Race and Ethnicity

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Control of New York’s Stages Remains in White Hands, a Study Finds

      by

      The Asian American Performers Action Coalition is hoping for a season of change when theaters reopen.As New York’s theaters prepare to reopen following the twin crises of a pandemic and rising discontent over racial inequity, a new study which found that both power and money in the theater world have been disproportionately controlled by white people is calling for “a fundamental paradigm shift.”The study, by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition, found that at the 18 major nonprofit theaters examined by the group, 100 percent of artistic directors were white, as were 88 percent of board members. On Broadway, 94 percent of producers were white, as were 100 percent of general managers.The study offers a direct challenge, not only to theater leaders, but also to those who fund the institutions, saying, “it remains to be seen whether or not the multitude of antiracist solidarity statements and pledges to diversity will result in real action and systemic change.”“Our expanded leadership stats confirm that almost every gatekeeper, employer and decision maker in the NYC theater industry is white,” the coalition declares in a letter introducing the study.They examined the 2018-19 New York theater season — the last full season before the pandemic — looking at every Broadway show, as well as the work of the nonprofits.The coalition called particular attention to a dearth of shows about Asian Americans. “Even as the industry has made small gains in diversity in recent years, particularly at the nonprofits, our work at AAPAC has shown that Asian-focused narratives remain consistently minimized and overlooked,” the report says.Among the other findings:Using publicly available tax forms, the coalition calculated the public and private contributions to nonprofit theaters, and said that $150 million went to the 18 big nonprofits in the city that it referred to as “predominantly white institutions,” compared with $12.6 million to 28 theaters of color.At the theaters studied, 59 percent of roles went to white actors, compared to 29 percent for Black actors, 6 percent for Asian American actors and 5 percent for Latinos (the coalition uses the gender-neutral term Latinx).Creative teams were less diverse, with 81 percent of writers being white, along with 81 percent of directors and 77 percent of designers.The report gave grades to individual theaters, and declared the Public Theater to be the most diverse, and the Irish Repertory Theater to be least diverse.The intense focus nationally on diversity issues has prompted an increase in research about race, gender and disability within the theater industry. A coalition of groups doing such research, called Counting Together, formed in 2019, and this month introduced the CountingTogether.org website, hosted by the Dramatists Guild and the American Theater Wing, to make the research more readily available. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      A Race ‘Report Card’ Measures Whether the Music Industry Changed

      by

      The Black Music Action Coalition issued a 37-page report examining if powerful companies followed through on diversity commitments made last summer.A new “report card” on race in the music business takes many of the industry’s most powerful companies to task, urging them to follow through on diversity commitments made last summer amid nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd.The 37-page “Music Industry Action Report Card,” by the Black Music Action Coalition, was issued over the weekend to coincide with the Juneteenth holiday. The group took its hardest look at the three major record companies, which announced large financial donations last year — Sony and Warner Music each pledged $100 million, and Universal $25 million — and doled out middling-to-poor grades to them.Only a portion of those donation pledges has been paid out so far, and in its report the coalition — a group of artist managers, lawyers and others in the business that was formed a year ago — pressed the companies to hire more people of color in top executive jobs.The report graded the labels in four categories, including their initial commitments and subsequent follow-through, and the companies mostly got B’s and C’s. None earned an A, and one, Warner, even got a D in the category of representation at the executive level.Last week, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California released a detailed report of its own, noting that, among 4,060 executives at 119 music companies of various kinds, 7.5 percent were Black. (At record companies, that number was 14.4 percent.)“Our hope is that the MIA Report Card, especially coming on the heels of the Annenberg study, will spur more conversations and efforts towards, in some cases, disruptive change,” Naima Cochrane, a journalist and former label executive who was the author of the Black Music Action Coalition’s study, wrote.Most companies named in the report, including each of the three major record conglomerates, declined to comment about it. But some within the industry privately complained that the study was inconsistent or incomplete.A total of 18 companies were examined in the report. While record labels were given letter grades, other types of companies, like streaming services, talent agencies and concert promoters, were rated on whether their efforts were “satisfactory.” Whole areas of the business, including radio and artist management, were not addressed. The coalition said the study would be expanded in coming years.“Our data is only as good as the record industry’s willingness to cooperate in providing information,” Binta Niambi Brown, the coalition’s co-chairman, said in a statement.Pandora, the internet radio giant that is owned by SiriusXM, was one of the few whose efforts were deemed “unsatisfactory,” although scant reasons were given for that rating. “Because Pandora has traded on its familiarity with Black and Latinx listeners and their impact on culture,” the report said, “we expected a more significant commitment from them.”In response, Nicole Hughey, the head of diversity and inclusion at SiriusXM, said the company has given money to organizations and pursued specific campaigns against racism in the audio business.“We support BMAC’s mission, but were disappointed and surprised by the Unsatisfactory rating given to Pandora in their recent report card, given our strong passion and commitment to fighting racism and promoting racial equality,” Ms. Hughey said in a statement.“There is always more work to be done, within our company and across the music industry,” she added, “and we will continue that work tirelessly.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      New Report Paints Bleak Picture of Diversity in the Music Industry

