Author: Matthew Westphal

The ‘School of Embodiment’: This Is How To Do Good Sex Writing

“[Garth Greenwell] is, a practitioner, with [Lidia] Yuknavitch and a few others, of what we might call the School of Embodiment: a kind of close tracking of sensation and response that we typically assign to poets or sensory neurologists. This doesn’t mean that work by these writers is stylistically similar, only that it seeks meaning in and through the body.” – The Point

Sydney Production Of ‘Hedwig And The Angry Inch’ Called Off After Trans People Protest Casting Of Queer Cis Male

The musical, which was to be one of the centerpieces of the Sydney Festival in January, was postponed and withdrawn from the festival by the producer after a trans non-binary actor launched a social media campaign saying the casting of Hugh Sheridan in the title role “is offensive and damaging to the trans community.” (John Cameron Mitchell, who created and co-wrote the show and originated the part, has said that Hedwig is not a trans character and can be played by anyone.) – The Guardian

James Conlon To Fill In At Baltimore Symphony After Marin Alsop’s Departure

Conlon — music director of Los Angeles Opera since 2006 and previously music director or principal conductor of the Paris Opera, the Cincinnati May Festival, the Ravinia Festival, the RAI National Symphony Orchestra in Turin, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, and the city of Cologne in Germany — will become the Baltimore Symphony’s Artistic Adviser in September of 2021, when Alsop ends her 14-year tenure as music director. Conlon will not be a candidate for the permanent music director post. – Baltimore Business Journal

For The First Time, An NBA Team Engages A Blue-Chip Artist As Creative Director

“In an unprecedented move, multi-hyphenate artist Daniel Arsham will become the creative director of the Cleveland Cavaliers. … His mandate will ultimately include everything from the imagery on the team’s jerseys and home court, to key aspects of its social-media presence, to collaborative initiatives with Cleveland-based artists and other [local] organizations.” – Artnet

Political Theater Moves Into Nonfiction — Is It Drama Or Seminar?

Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me has become “the grandmother of [a] genre” that includes, just this fall, Kristina Wong for Public Office (about Wong’s run for a local commission in Los Angeles), Lessons in Survival (actors repeating, complete with pauses and tics, observations of prominent Black Americans about society), Denis O’Hare’s What the Hell Is a Republic, Anyway? (using the history of the Roman Republic to examine the American one), and Melissa Dunphy’s The Gonzales Cantata (an oratorio setting the 2007 testimony of George W. Bush’s Attorney General before the Senate Judiciary Committee). Jesse Green looks at these pieces and considers “what it means for performers to take public policy as their script at a time when policymakers seem to be taking public performance as theirs.” – The New York Times