Alison Kinney: “I heard my first Glass opera, Satyagraha, days after a protest where I witnessed the use of unnecessary force by police against protesters … Since then, I’ve never heard the structures of Glass’s music simply as formal sound projections, onto a backdrop of historical source material. Now, I hear in the musical forms the forms of nonviolent resistance itself: holding steady, taking small steps forward, being beaten back, and getting up again.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
How To Fix The Creative Writing MFA
“The current MFA studio model grafts an MFA program onto an existing English department without a studied consideration of what the degree could be. This is not surprising, since the MFA did not emerge naturally out of an English department curriculum.”
Black Female Playwrights In Tune With The Times (Pun Intended)
Charles Isherwood: “It’s not unusual for theater, like many of the arts, to address a pressing social or political issue. But what strikes me as unusual this fall is that most of such work comes from notable black female playwrights:” Sarah Jones, Anna Deavere Smith, Lynn Nottage, and Suzan-Lori Parks.
Alexis Arquette, The Lady Chablis, And The Barriers They Broke
“In the 1990s, if you wanted to see a trans actor on the big screen, you had remarkably few options. Despite a plethora of films with large transgender roles, … trans actors were almost entirely sidelined from major productions. … But that wasn’t even a conversation in the 90s, when Arquette and Chablis became two of the first trans actors to play trans roles in major mainstream films.”
‘Disruptive And Insulting’: Berlin State Ballet’s Dancers Are Furious That Sasha Waltz Was Made Their New Director
“Berlin’s mayor Michael Müller had last week appointed Waltz and Swedish ballet chief Johannes Öhman as co-directors of Germany’s largest ballet company from the 2019/2020 season on. But in a scathing petition posted on the company’s homepage on Sunday, the dancers said: ‘Unfortunately, the appointment has to be compared to an appointment of a tennis trainer as a football coach or an art museum director as an orchestral director.'”
The Artist Arrested For Being A Nude Woman In Front Of A Painting Of A Nude Woman Is At It Again
“This time, the Luxembourg artist [Deborah De Robertis] sat in front of an exhibition by Araki, a Japanese photographer known for his images of bound naked women, in a transparent kimono. … Between her thighs was a watermelon, which she ate while moaning loudly. Visitors, far from being shocked, applauded her before security officers put an end to her show.” (In case you don’t recall the previous incident, here’s a refresher.)
Alec Baldwin Sues Art Dealer For Fraud For Selling Him The Wrong Ross Bleckner Painting
“The suit asserts that [Mary] Boone deceived [Baldwin] by promising a painting, Sea and Mirror, by the artist Ross Bleckner, that had been sold at Sotheby’s to a Los Angeles collector in 2007, but in fact supplied another similar Bleckner painting, also called Sea and Mirror.”
Plan For Lucerne Festival Opera Theater Killed By Local Officials
“An unusual episode in classical music philanthropy – the effort to build a theater for the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland to produce operatic and experimental works – came to an apparent end on Monday when Swiss officials voted it down.”
The Cultural Appropriation Wars Ambush A Literary Festival
“Officials in charge of an Australian writers festival were so upset with the address by their keynote speaker, the American novelist Lionel Shriver, that they censored her on the festival website and publicly disavowed her remarks. The event, the Brisbane Writers Festival, which ended Sunday, also hurriedly organized counterprogramming, billed as a ‘right of reply’.”
Here’s The Full Text Of Lionel Shriver’s Speech About Cultural Appropriation
“I’m afraid the bramble of thorny issues that cluster around ‘identity politics’ has got all too interesting, particularly for people pursuing the occupation I share with many gathered in this hall: fiction writing. Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all. Meanwhile, the kind of fiction we are ‘allowed’ to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.”