Miral al-Tahawy was born and raised in a Bedouin village in Egypt, moved (against her family’s wishes) to Cairo and earned a Ph.D., and then came to New York. “The foreigner was the Orientalist,” she says. ‘He was there to watch us. The first time for me to live this role was in Brooklyn Heights. I was the foreigner and I watched them. I was the one doing the ethnography and I was the one drawing them.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Turning A Frankly Sexual Memoir Into A Stage Play
“In The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir, Toni Bentley predicted that, if her book was ever turned into a play, it would probably only reach ‘Off-Off-Off Broadway.’ It might end up being staged ‘in some dark performance space down some little-traveled back alley’.” Actually, it’s having a successful run in Madrid’s top alternative theater.
Akram Khan, Injured, Cancels Shows
The renowned and popular British dancer-choreographer has injured his Achilles tendon and has withdrawn from all performances at least through the end of February.
Textual Study Of The Koran Starts To Get Daring
“The Koran may be interpreted but from a believer’s viewpoint, nothing in it can be set aside. Yet, at least in the calm, superficially courteous world of Western academia, debating the precise text of the Koran” – and, more crucially, how that text varied in its early versions – “is increasingly common.”
Ronald Searle, 91, Beloved Cartoonist And Illustrator
“[He was] best known for his spiky comic drawings depicting the outrageous antics of the St Trinian’s girls, and for his illustrations of the Molesworth series, written by Geoffrey Willans and which, as any fule kno [sic], tells of life at the boys’ prep school St Custard’s.”
Charles Dickens, Comic Novelist
Armando Iannucci, no stranger to comedy himself, looks at Dickens’s own sharp, and sharply observed, humour.
The Anti-Cirque Du Soleil
After 25 years, No Fit State Circus (yes, that’s what it’s called) “can justly claim to be one of the world’s leading exponents of contemporary circus. … You can hear the miked-up breath of the performers, smell their sweat, look into their eyes, touch the hem of their raggedy garments. It’s very consciously the opposite of the antiseptic enormo-shows put on by the globe-stomping Cirque du Soleil.”
Keeping Up Real-Life Relationships Via Electronic Games
“Almost every adult in the industrialized world (and many in developing economies) now uses some sort of electronic device daily, and all of those devices offer some sort of game. As games become ubiquitous, they are not only content but also context, context for mundane human relationships among people who don’t even consider themselves gamers.”
The Three Faces Of Stephen Colbert
“There used to be just two Stephen Colberts, and they were hard enough to distinguish. The main difference was that one thought the other was an idiot. … Lately, though, there has emerged a third Colbert. This one is a version of the TV-show Colbert, except he doesn’t exist just on screen anymore. He exists in the real world and has begun to meddle in it.”
An Opera Where A Conservative Mayor Is Antihero And Margaret Atwood Is God
The librettist of Rob Ford: The Opera “refused to divulge many plot details. He allowed that there is a fantasy sequence in which the mayor goes to heaven and meets God, ‘who may or may not be Margaret Atwood,’ and that there is a trial sequence in which ‘he is judged by a jury of Toronto librarians’.”