Tag Archives: gender

C1 PlayLab: What We’re Reading – Vol. 1

We recently kicked off the newest iteration of C1 PlayLab, and in the coming months, we’ll be using some of our time during our PlayLab Master Classes to discuss big ideas and current issues that are relevant to working playwrights. This month we are exploring the themes of Character and Identity — here are a few pieces of writing that will serve as a springboard for our conversation during this month’s PlayLab session.

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My Parents Were Tiger People: christopher oscar peña chats about writing race with A. Rey Pamatmat via HowlRound

A. Rey Pamatmat is our PlayLab guest this month, and this conversation is a great one to get us thinking about how one’s personal identity and experience can impact a play, as well as what it means to craft characters from a variety of backgrounds:

People need to be okay with labels evolving and redefining themselves. I also wish plays were experienced on their own. The context of the writer’s identity is totally exciting…afterward. Let that add to the conversation, not be it.

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 Artistic Authority Series – Part One and Part Two via Jacqueline Lawton’s blog.

In these two posts, playwrights Kia Corthron, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Kristoffer Diaz, Marcus Gardley, and several others all offer their thoughts on the ethics of writing characters from a different racial or ethnic identity than one’s self.

Are we ethically entitled to write outside of our own ethnicity (however we define any of those loaded terms)? If we do, are there any ground rules? Are we obligated to educate ourselves (even minimally) about a culture before assuming the authority to give voice to characters of that culture? Or is any such suggestion a hindrance to the creative process, at worst tantamount to censorship?

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Link Roundup! – 8/21/15

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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Upstream Arts offers a class to women with cognitive disabilities on how to negotiate relationships and avoid becoming victims of abuse. The group engages in singing, dancing and acting as they learn about sex, hygiene, body parts and self-advocacy. Judy Griesedieck for MPR News

Upstream Arts offers a class to women with cognitive disabilities on how to negotiate relationships and avoid becoming victims of abuse. The group engages in singing, dancing and acting as they learn about sex, hygiene, body parts and self-advocacy. Judy Griesedieck for MPR News

MPR News has a feature about Upstream Arts, an organization that uses arts and creativity to teach women with disabilities about health, sex, and relationships:

Despite the often tragic stories, the women laughed as they used theater, painting, movement and song to build their social skills and their sexual vocabulary. Most of the women were familiar with words for male and female body parts, but when asked if they’d heard the word “orgasm,” the room fell silent. No one knew what it meant. So Thune explained it to them.

“They’re adults,” she said later. “And it’s OK to have love. They should have that in their life.”

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Onstage has a story highlighting how poorly many theatres are dealing with issues around sexual assault, weight, and family leave:

For the past couple of years, incidents involving discrimination, domestic abuse and sexual harassment of women have been, thankfully, thrust into the public eye.  Whether it’s the ongoing incidents involving professional athletes, sexual assaults at an epidemic rate on college campuses or the debate over equal pay, these problems are finally being addressed on a national level.

However, while many organizations and industries are making leaps and bounds with how they treat women, the theatre industry still lacks progress in this area with some theaters taking egregious steps backward.

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Link Roundup! – 6/12/15

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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Fun Home, the musical based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel of the same name, won big at this year’s Tony Awards. It was a solid night for women in general this year, with women winning in almost every category they were nominated in, as noted by FiveThirtyEight:

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Lisa Kron’s acceptance speech for winning Best Book (Fun Home), which was frustratingly not aired on the live telecast, spoke to the variety in this year’s Broadway season. Her fantastic speech is below and well worth watching:

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The pool party in McKinney, Texas that resulted in another viral video showing the police force’s unnecessary use of violence is a potent reminder of the fraught history behind public swimming pools:

Campaigns by civil rights groups like the NAACP to integrate public pools often turned very, very ugly. “Groups for and against segregation threw rocks and tomatoes at one another, swung bats and fists, and even stabbed and shot at each other,” Wiltse wrote. Even after Brown v. Board of Education ostensibly desegregated America’s schools in 1955, a federal judge sided with Baltimore’s pro-segregation argument that pools “were more sensitive than schools.” (That decision was later overturned.)

