Says Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of London’s Royal Court Theatre, the first in Britain to completely revamp its policies for handling harassment allegations, “What we’ve uncovered is absolutely monumental and I feel we’re further away than we’ve ever been from getting to a place of truth or change. It’s really distressing.” On the other hand, four out of five theatres in the UK have overhauled their policies, and some actors say they feel a real change in the audition and rehearsal rooms.
Category: theatre
The Immersive Technologies Transforming Theatre
“The industry is experimenting with so-called immersive technologies including: virtual reality, where participants put on a headset to enter a computer-generated world; motion capture, which enables an actor to control a digital avatar through their own movement in real time; and projection mapping, where scenery is projected on to a physical environment and can be changed in the blink of an eye.”
How Immersive Theatre Is Creating Intimate Experiences
“We are simultaneously more connected than we ever have been and more disconnected. The way we communicate is through screens, which are essentially prosceniums” like the traditional stage that separates the actors from the audience, says Zach Morris. “When we seek culture, perhaps we want to be able to engage in it in a way that doesn’t have a membrane between us and it.”
Sometimes, Theatre Can Feel A Bit Too Topical (Even When It’s About 1977, Or 1897)
What it’s like to go to the theatre and see a play about the Constitution right now: “The play’s concerns could hardly have felt more viscerally urgent. In the row behind me, a woman wept deep, grieving tears — a kind of crying so suffused with pain that we’re not used to hearing it in public, even in a darkened theater. But this is not an ordinary time.”
As Oregon Shakespeare Festival Searches For An Artistic Director, Its Executive Director Also Announces Plans To Leave
Cynthia Rider, who has been with the festival since 2013, says the board just offered to renew her contract, and she declined, “adding that the near-simultaneous departure with Rauch will give the festival ‘new eyes, with lots of momentum’ for upcoming challenges, especially around financial loss from wildfire smoke.”
Black And Asian Theatre Artists Embrace A New British Book Of Monologues
The book is designed to avoid stereotypes – and give actors a better chance at roles outside of the terrorist, gang member, or other confining (or lazily cast) roles. “This project is special, as we are often encouraged to pick a character close to ourself for audition. But it is hard to find pieces, so we’re always having to play something that isn’t true to us.”
Who Won The UK Theatre Awards?
Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre cleaned up at the awards, which – though they’re held in London – celebrate achievement in regional theatre.
Twenty Years Ago, An Indian American Actor Wrote A Play For Himself, And Now He Revisits It
Has anything changed for Asians and other people of color in the theatre and movie world? Aasif Mandvi: “When you tell a story in Hollywood about brown people or black people or any people of color, it’s got to an extraordinary story. It’s got to be the worst thing or the best thing. It’s got to be like, [film trailer voice] “He was born a free man and then he was sold into slavery, and then he got onto a game show and won a million dollars. It’s 12 Years a Slumdog Millionaire!” It’s got to be Crazy Rich Asians, it can’t just be Asians, you know?”
The Women Who Built America’s Regional Theatre
Mary John was part of the nascent regional theatre movement, which was led in large part by women: Margo Jones opened Theatre ’47 in Dallas in 1947, Nina Vance opened Houston’s Alley Theatre that same year. And in Washington, D.C., Zelda Fichandler co-founded Arena Stage in 1950. Pat Brown, who would later become the Alley’s second artistic director and a founder of Theatre Communications Group, started the now defunct Magnolia Theatre in Long Beach, Calif., in 1954. For the next 15 years many women like them would work to bring to life a new vision of regional theatre in a country that still mostly looked to New York City,
Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Gets A New Artistic Director
The company announced Thursday that acclaimed Canadian director Weyni Mengesha will become its artistic director, starting in January. Paired with the hiring of UK-based arts administrator Emma Stenning as Soulpepper’s new executive director in August, Toronto’s largest not-for-profit theatre company will now be led by two women after a year rocked by legal and internal discord.