Open Society Foundations (OSF): When Viola Davis took the stage earlier this month to accept an historic Emmy Award for Best Leading Actress in a Drama, she declared that “the only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.”
Her poignant words were about racial and gender bias in Hollywood, but also about the larger struggle for equal opportunity in America. Judging from the overwhelming response on Twitter and other social media, her message reached and moved millions of people in the United States and around the world.
2 comments:
I thought it was interesting that this article was on the PTM blog because at first glance it has more to do with cultural and political movements than it does with the entertainment industry or theater in general. However, if you take a closer look at it, there really are many opportunities for the arts to support this kind of 21st century activism. The points the article made about how this new activism doesn't have a central leader but instead focuses on taking your own stand and encouraging others around you to do the same lend themselves well to theater, because it is definitely a community-based art form and involves everyone who watches and creates it. Theater has always been a way for people to express their opinions and ideas, but now more than ever it can be used to urge people to take action because we've revamped the way we support causes, raise awareness about issues, and demand change in the world at large.
This article makes an interesting point that I actually studied in my Interp class very recently: that 21st-century activism is much more of a network-based system than a hierarchy system. What this article shows is that this new network style of activism is very conducive for artists to share their art about their experiences and for their causes. It's interesting that social media and the internet can be used to share both art and activist causes, and it has created a large platform for many people all over the world to do both of these things. Art has always been used to aid and further activist causes, and the 21st-century methods of sharing information has created an online community that allows those causes and the art that comes with them to be spread very far very quickly, which allows for these causes to effect real change in a shorter period of time.
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