“This past year saw no shortage of controversies in both the art world and the real world. And perhaps more than ever before, the distance between those two worlds seemed to collapse, as artists and activists began demanding with unprecedented strength that patrons — both board members and corporate sponsors — answer for their actions outside the confines of the museum. We zeroed in on 11 hot-button issues that ignited heated debate in the art world this year, and the particular questions they provoked.” – artnet
Tag: sj
She Was *Not* Going To Play Princess Jasmine: Shereen Ahmed, First Arab-American To Play Eliza Doolittle In Major Production
“I don’t want to be Jasmine. She’s one of my favorite princesses, but I don’t want to perpetuate that stereotype: completely powerless, or overly sexualized,” says the Baltimore-born daughter of an Egyptian immigrant father. After understudying Laura Benanti on Broadway (she went on a dozen times), Ahmed is headlining the national tour, currently at the Kennedy Center. – The Washington Post
The 2010s Radicalized Video Games — And The People Who Make Them
“In traditional video games, labor and capitalism have been depicted in near-frictionless harmony. Take SimCity and Civilization‘s dogmatic views of economic progress popular during the booming real-life ’90s or even Mario’s insatiable accumulation of gold coins.” But in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and this decade’s insane lengthening of working hours, developers began creating games that imply real critiques of contemporary tech capitalism — and they began to consider unionizing. – The Nation
Mellon Foundation Pulls Grant After University Of North Carolina Makes Deal With Neo-Confederate Group
In a Letter to the Editor published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander confirms that funding was rescinded in direct response to the settlement. The university’s decision to protect and display the Confederate statue was especially jarring in light of the proposed grant’s intended purpose: “to develop a campuswide effort to reckon with UNC’s historic complicity with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and memorialization of the Confederacy.” – Hyperallergic
Queering Theatre Criticism
“Linnea Valdivia discusses the weight of reviews in theatre, the failure in arts journalism to approach queer stories with respect and empathy, how a critic should react if they misgender an artist, and more.” – HowlRound
A Better Solution Than ‘Latinx’: Teens In Argentina Lead Way Toward Gender-Neutral Spanish
“In classrooms and daily conversations, young people are changing the way they speak and write — replacing the masculine ‘o’ or the feminine ‘a’ with the gender-neutral ‘e’ in certain words — in order to change what they see as a deeply gendered culture.” – The Washington Post
Donald Byrd’s ‘Harlem Nutcracker’ Sold Out Theaters, But It Bankrupted His Company. After Almost 20 Years, He’s Reviving It
“It took five years of active persuading, plus nearly two decades of water under the proverbial bridge, before choreographer Donald Byrd finally agreed to resurrect The Harlem Nutcracker. Instantly loved after its 1996 New York premiere, his Nutcracker was financially doomed by 2001 — and left some scars on its way out.” But this year, firmly ensconced at Seattle’s Spectrum Dance Theater, Byrd is at last ready to return to it. – The Seattle Times
Queering History: How LGBTQ Artists, Playwrights, And Novelists Are Reimagining The Past
Jesse Green: “On the whole, queer art, which fully emerged from the closet in the 1960s and 1970s — around the same time people in great numbers did — has mostly concerned itself with its own moment, as if to say, ‘Here I am.’ … [Yet] another approach has been emerging in tandem. … The watchcry for these works isn’t so much ‘Here I am’ as ‘There we were.’ More trenchantly, they sometimes ask how the two ideas are, or aren’t, related. What is the queer past for?” – T — The New York Times Style Magazine
At ‘Slave Play’ Q&A, Woman Shouts That Playwright Is ‘Racist Against White People’
“According to witnesses, the woman, whom [playwright Jeremy O.] Harris has nicknamed ‘Talkback Tammy’ on Twitter, stood up from her seat and loudly interrupted the Q&A just as it was finishing up. She accused the queer black playwright of being ‘racist against white people.’ At one point, she complained that she didn’t want to hear that white people are the fucking plague all the time.'” Harris patiently responded to her and even sort of defended her reaction afterward, saying “Rage is a necessary lubricant to discourse.” – Gothamist
Nine Black Actresses Have Now Been Cast As Hermione In ‘Harry Potter And The Cursed Child’, But The Producers Refuse To Discuss Race
“The play’s producers, Sonia Friedman Productions, declined to comment for this article, noting that the subject of Hermione’s race had been discussed at length when the play opened in London. But that was eight Hermiones ago. When asked to discuss the cultural significance of the casting decision in the era when diversity and inclusion have become priorities in theater, the producers rebuffed The Times‘ attempts to speak with the show’s director, actors or anyone else in the production.” – Los Angeles Times