Tag Archives: inclusion

Link Roundup! – 7/15/16

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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Arts Museum Teaching has a post about creating empathy and social impact in museums that can and should be applied to theatres as well:

“We are in more urgent need of empathy than ever before.”

This quote has been on my mind often over the past days, weeks, months, and sadly, years—as senseless acts of violence and hatred hit the headlines at a numbing pace of regularity. This past Friday was no different, as we all awoke to the horrific news from Dallas, during a week when the country was already reeling from news of the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. We’re also seeing an alarming spike in hate crimes and xenophobia in the UK after ‘Brexit’ that correspond in unsettling ways to divisive rhetoric and acrimonious tone of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. All of this as we are still processing the Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando, where 49 individuals lost their lives.

I think in moments like these, it’s important for museums—and the people who work for them—to pause and reflect on the roles that we serve within our communities. Yes, museums are institutions that hold collections. But they can also serve a powerful role with our communities as active spaces for connection and coming together, for conversation and dialogue, for listening and sharing. Museums can be spaces for individual stories and community voices. They can be a space for acknowledging and reflecting on differences, and for bridging divides. They can be spaces for growth, struggle, love, and hope.

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The Nonprofit with Balls blog, following a week of tragic news from around the country, has some good reminders for folks working in the arts:

But we can’t give up hope. Despite the suffering and death we witness each day, our work is making the world better. I see it all the time. I am motivated every day by learning about the amazing programs you make possible, and by getting to know the kind of people you are and the kind you inspire others to be: thoughtful and compassionate and hilarious, full of hope and love and joy and creativity and the belief in a world that is possible. Our community is becoming stronger and more beautiful because of you and all you bring to it, even during difficult days when none of us know the answers. We must keep trying, even when we don’t know all the right words or all the right actions, even when we make mistakes.

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Link Roundup! – 4/1/16

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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Devlin’s set for the musical “American Psycho” at the Almeida Theatre, in London. The production is transferring to Broadway. Courtesy Robbie Jack / Corbis

Set designer Es Devlin and her work is featured in The New Yorker this week:

In theatre terms, this is the age of Es Devlin. She is theatre’s postmodern expert, and has an instinctive sense of how Shakespeare and opera and fashion and pop concerts might draw from the same dark web of psychological information. Each of her designs is an attack on the notion that a set is merely scenery. She is in demand because she can enter the psychic ether of each production and make it glow with significance. She told me, “A stage setting is not a background, it is an environment”—something that directors and actors can respond to. “Sometimes what these people want is a liberator, someone who might encourage them to defy gravity.”

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Vox reports on the recent controversy about Hamilton‘s casting notice:

As it has everywhere else, diversity has become a flashpoint conversation on Broadway over the past few years. And Hamilton‘s approach to its subject matter — using a blatantly diverse cast to reclaim historical narratives traditionally populated by white actors — has become so iconic that these days on Broadway, “Hamilton casting” is a commonly discussed production strategy. The casting notice recently posted to the show’s website (and later edited) originally explicitly sought nonwhite actors to audition for the lead roles, a way of subverting theater’s typical white-as-default casting bias.

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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

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! – 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 – 11/6/15

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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Photograph: Mark Douet

The Guardian has an article asking organizations to consider how they impact the local communities that don’t necessarily see their work:

Every theatregoer has an example of a play that changed their life to a greater or lesser extent. However, the real question I reckon theatres need to ask themselves is not whether what they do impacts on those who go to their shows but whether what goes on in their building really has a significant impact for those who have never stepped inside it? This is not about an individual’s response and relationship to a particular show in a particular building, but about a play and a venue’s relationship to the community at large.

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The LA Times has a story summing up the recent stats surrounding theatre donors and attendance:

Theaters are making adjustments by trying new approaches, she said, including more emphasis on shows geared toward children and parents.

The report said that productions for young audiences were “a bright spot” in which attendance grew 12.9% between 2010 and 2014. But childrens’ series accounted for just 3% of total attendance at the 118 theaters surveyed over the five years.

“More theaters would benefit from producing high-quality programming for multigenerational audiences,” Eyring said. “Not only because the numbers tend to be on the rise, but it’s a way of engaging the next generation of theatergoers.”

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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! – 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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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

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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