      by

      The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative examined 4,060 executives at six types of companies, and found 19.8 percent were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.A year ago, as protests spread across the country following the murder of George Floyd, the music industry promised to change.Major record labels, streaming platforms and broadcasters pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable donations. The diversity of the music industry itself — a business that relies heavily on the creative labor of Black artists — came under scrutiny, with calls to hire more people of color and to elevate women and minorities into management and decision-making positions.But how diverse is the music business? The answer, according to a new study: not very.A report by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California, released Tuesday, examined the makeup of 4,060 executives, at the vice president level and above, at 119 companies of six types: corporate music groups, record labels, music publishers, radio broadcasters, streaming services and live music companies.Among those executives, 19.8 percent were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, including 7.5 percent who were Black. Women made up 35.3 percent of the total.Delving deeper into the numbers, the authors of the 25-page report, led by Stacy L. Smith and Carmen Lee, found that the representation of women and minorities seemed to shrink as they looked higher up music companies’ organization charts.After filtering out subsidiaries, the researchers looked at the uppermost leadership positions — chief executives, chairmen and presidents — in a subset of 70 major and independent companies, and found that 86.1 percent of those people were both white and male. The 10 people of color who held those positions were all at independents, and just two were women: Desiree Perez, a longtime associate of Jay-Z who leads his company Roc Nation, and Golnar Khosrowshahi, the founder of Reservoir, which owns music rights.The report includes some stark findings. For example, among the 4,060 people in the study’s sample, the researchers found 17.7 white male executives for every Black female one.“Underrepresented and Black artists are dominating the charts, but the C-suite is a ‘diversity desert,’” Dr. Smith said in a statement. “The profile of top artists may give some in the industry the illusion that music is an inclusive business, but the numbers at the top tell a different story.”Each year since 2018, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has tracked the artists, songwriters and producers behind the biggest hits. Again and again, it has found that women are far outnumbered by men, yet revealed some encouraging numbers for underrepresented groups: People of color have made up about 47 percent of the credited artists behind 900 top pop songs since 2012.Yet the group’s new report, called “Inclusion in the Music Business: Gender & Race/Ethnicity Across Executives, Artists & Talent Teams,” and sponsored by Universal Music Group, shows that women and people of color are poorly represented in the power structure of the industry itself.The variation across different job levels and industry sectors is notable. Black executives fared best within record labels, making up 14.4 percent of all positions, and 21.2 percent of artist-and-repertoire, or A&R, roles, which tend to work most closely with artists. Black people hold just 4 percent of executive jobs in radio, and 3.3 percent in live music.According to U.S. census data, 13.4 percent of Americans identify as Black.Women posted their highest executive numbers in the live music business, holding 39.1 percent of positions. But drilling down, the study found, most of those women were white. Even at record labels, where Black executives were best represented, Black women held only 5.3 percent of executive jobs.The U.S.C. report is one of a number of efforts underway to examine the music industry and evaluate its progress in reaching stated goals of diversity and inclusion. This week, the Black Music Action Coalition, a group of artist managers, lawyers and other insiders, is expected to release a “report card” on how well the industry has met its own commitments to change.Much of the data used in the U.S.C. report, the researchers said, came from publicly available sources, like company websites. The report suggests that a lack of participation in the study by music companies was a reason.“Companies were given the opportunity to participate and confirm information, especially of senior management teams,” the report says. “Roughly a dozen companies did so. The vast majority did not.”The authors of the report, who also include Marc Choueiti, Katherine Pieper, Zoe Moore, Dana Dinh and Artur Tofan, said they want to spur the industry toward change. The report recommends a number of steps that companies can take to make their executive ranks more diverse, including making career pathways more flexible and “fast tracking” leaders with support and mentoring.“Our hope,” Dr. Lee said, “is that the industry will come together to tackle this problem in a way that creates meaningful progress.” More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      How Jodie Turner-Smith Is Reshaping Anne Boleyn's Story

