Meeting The Real-Life Diplomat At The Heart Of The ‘M. Butterfly’ Story

Stage director Vincent Lancisi and his wife were vacationing in France a couple months before he was to begin work on a revival of David Henry Hwang’s Pulitzer-Prize winning play. One day, their guide/driver casually said, “I was a driver for a famous man. There is a movie about him with Jeremy Irons, called M. Butterfly.” Within an hour, Lancisi was on the phone with Bernard Boursicot; within a month, he and his lead actor were visiting Boursicot at his nursing home in Brittany.”

Here’s The World’s Blackest Pigment That Working Artists Can Actually Buy And Use

Singularity Black absorbs just a bit less light than Vantablack, whose creation was announced last year. But the makers of Vantablack (notoriously) sold exclusive rights to its use to sculptor Anish Kapoor, and it’s not even in a fully usable form yet, while Singularity Black is already available for purchase by any interested customer.

Controversial Director Of Bolshoi’s Banned ‘Nureyev’ Is Trapped In Russia, His Passport Confiscated

Kirill Serebrennikov, artistic director of the cutting-edge theatre The Gogol Centre, saw his travel documents seized when he was detained and his apartment was raided in May in what authorities said was an investigation into embezzlement of state funds. Last month, his staging for the Bolshoi ballet of a full-length work about the life of Rudolf Nureyev was abruptly cancelled a few days before opening night.

SoundCloud Saved By Last-Minute $170M Investment

Rumors of the site’s imminent collapse had been floating for weeks, and 40% of its staffers were laid off in early July. “The [new] funding comes from two firms, The Raine Group – which also holds stakes in Vice Media and C3 Presents, the owner of Lollapalooza – and Temesek Holdings, a state-run Singaporean holding company with interests in several state-run Chinese companies. In addition, co-founder Alex Ljung will be stepping down as CEO, but remaining chairman.”

How To Encourage Canadian Culture? Take Off The Handcuffs

“We must stop handcuffing our writers and producers by forcing them to comply with some national mandate to tell Canadian stories. We are Canadian, and our stories will inherently reflect our sense of humour, our drama and our individuality. I can’t tell you how many pitches I have been to where some development executive measures the Canadian quotient word by word like a recipe for poutine.”

UK’s Labour Party Says Arts Council Should Only Fund Arts Organizations That Pay Living Wage

Acting Up’, commissioned by Shadow Culture Minister Tom Watson, notes that although 33% of the population is working class, just 16% of actors are working class, and only 7% of the performing arts workforce is from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background. The report presents the findings of an inquiry that focused on the barriers to working in the performing arts at every career stage, in order to find “political solutions to knock them down”.

The Brouhaha Over The Koch Brothers Funding ‘Wonder Woman’ Reflects Entertainment’s Biggest Problem

Uh, y’all, the system is capitalism, and that means that “the moral ballyhooing or furious condemnation of mainstream art and pop culture often seems undercut by the very fact that, presumably, the process by which most of these works were made will inevitably play into inequality-perpetuating systems in ways that have just as critical — and in some ways, a more direct and immediate — impact on the world as what we’re seeing onscreen.”

Here’s How Theatres Can Welcome And Work With Professional Artists With Disabilities

This is practical info. First of all, silence around accessibility is not going to help. Second, plan ahead. “If you want to produce a play that has three Deaf characters, start allocating money for professional ASL interpreters several months in advance. If you want to stage an inclusive musical in a ‘historical’ venue that is inaccessible to performers who use wheelchairs, start researching retro-fits and accessible ramps, and make friends with an architect or designer who can help.”