It’s Hyderabad, India’s fourth-largest city, sixth-largest metro, and the home of the world’s largest film studio, Ramoji Film City, the heart of the movie industry in Telugu, India’s third-most spoken language (after Hindi and Bengali). — The Guardian
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Brief, Brilliant Filmmaking Career Of Ida Lupino
“In the 1940s she was known as an actress, usually playing good-hearted tough-as-nails dames … But in a brilliant short burst, from 1949 to 1953, she directed six of her seven feature films, co-writing and producing many of them. She was, of course, a woman director in a man’s world, but beyond that her films deserve to be rediscovered because they are so substantial, stylish and bold, … [taking] on social issues that were usually taboo.” — BBC
Staging The Stories Of The Murdered Women Of Juárez
Dramaturg Trevor Boffone takes an in-depth look at La Ruta, a new play about the epidemic of violence against the women of the Mexican border city, written by Isaac Gómez and recently premiered in Chicago by Steppenwolf. — HowlRound
‘Paraconceptual’ Artist Susan Hiller Dead At 78
After earning a Ph.D. in anthropology and doing field research in Central America, she moved from the U.S. to London and began her art career in the 1960s. While grouped with the Conceptualists, she called herself a “paraconceptualist” because of her interest in paranormal phenomena, which she incorporated into her multimedia work. — The Art Newspaper
They’re Both Native Americans And Native New Yorkers, And For 50-Odd Years They’ve Been Performing Native Dance In The City
The Thunderbird American Indian Dancers were formed in downtown Brooklyn in 1963 by a group of mostly Mohawk neighbors who were the first generation in their families born off the reservation. Now the group preserves and performs indigenous dances from across North America. Reporter Siobhan Burke talks with the Thunderbirds’ director, 82-year-old Louis Mofsie. — The New York Times
BBC’s Latest Dance Competition Show Has A Race Problem
Not that the producers or panelists are to blame: The Greatest Dancer features plenty of minority contestants. But it’s the studio audience that decides who proceeds to the next round, and it seems they just will not vote for Asian competitors, no matter how enthusiastic the panelists are. Same for black female contestants. — The Guardian
A Virtual-Reality ‘Hamlet’
The metro Boston-based Commonwealth Shakespeare Company has partnered with Google’s AR/VR Lens project to create Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, in which the viewer watches the action from the notional point of view of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. — American Theatre
Wattpad, Popular Online Platform For Fan Fiction And Original Stories, Will Start Publishing Books
Using what it calls Story DNA Machine Learning software, the company will mine the hundreds of millions of fiction works submitted by its 70 million-member community for material it believes will be commercially viable. (And yes, the writers will be paid.) — The New York Times
Americans For The Arts Expands Programs For Cultural Equity And Diversity In Arts Leadership
This year the organization will extend its 25-year-old Diversity in Arts Leadership program beyond New York City to New Jersey and Iowa, launch an Arts & Cultural Equity Fellows program in the Great Lakes region, create an Arts & Culture Leaders of Color Network, and begin a 3-day retreat called the Leaders of Color Forum. — Americans for the Arts
At 60, Can Aprile Millo Make A Comeback To Opera Stardom?
In the 1980s and ’90s, she was one of the Metropolitan Opera’s reigning sopranos, considered a latter-day exemplar of Golden-Age Verdi singing. “Then, at what should have been the height of her career, things petered out, … [and] over the past decade, she has barely sung in public at all.” But now she’s aiming to return to the Met stage. “It’s not about voice; the voice has been functioning,” she says. “But when you go through a lack of confidence, you’re not going to want to be anywhere.” — The New York Times