When the group of white and black integrationists refused to leave the motel's pool, this man dived in and cleared them out. All were arrested. Horace Cort/AP


When the group of white and black integrationists refused to leave the motel’s pool, this man dived in and cleared them out. All were arrested. Horace Cort/AP

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Link Roundup! – 6/5/15

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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Julissa Rodriguez - Gabriel Garcia Roman

Julissa Rodriguez – Gabriel Garcia Roman

NPR’s feature of photographer Gabriel Garcia Roman’s portraits of queer people of color, inspired by fresco paintings of saints, is so awesome:

The photo series, called “Queer Icons,” evokes the colorful, religious artwork that Roman grew up with. “Because I grew up Catholic in a Mexican community in Chicago, my first introduction to art was religious art,” he says…And because Roman’s subjects are activists and artists who do good for the community, “I wanted to represent them as saints,” he says. He also wanted to capture their pride and their strength. “I wanted them to be warriors — that’s why a lot of them are looking straight at the camera, saying ‘Here I am, and I’m not going to hide.'”

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This Guardian article asks an important question: how would you explain theatre to somebody who’s never been?

There’s been lots of talk recently around the idea that theatre sometimes feels too much like an exclusive club for those who are in the know. Questions are being asked about why so many people think that it’s not for them – something I touched upon in a blog earlier this year. Figures from the Warwick Commission make worrying reading: the wealthiest, best educated and least ethnically diverse 8% of society make up nearly half of live music audiences and a third of theatregoers and gallery visitors…Perhaps what we don’t talk about enough is the pleasure of theatre, how it makes us feel, and why those of us who go frequently love it so much.

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Link Roundup! – 2/6/15

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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Over at HowlRound, Yvette Heyliger wrote a post about her petition calling for new legislation mandating that nonprofit arts organizations and institutions receiving tax-payer dollars must allocate an equitable portion of that funding to women artists:

The 2013 Women Stage the World Parade in Manhattan’s Theatre District. Photo by Jeff Colen Photography.

The 2013 Women Stage the World Parade in Manhattan’s Theatre District. Photo by Jeff Colen Photography.

This petition is one way to create a seat at the table of artistic opportunity. In 2015, women continue to find themselves at the children’s table, sitting on chairs too small, eating from mix-matched dishes and drinking from plastic cups. The petition is simple and straightforward. With only initials and perhaps states as identifying markers, all are welcome to sign. If the petition receives 100,000 signatures by February 6, 2015, an official response from the White House will be issued.

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Playwright Marcus Gardley has a great interview on the Art Works blog about his creative process and the way he views playwriting as social activism:

GARDLEY: I consider myself an activist, and I couldn’t do it if I wasn’t hoping that the work would somehow spark a dialogue, or somehow cause people to look at social issues differently. What I intend for [the plays] to do, is cause conversation afterward. From that conversation, [I hope] people are not only inspired to see more theater, but also inspired to do things in their community, so that the work is actually, literally causing a spark for change.

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Link Roundup! – 1/16/15

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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Three new reports from the NEA were recently released and explore the relationship between arts and the economy and detail how audiences attend and participate in the arts. Check them out, data nerds!

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Everyday Feminism has a great post about what intersectionality means and why it’s so important. It’s a great tool for anyone wondering how to explain inclusive feminism and apply it day-to-day.

It makes sense in many ways that those of us with identity privilege would have a harder time including in our feminism those who are oppressed. Privilege conceals itself from those who have it, and it’s a lot easier to focus on the ways that we are marginalized or oppressed.

But without an intersectional lens, our movements cannot be truly anti-oppressive because it is not, in fact, possible to tease apart the oppressions that people are experiencing. Racism for women of color cannot be separated from their gendered oppression. A Trans person with a disability cannot choose which part of their identity is most in need of liberation.

Yet there is regularly confusion about what intersectionality really is.

intersectionality

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The Kilroys: THE LIST

This is a list of the 46 most recommended plays written by female playwrights. The Kilroys asked 127 theatre professionals from around the country to recommend the best female authored plays they have encountered in the past year. The list in its entirety has 300 nominated plays that were eligible. You can see the entire list here.

This is an interview that Polly Carl of HowlRound did with members of The Kilroys regarding “The List.” Read the interview here.

Even the New York Times picked up on the list here.

The Kilroys are a group of LA-based playwrights and producers who are tired of just talking about gender parity and “were ready to act.”