      by

      Jodie Turner-Smith portrays the ill-fated wife of Henry VIII in a new mini-series. The show has stirred debate in Britain, which is sort of the point.LONDON — Britain’s most recent rendering of the story of Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry VIII’s six wives, begins at the end. When the new mini-series “Anne Boleyn” opens, it’s 1536, the queen is pregnant and powerful — and has five months left to live.Anne’s story, which occupies a special place in the British collective imagination, has spawned an abundance of fictionalized depictions onscreen (“The Tudors”) and in literature (“Wolf Hall”). It is generally told as a morally dubious young woman seducing an older king into leaving his wife and his church, before she is executed for failing to give birth to a male heir.But the new mini-series, which premiered last week on Channel 5, one of Britain’s public service broadcasters, attempts to reframe Anne’s story, instead focusing on her final months and how she tried to maintain power in a system that guaranteed her very little.In the three episode-long series, Anne is played by Jodie Turner-Smith, best-known for her role in the film “Queen & Slim.” It is the first time a Black actress has portrayed the Tudor queen onscreen.“We wanted to find someone who could really inhabit her but also be surprising to an audience,” Faye Ward, one of the show’s executive producers, said in an interview. Since there were already so many depictions of Anne Boleyn, the show’s creators “wanted to reset people’s expectations of her,” Ward said.Turner-Smith’s Anne Boleyn, center, desperately tries to maintain power in a system that guarantees her very little.Sony Pictures TelevisionAnne (Turner-Smith) and her brother George (Paapa Essiedu).Sony Pictures TelevisionMadge Shelton (Thalissa Teixeira), Anne’s cousin and lady-in-waiting.Sony Pictures TelevisionThe series employs a diverse casting playbook, in a similar vein to the Regency-era Netflix drama “Bridgerton.” But whereas that show’s characters are fictional, in “Anne Boleyn” actors of color play several white historical figures: The British-Ghanian actor Paapa Essiedu plays Anne’s brother George Boleyn, and the British-Brazillian actress Thalissa Teixeira portrays Madge Shelton, Anne’s cousin and lady-in-waiting.Although race does not figure overtly in the show’s plot, the program makers adopted an approach known as “identity-conscious casting,” which allows actors to bring “all those factors of yourself to a role,” Ward said.For Turner-Smith, that meant connecting her experiences with the ways in which Anne, who was raised in the French court, was an outsider and suffered at Henry’s court.“As a Black woman, I can understand being marginalized. I have a lived experience of what limitation and marginalization feel like,” Turner-Smith, 34, said in an interview. “I thought it was interesting to bring the freshness of a Black body telling that story.”Casting Turner-Smith as one of Britain’s best-known royal consorts has caused debate in the press and particularly on social media in Britain, with “Anne Boleyn” trending on Twitter the day after the series premiere.In the newspaper The Daily Telegraph, the writer Marianka Swain called Turner-Smith’s casting “pretty cynical” and wrote that it was designed to have “Twitter frothing rather than adding anything to our understanding of an era.”Others, though, have welcomed the show’s perspective. Olivette Otele, a professor of the history of slavery and memory of enslavement at the University of Bristol, noted in The Independent newspaper that the series arrived at a time when Britain was “soul searching” about how to understand its colonial past. “The past is only a safe space if it becomes a learning space open to all,” she wrote in praise of the series.It was important to the show’s creators to center the narrative around Anne’s perspective, rather than Henry’s (played by Mark Stanley).Sony Pictures TelevisionDuring the show’s press run, Turner-Smith’s comments about the royal family’s treatment of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex — including that having her in the family was “a missed opportunity” for the monarchy — made headlines in Britain.Meghan’s treatment by the palace — which she told Oprah Winfrey in a bombshell March interview had driven her to thoughts of suicide — is representative of “just how far we have not come with patriarchal values,” Turner-Smith said.