Author: Matthew Westphal

Major Public Art Project Honors Black Lives In One Of America’s Most Important Black Neighborhoods

“Njaimeh Njie, a Pittsburgh-based artist who works primarily with print and photography, set out on a journey in 2016 to document black lives in her city, focusing on the Hill District, the historic black neighborhood that serves as the home base for some of the world’s most pioneering musicians and August Wilson’s 10-play theatrical universe.” – CityLab

African Women Authors Make Historical Fiction Their Own

“African historical fiction is far from a new genre – is there a more globally known work of African fiction, after all, than Chinua Achebe’s 1958 classic story of Nigeria at the moment of British colonization, Things Fall Apart? But in recent years, the genre has been reinvented by a new generation of African writers. And this time around, most of them are women.” – The Christian Science Monitor

New York Mag/Vulture Theater Critic Sara Holdren Steps Down

“I’m stepping away from full-time criticism to pursue more directing, but there’s no disentangling the two pursuits for me now. … Critic and director must both articulate a vision and relate it to the wider world. Both are authors, whether of an argument or an event. Both must contextualize; both must reveal themselves in the work; both must dream the future of the form they love. I’m off now to a different kind of dreaming.” (ninth paragraph) – Vulture

Annie-B Parson On Choreographing For Non-Dancers (Such As David Byrne’s Band)

“Working with dancers, a lot gets communicated non-verbally, but with untrained dancers you need to find a specific and deliberate language around movement because there is no shared language, no baseline. I try to put myself in their shoes. It’s important to remind myself how scary and alien dancing is to the non-dancer.” – Dance Magazine

Wayne Fitzgerald, Master Of The Movie Title Sequence, Dead At 89

“He got hooked on the idea that movie title sequences could be more than just ‘book covers,’ as he once described it, and he parlayed that concept into a 50-year career designing title sequences for more than 500 movies … [and] scores of television shows” — from The Searchers to the Godfather series and from The Dick Van Dyke Show to Dallas. – Los Angeles Times

Think Translating Opera For Surtitles Is Tricky? Try Putting ‘Porgy And Bess’ Into German Or Spanish

It’s not just a matter of slangy terms like “happy dust” (German and Spanish have their own words for cocaine). Finding equivalents for the contractions and non-standard grammar in the libretto’s “Negro dialect” (as the Gershwins and Heyward called it) is challenging in itself, let alone when you only have 72 characters per screen. Here’s how the translators did it. – The New York Times