mount a musical. Parts 1-5 are online now:

After a decade of writing about the art form he loves, critic J. Kelly Nestruck found himself in a moment of crisis. Theatre, it seemed, had grown elitist and out of touch with the country it was supposed to entertain. To renew his faith, he went back to where it all began: high school. But can a group of teens enduring their own struggles prove that theatre is still worth fighting for?

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Link Roundup! – 7/10/15

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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CityLab’s recent report on the Martin Prosperity Institute’s project to map connections between cities, inequality, and creative economies around the world is fascinating and has some great maps of the data:

Capitalism is in transition. It’s pulling away from its previous industrial model to a new one based on creativity and knowledge. In place of the natural resources and large-scale industries that powered the economies of previous centuries, economic growth today turns on knowledge, innovation, and talent. In a new report released Wednesday, my Martin Prosperity Institute colleagues Charlotta Mellander and Karen King and I evaluate 139 nations worldwide on their ability to compete and prosper in this new, creativity-powered knowledge economy.

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Buzzfeed’s post highlighting the work of Dylan Marron and his Tumblr Every Single Word is a stark look at how far the film industry still has to go before POC are represented equally on screen.

The Every Single Word series urges people to question why movies with such universal themes so frequently feature white protagonists. Marron wants the audience to come up with their own conclusions about the lack of diversity in Hollywood after watching the clips. “I present these cuts without comment and without embellishment,” he said. “As the volume of videos keeps getting bigger, a pattern will emerge. When you lay out patterns in front of people, they speak much louder than any megaphone rant.”

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