“It represents how far we have not come in terms of the monarchy and in terms of somebody being an outsider and being different, and being able to navigate that space,” she said, adding that “you can draw so many parallels if you look for them” between Anne and Meghan’s attempts to figure out life within a British palace.“There is very little room for someone brown to touch the monarchy,” said Turner-Smith — who, upon being cast as Anne, fully expected the move to draw criticism in the country.For the actress, that presented even more reason to push back against people’s assumptions about Anne. “Art is supposed to challenge you,” she said. “The whole point of making it this way was for a different perspective. What is going to resonate with somebody by putting a different face to this and seeing it in a different way?”Dr. Stephanie Russo, the author of “The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen,” said there were many reasons for Britain’s fascination with and attachment to the Tudors, and Anne specifically. The “soap opera” of a younger woman disrupting a long-term marriage remains fascinating, she said, as does the rise and fall of a powerful woman.There is also a patriotic element, Russo said: Anne’s daughter was Elizabeth I, the monarch who oversaw Britain’s “golden age,” when William Shakespeare was writing his plays and many historians credit the British Empire as having been born.The series was conceived as a feminist exercise, unpacking what Eve Hedderwick Turner, the show’s writer, called “those big, insulting and detrimental terms” attached to Anne, which at the time included accusations of treason, adultery and an incestuous relationship with her brother.“There is very little room for someone brown to touch the monarchy,” Turner-Smith said.Sony Pictures TelevisionIn the mini-series, Anne falls out of favor with Henry after a stillbirth. No matter how nominally powerful or ambitious she is, she is no match for the forces that seek to extinguish her, which come to include her husband, his advisers and the country’s legal system. All the while, she tries not to show vulnerability in public.It was important, Hedderwick Turner said, for the creators to put “Anne back in the center of her story, making her the protagonist, seeing everything from her perspective.”The political machinations of Henry VIII and his advisers, his internal life and his motivations are largely obscured in the series. Instead, viewers are privy to Anne’s state of mind and her relationship with her household’s ladies-in-waiting.“Henry is spoken about as this great man, because he had all of these wives” and killed some of them, Turner-Smith said. “It’s just like: Actually, there’s a woman at the center of this story who is so dynamic and fascinating and interesting.”Hilary Mantel, the author of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy charting Thomas Cromwell’s life serving Henry VIII, wrote in a 2013 piece for the London Review of Books about how fictionalized accounts of Anne’s life communicate society’s contemporary attitudes toward women.“Popular fiction about the Tudors has also been a form of moral teaching about women’s lives, though what is taught varies with moral fashion,” she said.What, then, does this “Anne Boleyn” say about today’s world?“We’re finally getting to a place where we’re allowing women to become more than just a trope,” Turner-Smith said.Traditionally, when playing a female character, “you’re either the Madonna or you’re the whore, right?” she said. But in this series, “We’re saying we’re unafraid to show different sides of a woman.” More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Chris Harrison Has Officially Left ‘The Bachelor’

