Tag Archives: technology

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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Link Roundup! – 12/18/15

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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Lester Hellman Shamos, Megan Cramer, Martin McWatters, Lena Hellman, and Lindsay Torrey at SPACE on Ryder Farm in Brewster, N.Y. (Photo by Talya Chalef)

Lester Hellman Shamos, Megan Cramer, Martin McWatters, Lena Hellman, and Lindsay Torrey at SPACE on Ryder Farm in Brewster, N.Y. (Photo by Talya Chalef)

American Theatre has a piece about companies that are including amenities for work/life balance, like on-site child care, into their operations:

Creating a supportive work enviornment can address both old dilemmas and new social realities. Jobs in the nonprofit theatre can be less lucrative than jobs in other sectors, observes Amanda White Thietje, managing director of Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theatre. At Mixed Blood, she says, “The salaries do not match the corporate headquarters nearby.” So it behooves the company to consider, as she puts it, “What are the ways we make sure [employees] feel rested and appreciated and have time with their families?” Such a strategy can have the added bonus of cutting down on employee turnover, which is expensive and disruptive for a company, she notes.

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The Boston Globe highlighted the recent NEA grant awards, including the one Company One received for a new Kris Diaz project:

The piece, using the rivalry between the Celtics legend and Wilt Chamberlain to highlight issues of race, class, and segregation in Boston, was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as one of a series of plays addressing US history.

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Link Roundup! – 7/17/15

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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Lisa Kron, left, and Jeanine Tesori accepting a Tony Award for best score, for their collaboration on "Fun Home." Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Lisa Kron, left, and Jeanine Tesori accepting a Tony Award for best score, for their collaboration on “Fun Home.” Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The New York Times has a story about The Count — a study that tracks the number of female-written productions that are done each year.

Overseen by the playwrights Julia Jordan and Marsha Norman, the study, called “The Count,” is to be updated each year. Until now, besides a handful of older analyses, it had been unclear just how many female playwrights were seeing their work staged, according to Ms. Jordan.

“We wanted to create a baseline,” she said, “and to document the change.”

Judging from the numbers, the picture for women is rosier than a decade ago. A 2002 report from the New York State Council on the Arts found that 17 percent of productions across the country had female playwrights. According to the new report, that figure now sits at 22 percent.

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The ongoing conversation about the way theatre critics handle race in their reviews is continued in this article by Diep Tran for American Theatre, which gives four ways critics can be less racist:

We theatre journalists are a marginalized minority ourselves: overworked, underpaid, and constantly fighting to justify our existence. We’re not all that different from the artists we claim to love. And if we really love theatre, then we need to find a better way to talk about the diverse people who make it. Because right now, we—whose job it is to tell the truth—are failing at it.

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Link Roundup! – 5/8/15

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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A 60-foot community mural was created outside of the Prudential Center on Memorial Day last year. Photo: Globe file

A 60-foot community mural was created outside of the Prudential Center on Memorial Day last year. Photo: Globe file

The Boston Globe recently highlighted some national trends in city development and looked at how arts and culture can be integrated into the development happening in Boston:

More cities have undertaken cultural planning to shape a coherent approach to advancing the arts. Cultural planning looks different in each place, as it should. Yet, when we consider the cities where cultural planning has been most effective, we consistently find an ambitious, inclusive, communitywide effort to develop a shared vision and blueprint for arts and culture — one that prioritizes, coordinates, and aligns public and private resources to strengthen cultural vitality long term.

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infographic-3-1024x1024Create Equity looked at the barriers that prevent people from participating in cultural and artistic activities if they are from lower socioeconomic and educational backgrounds:

Data from the survey shows that fewer low-income individuals attend pop and rock concerts than their wealthier counterparts, and significantly fewer of them attend visual arts festivals and craft fairs. In fact, people with lower incomes and less education are less likely to read books, go to the movies, take an arts class, play a musical instrument, sing, dance socially, take or edit photographs, paint, make scrapbooks, engage in creative writing, or make crafts. All told, the data paints a consistent portrait of lower participation by low-SES adults in a breathtaking range of visual, performing, literary, and film activities…When large numbers of people face barriers to participating in the arts in the way they might want to, we know that we’re missing opportunities to improve people’s lives in concrete and meaningful ways.

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Link Roundup! – 4/3/15

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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Shaun Blugh, 30, has been appointed the City of Boston’s first-ever chief diversity officer. Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/Globe staff

Shaun Blugh, 30, has been appointed the City of Boston’s first-ever chief diversity officer. Photo: Suzanne Kreiter/Globe staff

The Boston Globe has a story about the mayor’s new Office of Diversity and their efforts to make Boston workforces more equitable:

A glimpse at the city’s roughly 15,000 full-time employees underscores their challenge. In a city in which people of color constitute 53 percent of the population, Boston’s municipal workforce remains 61 percent white, according to records released to the Globe under the state’s open records law. Women slightly outnumber men at City Hall, but on average are paid 7 percent less than their male counterparts.

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The Non Profit with Balls blog has a post up about “Fakequity” — a term he coined for organizations that claim to be interested in creating equity, but don’t participate in active change:

So how does this apply to Equity? People seem to think that forming an equity committee, talking about equity, sending staff and board to trainings, “listening” to communities, conducting research and gathering data, and adding terminologies to websites and brochures are sufficient to achieving equity. But no, these things are necessary, but not sufficient. When we just talk about Equity and go no further, we are guilty of Fakequity. I’ve seen many well-meaning organizations and foundations spend years talking about equity, congratulate themselves on it, and don’t do anything else that would actually help to bring about Equity.

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Arts Professional: Live Streaming Explored

This article from Arts Professional, a UK magazine, explains how live streaming theatrical performances creates new opportunities in areas such as audience engagement, marketing, fundraising, education and brand awareness. Read the article here.

American Theatre Magazine: The Technical Answer

An American Theatre Magazine article, The Technical Answer, talks about the advances in technology in theatre and how (or if) we are training the next generation of theatre makers in this new technology. Jared Mezzocchi (Astro Boy and the God of Comics) is interviewed in the article and talks about the multimedia class he teaches at the University of Maryland. Read the article here.