Diversity in American Theater: The Mythology of Color Blind/Conscience Casting
HowlRound: I heard about a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof where the woman cast as the mother was African American and the only person of color in the cast. Close your eyes and picture this for a moment…got it? Now I don’t know about you, but this image bothered me—and it happens every season. Every season, someone in some theater decides that it would be cool to do stuff like adapt the tragic myth of Phaedra, with the story set during the Boxer Rebellion or to produce Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but cast it with two African Americans, a Latino, and another actor of ambiguous race. Let us not forget that no theater season in America is complete without an adaptation of a Shakespeare play (pick one—it doesn’t matter) with an all white cast except for the one black girl who I like to call the “third black girl from the right,” set in New York during the roaring twenties. This has always bothered me.
Iris van Herpen 3D Printed Designer Shoes
The Mary Sue: These designer shoes are no ordinary Louboutins or Ferragamos– they’re by designer Iris van Herpen, who used a 3-D printer to create this pair of sky-high tentacle heels for her Paris Fashion Week show. Head under the cut for more pictures of the 3-D printed collection, and a video of the shoes in action.
The Tricky Business of Innovation: Can You Patent a Magic Trick?
Wired Opinion | Wired.com: I created a magic trick with a balloon. You stretch out the balloon’s nozzle, rip it off, and then magically reattach it as the balloon deflates. No secret props, no extra pieces: just one balloon. I spent months developing this trick, perfecting the psychology and the physiology. Then I spent weeks filming and editing the trick with magic distributor Theory11.com. We released “Detach” in February of 2012. Some company in Russia copied it a couple months later. But they didn’t just copy my trick — move for move, beat for beat — they copied the look and feel of the marketing in the trailer, too. [You can see for yourself by comparing those two links.] In the field of magic, theft is rampant. Close-up magic wholesalers steal from close-up magic wholesalers. Parlor manipulators steal from parlor manipulators. Large-scale illusionists steal from large-scale illusionists. Why do they do it? Because they can.
Building a 15-foot-tall brain-controlled brain for Burning Man and beyond
Boing Boing: My cousin Katherine Leipper is part of a crew that's building a 15-foot-tall head and brain with interactive light and flame effects that will be controlled by a participant's brain waves. Yup. Weirdness runs in our family. She and her co-makers will take it to Burning Man, but the bigger plan is to take it around to schools after the festival, "to get kids excited about science, technology and fabrication."
To Tweet Seat or not to Tweet Seat: A Perspective
Technology in the Arts is a service of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Arts Management and Technology.: To tweet seat or not to tweet seat; that’s the question on everyone’s mind. After a rather engaging conversation at the Theatre Communications Group Annual conference in Dallas, I went home thinking about the pros and cons of new technology and how it can be used to engage today’s audience. If our audiences are evolving, why are we still connecting with them in the same manner as the previous generation of administrators? After the success of email, facebook, and blogs, it only makes sense to give the Twitterverse a try, right? But what I realized in Dallas was that the question, “Why?” can be applied to anything; and should actually be applied to everything. Your success with Twitter, just like your success with any initiative, will have a direct correlation to a clearly defined “Why?” It’s easy to think that you should jump on the tweet seat bandwagon because supposedly everyone is doing it, but that is simply not the case. If your “Why?” is something like “I want tweet seats because XYZ Theatre has tweet seats,” then you will have a hard time finding success. Every organization is unique and you should do what is in its best interest.
Friday, July 19, 2013
NFTRW Weekly Top Five
Here are the top five comment generating posts of the past week...
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