Herbert Sigüenza, a founding member of the Chicano sketch company Culture Clash and playwright-in-residence at San Diego Rep (which premiered his latest script, Bad Hombres/Good Wives) talks to dramaturg Matthew McMahan about “the unique dynamics of bicultural comedy. He frames the comic writer as a type of diplomat whose plays yoke together divergent ideas, jokes, characters, and languages, while managing to get a diverse group of people to laugh at it all the same.” – HowlRound
Tag: sj
Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s New Leader Pushes To Be Artistic Leader In Fighting For Social Justice
To survive long-term, companies such as Woolly need to convince social-justice-minded, cash-challenged millennials to buy tickets. The crucial challenge: Can they do this without alienating a crowd who, liberal as they may be, might also be slower to get with the times? Or do you have to, in effect, fire one audience to lure the other? – Washingtonian
Can An Artist-In-Residence Really Transform A Big-City DA’s Office? This One Means To Try
Muralist James “Yaya” Hough, 44, was released last year after 27 years in prison, and within a few months he was hired for the new artist-in-residence position in the office of reformist Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. “Hough told Hyperallergic that he was looking to program workshops that will foster conversations between the DA’s 600 or so employees, survivors of crimes, and those currently serving time in the criminal justice system.” – Hyperallergic
The Problems With Translating Shakespeare Into Modern English, And How The Playwrights Who Did It Dealt With Them
Writer and dramaturg Loren Noveck was skeptical of the Play On Shakespeare project, and not because she’s a purist: “The Bard,” perhaps the paradigmatic Dead White Male, takes up so much space on stages, in season schedules, and in the minds of theatre folk that there’s not nearly enough room for newer voices dealing with contemporary issues. (Not to mention the now-abhorrent 17th-century attitudes in some of the plays.) But the playwrights tell Noveck that they were well aware of these questions, and they talk to her about their answers. – HowlRound
Progress In Hollywood: Number Of Female Directors Hits All-Time High, But Women Remain Rare In Other Behind-The-Scenes Jobs
“Examining the 1,300 top films from 2007 through to 2019, the Annenberg researchers found that on average just 4.8 percent of directors were women, yet that spiked to 10.6 percent in 2019 … [and] 15 percent of the directors of all films released by major companies last year were women, another record. … [But] the latest Celluloid Ceiling report … found that women in key behind-the-scenes jobs were outnumbered four to one by men. That figure remained unchanged from 2018.” – The New York Times
Dancing While Deaf: What It’s Like To Move To Music You Can’t Hear
“Dance may be a visual art form, but it’s tightly intertwined with sound. Even as the field strives to be more inclusive, learning to dance without two fully functioning ears remains a challenge. But today, dancers with full and partial hearing loss are becoming more visible, thanks to growing opportunities, high-profile role models and even Instagram.” – Dance Magazine
The Cultural ‘Canon’ Really Is Getting More Diverse
“It’s not so much that canons have been completely obliterated, as [Harold] Bloom and others feared — in any given collection, the old guard and their descendants have remained. But canons have continued to evolve, and new ones have sprung up alongside them.” Aisha Harris looks at some examples. – The New York Times
‘The Four Horsemen Of Asian-American Literature’
That was Ishmael Reed’s nickname for Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Shawn Wong, and Lawson Fusao Inada, who (on top of their own writing) put together the first major anthology of Asian-American fiction (titled Aiiieeeee!) and thereby began a canon. “The Four Horsemen had no interest in being loved,” writes Hua Hsu in this essay, “especially by white people. … When an editor asked [Chin] to tidy some grammatical errors, he called her the ‘great white bitch goddess priestess of the sacred white mouth.'” – The New Yorker
How The 2010s Became The Queerest Decade Ever On Screen
“It feels like we’re leaving this decade light years ahead of where we entered it. In 2010, salacious stories about queer people were still routinely seen in tabloids and on TV. Today, LGBTQ+ people are heralded for being themselves, and our stories are being normalized and told with a broader range of diversity and experiences than ever before.” Writer Jill Gutowitz talks with four leading queer media creators about how it happened. – them
Fifty Years Of The Community Museum Movement
“How should museums relate to their surroundings? What are the most meaningful ways for them to connect and work with their communities? … These questions date to the beginning of the community museum movement in the 1960s and remain foundational to the field.” Anna Diamond reports from a Smithsonian symposium on the subject. – Smithsonian Magazine