A Proposed New Theatre In England Gets A High Court Legal Challenge

The local planning council gave permission for a 1200-seat theatre in a park in the city of Tunbridge Wells, but there’s a challenge: “Former conservative councillor Brian Ransley has submitted an application for judicial review to the high court, which means a judge will review the planning decision made by the council. The claim was based on an objection to the process that was used by the council to come to the decision, according to Ransley.”

Thandie Newton Says It’s Time For More Diversity In Sci-Fi

Newton, star of Westworld, lays it out: “Science fiction is a projection of a time that hasn’t even happened, so if you don’t populate that place with people of different skin tones, shame on you. What it actually is is the reflection of what those makers do in their daily lives, how little they hang out with people of different skin tones. These are the key people and it’s like, ‘Oops-a-daisy, I don’t have a lot of black friends,’ and that’s a reality.”

The Challenging Patron Behind The Non-Publication Of Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Barracoon’

How was Barracoon funded? None of the PR has focused on this aspect of the book. And “like it or not, Barracoon bears Mason’s indelible mark. It was written on her schedule, under her pressure, and with her money. The 2018 edition of the text even opens with the bizarre dedication that Hurston, respecting her patron’s insistence on privacy, never included in her typed manuscript: ‘To Charlotte Mason, My Godmother, and the one Mother of all the primitives, who with the Gods in Space is concerned about the hearts of the untaught.'”

What Audience Members Now Think When A Ballet Suddenly Stops

During a performance of Swan Lake, “The curtain came down. The orchestra stopped. The house lights came up. There was no announcement. Most people were on their feet, and many started heading for the doors. We debated what to do. We scanned the crowds below, trying to make sense of what we were seeing. In the balcony, we were acutely aware of how high up our seats were and how many people were in the building. Our hearts were pounding. We did not see a threat, but people were reacting as though something were very wrong.”

Dear Actors: Stop Whining About Audience Members Looking At Their Phones

Everybody in performance needs to toughen up and remember that “hushed reverence at public performances, from classical music to theatre, is a relatively recent invention, to keep the riff-raff out; it sounds as if attending plays in Shakespeare’s day, all tobacco and ale and raucous banter, was more closing time on a bank holiday than church service. It kept the playwrights and the actors on their toes, because they were forced to earn the audience’s attention, rather than just expect it.”

The Transgender Artists Of France Are Changing That Country’s Theatre, Slowly

But French bureaucrats might not quite be with the program yet. “‘Since they didn’t know where to put me, I’m ‘undisciplined,’ ‘ [Phia Ménard] said in a recent interview, looking wearily amused. Ms. Ménard, 47, often perplexes programmers. Her stage productions feature almost no text and operate on an architectural scale, somewhere between choreography and art installation. Their slow-moving tableaux dwarf any human presence, leaving audiences with enigmatic, elemental images — a shadowy army of frozen figures melting before our eyes, say, or a lonely performer struggling in a vortex of fan-powered winds.”

How A 97-Year-Old Artist Became The Hot ‘Discovery’ Of A Show In Los Angeles

“Luisa Amelia Garcia Rodriguez Hurtado was born on Nov. 28, 1920, in Caracas, Venezuela. And over the 97 years that have passed between her birth and the current moment, she has lived at the center of the art world — yet also at its margins. … Just in the last two years she’s had two solo exhibitions, but before 2016 her last solo show was back in 1974 at L.A.’s Woman’s Building. You could say that at 97, Hurtado is a fresh face in art.”