Gender Parity Linkfest

I wanted to point out some of what's new in the blogosphere about gender representation in theater around the world.

1) Australia's official arts funding body, the Australia Council for the Arts (kinda like an Australian NEA), has just published a report called Women in Theater.  This report, a first of its kind in Australia, offers ' a detailed analyis of the representation of women in creative roles in the Australian theatre scene from the early 80s to today.' The creative roles the report looks at are directors, writers, as well as artistic director, general manager and board.  It includes not only the numbers and how they've changed over time (not much), but also an attempt to diagnose some of the symptoms as to why female representation is low, and offer solutions.   It's worth a read.  A brief intro, with links to different ways to read the report, is here.

2) If you've been under a rock, Minneapolis's Guthrie is under a ton of flack for the lack of diversity in the directors and writers chosen for their 50th anniversary season.  Minnesota Public Radio has a great article summing it all up here.  And the Guthrie's season announcement is here.

A quick reminder - if you're working on a show or have seen a show with performances in April, take 5 minutes and send an email to me for the Counting Actors project.  With your help, I'm tracking some key questions relating to gender, union status and local/non-local hiring of actors, writers and directors in Bay Area theaters.  So go to this page to learn more, and to learn how to send in some stats.

Deja Vu

Recently, I've been contacted by various indie filmmakers interested in me for their projects, but I've had to turn down the auditions because some of my warning flags were raised.  I thought I'd write a post about those flags, but wanted to check my archives to make sure I wasn't repeating myself.

And voila: Dear Low-Budget Independent Filmmaker - the post I wrote EXACTLY ONE YEAR AGO TODAY. 

The most important point to reiterate:

"What you need on set is a well-prepared actor.  If you don't let me have sides in advance, how can you assess my skills at preparing?"
 

Big Time Shakespearean Geekery

The dream team of the British Museum and the BBC are back again with another awesome series!  They're calling it 'Shakespeares Restless World' and it's a series of twenty programs, each running approx 15 minutes.

It follows a similar format to the History of the World in 100 Objects series that I wrote about here.  But this time, each program picks an object from the British Museum's collection and uses that as a jumping off point to explore a specific aspect of the history and culture of Shakespeare's England. 

Already pretty awesome, but then they add in a little bit of Shakespearean text analysis on the theme at hand, and my teen Shakespeare geek heart goes pitter pat.

You can find the programs detailed here.  As of this writing, the first five programs are online, and they'll keep adding new ones M-F through May 11th.

Huzzahs all around for Emily Weak, my sister and librarian supreme, who tipped me off to this new series.