“Over the history of our big and small screens, audiences have been treated to thousands of variations of whiteness. White people have stood in as the face of humanity’s fullness and complexity. We’ve watched white people traverse the boundaries of class, history, sexuality, gender, disease, fame and technology.” Now it’s time for everyone else to get that fullness, complexity, and – The New York Times
Blog
Did The Enlightenment Invent The Future?
We didn’t used to worry or predict it, aside from religious prophets. Then came the idea of progress. “The Enlightenment gave humanity the idea that we might make things better, that perhaps there was some inevitability to this, that we would discover more, find better ways to live, treat one another with greater kindness, and eventually build a kind of heaven without the need of gods to hold it up.” – LitHub
Learning About What Theatre Artists Can Offer To Veterans – And, Of Course, What Vets Offer Artists
The Telling Project works with veterans and their families to create devised work all over the country. How does that work, really? “We are using our decades of training as artists to translate the experiences of veterans and their families into narratives, and then to translate the narratives into performances. Another way to put it is that we are helping these folks with meaning,” says founder and director Jonathan Wei. – HowlRound
Moving, By Choice, From Ballerina To Administrator
Kathleen Breene Combs has been with the Boston Ballet for decades. now, she’s packing up her pointe shoes, putting on the business shoes, and moving to Rhode Island’s Festival Ballet Providence as executive director. Her interest in the smooth running of the back end came about when she got active in the union, negotiating dancers’ contracts, and morphed into something else when she got pregnant. – Pointe Magazine
A Few Weeks On, Gauging How Very, Horribly Dark That ‘Game Of Thrones’ Ending Was
Oh, you thought it was cool, or even OK, that [SPOILER ALERT HIDDEN] is ruling Westeros? Let’s think of alllllll of the reasons why that person is a mass murderer who may rule for hundreds of years, and see if you still think it’s cool. – HuffPost
The Art Of Protest In Putin’s Russia
To put it bluntly, Russia is terrible for activists and artists. Both? Wow. So, for the ones who haven’t fled the country, it’s necessary to find new, creative ways to protest the repression, preferably without becoming a martyr. – BBC
The Director Of ‘Hadestown’ Won A Tony And Ripped Into The Reasons She’s The Only Woman Directing On Broadway This Year
It has nothing to do with who is ready to direct, Rachel Chavkin said. “There are so many women who are ready to go. There are so many artists of color who are ready to go. … This is not a pipeline issue. It is a failure of imagination by a field whose job is to imagine the way the world could be.” – The New York Times
Television And The Stories Of Refugees
One of the writers of Jane the Virgin says, “What is Game of Thrones if not the story of Jon Snow, who saves a bunch of refugees, gets killed by his people for doing so, gets brought back from the dead, and survived the politics of his nation, then goes beyond the Wall to start his own chapter of Amnesty International?” – Variety
What If You’re A Fiction Writer, But You Need To Write About Science?
Well then, you become obsessed with theoretical physics, of course. Just ask Nell Freudenberger. Freudenberger “was, like so many other young women, encouraged to believe she didn’t ‘have the right kind of brain for it.’ After doing badly in a maths test in her teens, she was told by a teacher that she might as well quit.” – The Guardian (UK)
Who Cleaned Up At The Tonys? The Complete List
Basically, Hadestown. Sure, it didn’t win all 14 awards it was nominated for, but eight’s not bad. – The New York Times