      by

      The longtime host permanently parted ways with the reality franchise after stepping back in February.Chris Harrison, the longtime host of “The Bachelor,” “The Bachelorette” and “Bachelor in Paradise,” has parted ways with the reality TV franchise after nearly 20 years as its most constant presence.His departure, which was first reported by Deadline on Tuesday, comes several months after a much-criticized exchange with a previous Bachelorette about racism, which led Mr. Harrison to step back temporarily from his role as host. It also immediately follows Monday night’s premiere of the first season not hosted by Mr. Harrison since the series’ debut in 2002.Mr. Harrison was fundamental to the narrative arc of each season of “The Bachelor” and its spinoff shows, playing the role of M.C., conflict mediator and even onscreen dad to the contestants — all while talent scouting and orchestrating drama, with the help of producers, behind the scenes.“I’ve had a truly incredible run as host of The Bachelor franchise and now I’m excited to start a new chapter,” Mr. Harrison wrote on Instagram on Tuesday. “I’m so grateful to Bachelor Nation for all of the memories we’ve made together. While my two-decade journey is wrapping up, the friendships I’ve made will last a lifetime.”Warner Horizon and ABC Entertainment, which produce and distribute the series, wrote in an email statement: “Chris Harrison is stepping aside as host of ‘The Bachelor’ franchise. We are thankful for his many contributions over the past 20 years and wish him all the best on his new journey.”The Deadline story alluded to an eight-figure payout for Mr. Harrison, which The Times could not confirm.Mr. Harrison’s exit was prefigured in an announcement in February that he would be “stepping aside” from the show “for a period of time” after a heated conversation with Rachel Lindsay, the first Black Bachelorette, in which he downplayed her concerns about the past conduct of Rachael Kirkconnell, a contestant on this year’s season of “The Bachelor.”Before the series finale, a photo had surfaced of Ms. Kirkconnell attending an “Old South” antebellum-themed sorority party in 2018, where she and other attendees dressed in period attire. Ms. Kirkconnell, who is white, was a clear front-runner on Matt James’s season — the first with a Black male lead. (She eventually received the final rose.)Ms. Lindsay had expressed concerns about Ms. Kirkconnell’s attendance of such an event, as well as that she had not thought to tell Mr. James about it. Mr. Harrison vigorously and reflexively defended Ms. Kirkconnell, suggesting that she wouldn’t have known better in 2018.He assailed Ms. Kirkconnell’s critics as being “judge, jury, executioner.”“People are just tearing this girl’s life apart,” he said. “It’s just unbelievably alarming to watch this.”He later apologized on Instagram. “I invoked the term ‘woke police,’ which is unacceptable,” Mr. Harrison wrote, adding, using an abbreviation for Black and Indigenous people and people of color: “I am ashamed over how uninformed I was. I was so wrong. To the Black community, to the BIPOC community: I am so sorry. My words were harmful.”“This historic season of ‘The Bachelor’ should not be marred or overshadowed by my mistakes or diminished by my actions,” he wrote.Ms. Kirkconnell also posted an apology on Instagram. While she did not directly confirm the veracity of the party photos or other content posted online, she said her actions had been racist.“I’m here to say I was wrong,” she wrote in her post. “I was ignorant, but my ignorance was racist.”The interaction between Mr. Harrison and Ms. Lindsay was notable because the “Bachelor” franchise had long been criticized for its lack of diverse contestants. Before Ms. Lindsay’s season, nearly all of the previous 33 Bachelors and Bachelorettes had been white.And as the Bachelorette, Ms. Lindsay could not escape racism in the form of microaggressions and, seemingly, sabotage. One potential suitor greeted her by saying, “I’m ready to go Black and I’m never going to go back,” and another referred to her as “a girl from the hood.” A third contestant, Lee Garrett, bad-mouthed several Black contestants to Ms. Lindsay, using words including “aggressive,” “big,” “angry” and “violent.” (Tweets attributed to Mr. Garrett that surfaced during Ms. Lindsay’s season equated the NAACP with the KKK.)At the time of Mr. Harrison’s exchange with Ms. Lindsay over the “Old South” party in February, she was a correspondent on “Extra,” interviewing him for the show.After, Ms. Lindsay addressed the interaction on a podcast she co-hosts. She said Mr. Harrison had apologized to her but said she was “having a really, really hard time” accepting his apology.“I can’t take it anymore,” she said, speaking broadly about her frustration with the franchise’s handling of race. “I’m contractually bound in some ways, but when it’s up — I am so — I can’t, I can’t do it anymore.”Though the franchise has not named a permanent replacement host, there are some temporary ones lined up for the next few seasons. This season of “The Bachelorette” is hosted by Tayshia Adams and Kaitlyn Bristowe, two former Bachelorettes. When it airs this summer, “Bachelor in Paradise” will be guest-hosted by David Spade. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      A Writer’s One-Act Plays Debut, Continuing Her Resurrection

