Author: Matthew Westphal

Mike Daisey Is Still Performing His Steve Jobs Monologue (?!)

Earlier this year, the falsehoods in Daisey’s hit one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs – a piece which was basically presented as non-fiction – were revealed in a spectacularly humiliating fashion. “[The] most pressing question is the simplest: Why is Daisey still performing a play that brought him so much disgrace?”

13P, New York’s Impressive Playwrights’ Collective, Gives Its Last Show And Dissolves

“Since its formation in 2003 13P has produced shows that feature Kleenex-carrying Nazis, a talking bird statue, … intergenerational lesbian seduction and Monica Lewinsky. The group came together with a deceptively simple goal: to offer a full production to each of its 13 associates, most of them unknown at the time of the group’s founding. Its pithy (if slightly snippy) motto: ‘We don’t develop plays. (We do them.)'”

Another Member Quits LA MoCA’s Board Over Museum’s New Direction

“The troubles of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art intensified with the resignation of noted artist John Baldessari’s from its board. … Baldessari is the fifth MOCA board member to leave since February. His exit after 12 years is another signal that the old guard of L.A.’s contemporary art scene has grown disenchanted with its direction under [Jeffrey] Deitch.”

From African Civil War Orphan To Fast-Rising Ballerina

“Michaela DePrince was little more than a toddler when she saw her first ballerina – an image in a magazine page blown against the gate of the orphanage where she ended up during Sierra Leone’s civil war. It showed an American ballet dancer posed on tip toe. … She wished “to become this exact person. … I saw hope in it. And I ripped the page out and I stuck it in my underwear because I didn’t have any place to put it.”

Batsheva Dance Co. To Face More Protests, This Time At Edinburgh

“Campaigners are planning disruption at the Edinburgh International Festival of performances by Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company.” Scottish protesters argue that “Batsheva [is] ‘actively complicit in whitewashing Israeli human-rights abuses, apartheid, and occupation of Palestinian land’ because it receives funding from the Israeli government.”

Who Were The First North Americans? The Answer Has Just Changed

“New evidence from caves in Oregon may finally put to rest the long-held theory that the early people who made Clovis spear points were the first inhabitants of North America. … The new finds provide strong support for growing genetic evidence that indicates the Americas were populated in at least three waves of immigration beginning at least 15,000 years ago.”