“With subtitles, audiences will be able to understand a feature film titled SGaawaay K’uuna, translated as Edge of the Knife, which has its UK premiere in April. It is in two dialects of the highly endangered Haida language, the ancestral tongue of the Haida people of British Columbia. … The film is playing an important role in preserving the language, its director Gwaai Edenshaw said.” – The Guardian
Author: Matthew Westphal
Theatre Company Goes Into Welsh Schools To Teach Students About Drug-Dealer Dangers
Long-distance drug-dealing gangs known as “county lines” have hit North Wales hard, with all the attendant violence and human misery. Theatr Clwyd, a professional company in the region, is touring to area schools with a new play depicting the dangers and consequences of getting involved with a county lines gang. – BBC
Literary Prize Runners Denounce ‘False Hierarchy’ Of Prizes, Then Revise Their Own Prize Accordingly
Said the organizers of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, devoted to books from publishers with five or fewer employees, “While the competitive dynamic of prizes points readers towards ‘the best books’, they also create a false hierarchy where ‘the best’ becomes a valid category.” So, beginning with this year, judges may select anywhere from one to four titles as winners, “on the criteria that book X or Y cannot not win.'” – The Guardian
Staging The Stories Of The Women Who Faithfully Visit Their Loved Ones In Prison
Liza Jessie Peterson, playwright and star of The Peculiar Patriot: “I came to Columbus Circle [in Manhattan] at midnight and found a whole fleet of buses. All these women, children and even some men were boarding these buses to go to the upstate correctional facilities. They would ride all night, go through a long, degrading security process, just to spend a few hours with their loved ones, before taking the bus home. As I talked to those women, I knew I was witnessing one of the great love stories of our time. A writer friend said, ‘You know, you have a profound story to tell, so tell it.”” – The Washington Post
Recent Listening: Logan Strosahl, ‘Sure’
Logan Strosahl, Sure (Sunnyside)
Piping at the high end of the flute’s range, guttural near the tenor sax’s low end, sliding, slurring and sometimes punching notes on alto saxophone, Strosahl is intense and full of surprises with his trio. – Doug Ramsey
Hawai’i’s Last Monarch Was Also Its Most Important Composer
Queen Lili’uokalani steered her people through the difficult period of annexation and prevented a war — and she was also a highly trained musician who wrote some 200 songs (the most famous of them being “Aloha ‘Oe”) that became the foundation of modern Hawaiian music and a bulwark against the onslaught of mainland American culture. – Smithsonian Magazine
The Literary Agency That’s Made A Business Out Of Trump Administration Tell-All Memoirs
Ever since Keith Urbahn and Matt Latimer persuaded James Comey to write what became A Higher Loyalty, edited the manuscript, and worked a skillful media campaign around it, their agency, Javelin, “[has] become a popular destination for Trump administration officials, especially those contemplating an exit — ‘and they all are, by the way,’ Urbahn [said]. … Their central insight is that that hoary old fixture of Washington self-promotion, the tell-all, may be the ideal solution to the very new problem of post-Trump rehabilitation.” – The New York Times Magazine
‘Heathers’, The Movie That Upended The Teen-Comedy Genre
“It wasn’t exactly that Heathers contained no [John] Hughesian influence. The types and tropes were all there — mean girls, jocks, bullying, upper-middle-class ennui, idiotic or abusive parents, delusional teachers, a bad-boy crush — but … Heathers seemed influenced as much by Blue Velvet as by Sixteen Candles, and it paved the way for an era of darker, edgier, more experimental teen comedies.” – The New Yorker
Maybe The Oddest Dance Competition Ever: 40+ Choreographers Tried To Read Agnes De Mille’s Mind
In 1963, de Mille sent a sealed envelope to her union, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, with a handwritten note saying not to open it because it had the “eminently stealable” idea and outline for a play, and, at the time, she couldn’t copyright it. SDC decided to celebrate its 60th anniversary by calling for submissions guessing what was in that envelope, and a panel chose five of the submitters to make short dances based on their guesses. – Dance Magazine
Downtown Theater Finds Itself On Broadway (And Finds That It’s Not All That Different)
Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, Taylor Mac’s Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown, Daniel Fish’s very revisionist Oklahoma! — all are in the Off-Off-Broadway mode of messing with both the form and content of conventional theater, and all are or have been on Broadway (the ultimate conventional theater ecosystem) this season. And such recent Broadway successes as A Doll’s House, Part 2 and Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 have a similar pedigree. Diep Tran talks to the creators of these works about crossing the downtown-uptown (non-)divide. – American Theatre