Knowing that you may never get a response is disheartening. Yet many embrace the uncertainty and even lean into it. For those playwrights, rejections become the most common form of communication with theatres.
Author: Douglas McLennan
How The Culture Wars Are Changing Theatre
Across the entertainment industry, hard battles are being fought for visibility and representation.
Non-Profit Theatres Were A Big Part Of Broadway This Season
In the season that concluded last night, 33 new shows opened in Broadway houses. But while Broadway is usually spoken of in commercial terms, it’s worth noting that 10 of those shows were produced by the subsidised companies resident at Broadway venues. That’s 30% of this year’s total output.
Why It’s Never Too Soon To Make Art About Tragedy
As we try to navigate through an age defined by particularly egregious bullshit, writers have a moral obligation to avoid infecting the universe with more careless storytelling. It’s a privileged viewpoint to declare that the only thing in the world that matters is my personal interpretation of events.
The Bizarre Russian Big Money Culture Machine
Those who are familiar with the state’s cultural agenda in Russia are no longer surprised by these kinds of events, but it’s still difficult to get used to. You’re a good artist if you earn a lot, and preferably, have a wide audience. For the BraVo prize, as written on the website, any artist could be nominated, so long as they had the potential to “reach an audience of three billion.” In a state where culture, whether serious or for entertainment, still belongs to the service sector at the legislative level, more is more.
How Communist Bulgaria Became A Hotbed Of Thinking (And Worrying) About Robots
Bulgarian engineers and cyberneticians, champions of this new technology, increasingly worried about what this meant. In the ivory towers of places such as the Institute of Technical Cybernetics and Robotics in Sofia, they wrote detailed papers on robotic movement, image recognition, planning algorithms. They ran experiments and built labs to test how to perfect Man-Machine Interfaces – from the design of the perfect office that would minimise an office worker’s eye-strain to the future melding of human and machine vision.
It Used To Be Possible To Know Anything. Here’s The Last Man Who Pulled It Off
It hardly seems likely that the life of an obscure Anglican clergyman should recommend itself to the attention of a modern biographer; the shelves of second-hand bookshops are the sepulchers of many an Essex parson’s dutifully compiled Life and Letters. But Sabine Baring-Gould happens to have been the last man who knew everything.
Libraries Are Messy, Flawed Human Places
If Stuart Kells wants to show that libraries are human places, he has also chosen stories that reveal their venal side. His librarians can be thieves, hoarders, or shameful caretakers. Even when they love books, they can’t be trusted with them. In its ideal form, a library protects books, celebrates them, and also makes them available to a wide group of readers. In this history, any single library rarely achieves all of these goals at once.
Small Study Suggests Childhood Trauma May Lead To More Intense Creative Experiences
A study of 234 performing-arts professionals found those who experienced intense childhood trauma—about 18 percent of the participants—reported higher levels of anxiety and internalized shame. But “they were also more fantasy prone, a factor that may enhance creativity,” write Paula Thomson of California State University–Northridge and S.V. Jaque of York University.
This Year’s Turner Prize Finalists
Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, who chairs the jury, said the judges had chosen “an outstanding group of artists, all of whom are tackling the most pressing political and humanitarian issues of today”.