      by

      By staging Kathleen Collins’s rich psychological portraits of Black women, a theatrical group aims to enlighten, heal and inspire.“No one is going to mythologize my life,” the playwright and filmmaker Kathleen Collins said in 1984 to a group of film students at Howard University. “No one is going to refuse me the right to explore my experiences of life as normal experiences.”Collins’s insistence on portraying the ordinariness of African American women’s lives rather than reproducing the Hollywood narratives that pathologized or mythologized them is resonating with a new generation of Black women artists who have recently discovered Collins and her work. Part of what makes Collins’s writing so appealing is her attention to the complex internal struggles and external journeys, of what Elizabeth Alexander calls those “Bohemian Black women” who often work as artists and academics, and have a robust intellectual life. Because she renders them with such care and imbues them with such vulnerability, her characters have heightened insights and are aware that they are both liberated and alienated by their knowledge of how others see and stereotype them.Such rich psychological portraits of Black women are what originally drew Afrofemononomy, a group of Black femme theater artists, to Collins’s plays. In addition to adapting that Howard University speech into a monologue, they are also performing “Begin the Beguine,” a quartet of Collins’s one-acts that have never been produced before.Over the past two weekends, under a program titled “Work the Roots,” Afrofemononomy performed the title play “Begin the Beguine,” about the actress Ruby Dee and her son, the blues guitarist Guy Davis, as well as “The Healing,” “The Reading” and “Remembrance” at various locations in New York City (from a lawn in Harlem to a park in Bedford-Stuyvesant). On Saturday, May 29, they will present the premiere of a mixed-media installation called “Gold Taste” that is a response to “The Essentialisn’t,” a theatrical work by one of the group’s members, Eisa Davis. The piece will be available for viewing until June 27 at Performance Space New York’s Keith Haring Theater.Jennifer Harrison Newman dances with audience members as part of the performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe debut of Collins’s plays is part of a continuing resurrection of her works after her death from breast cancer in 1988 at the age of 46. Largely because of her daughter Nina Lorez Collins’s commitment to preserving her mother’s legacy, we are now able to access the gifts of Collins’s ambitions and archive, including the theatrical release in 2015 of her 1982 film, “Losing Ground”; the publication of her short story collection “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” in 2016; and, in 2019, the arrival of “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” a mélange of her short stories, plays, diary entries and film scripts.Davis, an actress and playwright recently seen in HBO’s “Mare of Easttown,” first became acquainted with Collins’s writing when she was asked to do a public reading of Collins’s short stories at the Brooklyn Public Library in 2017. But, she now realizes, Collins has been with her a lot longer. “She is a literary foremother for me that has just been under my nose all this time,” Davis said. “When Nina first gave me these plays, I was like, ‘Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Collins,’ and then I looked at my bookshelf and I found ‘9 Plays by Black Women,’ an anthology from the 1980s, and her ‘The Brothers’ in there. It’s the only play of hers that was ever produced, [a production of the Women’s Project, now WP Theater] at American Place Theater.”A line from Collins’s play “Remembrance” on a wall at Performance Space New York reads, “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOnce she read Collins’s other plays, she immediately shared them with her friends and other Black female theater artists with whom she frequently collaborated in the most quotidian of ways: over dinner, on museum trips and visits to the beach, via texts, after seeing plays together, and, in the past year, over Zoom. By 2019, their casual interest in Collins’s plays turned into the more concrete idea of staging and sharing them with the broader public.“In a lot of ways, this was an attempt to take the model of our friendship and then apply it to the conditions under which we collaborate,” Davis said.The director Lileana Blain-Cruz (“Marys Seacole”) said learning about Collins’s plays enabled her to take different risks. For the project, she has thoughtfully transformed Collins’s “The Reading,” a 30-minute play that anticipated our conversations about racial microaggressions today. Set in a Black psychic’s waiting room, a tense conversation ensues between Marguerite (Kara Young), a Black fashion designer, and Helen (Amelia Workman), a white romance novelist. As Helen tries to assert her entitlement, Marguerite pushes back, and eventually denies Helen an opportunity to take up the space that she, as a white woman, feels obligated to inhabit.Amelia Workman in “The Reading.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAudience members at the performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFood, books and more were on display.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“For me, the celebration and the exploration collectively around Kathleen Collins’s work is another way of seeing each other before we even knew how to see each other in existence and collectivity,” she said. “That, for me, is really moving because I was like, ‘Oh, this is somebody that I should have known.’” She added, “Now I get to discover, and I don’t have to discover alone.”In addition to the moving performance by individual actors, these plays, which were not open to critics to review, were made even more engaging because of the casting and staging. Collins wrote “The Healing” and “The Reading” with white characters but because Afrofemononomy cast from within their group, they provided a space in which Black actresses were always front and center. This gesture was intensified by the intimacy of their set. At the end of “The Reading,” the audience was led by the actress Jennifer Harrison Newman to dance with the cast, an invitation that turned the luminescent installation and graffiti scrawled wall that read “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God” (a line from another Collins play in the quartet) into a communal party celebrating Black women’s creativity.April Matthis, left, and Stacey Karen Robinson perform “Begin the Beguine,” by Kathleen Collins, at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy inviting us to these tender moments in which Collins’s Black female characters pull back their layers, the performances themselves transport both those fictional characters and this real-life Black cast far beyond the strict racial and gender categories that envelop them and us.“These are stories about the interior lives of Black women,” Nina Lorez Collins told me. “One of the reasons I like the “Begin the Beguine” is because it is about race, but it is also not. It’s really about the interior life of this artist, this young woman. And I just don’t think we’ve seen anything like it.” As avant-garde as Collins’s characters were in her time, they still remain singular today, giving us rare social insights into how we can navigate our unique moment of slowly returning to each other, to public spaces, and ultimately, live, in-person performances. In the foreword to “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” the fiction writer Danielle Evans described Collins as “a master of the moments when the interior becomes the exterior, when all pretense drops away.”This blurring between our inner selves and the identities projected back onto Black women was at the heart of Afrofemononomy’s take on “Remembrance,” described as “a kind of personal séance.” Under the directorial consultation of Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview”) and featuring Davis as The Woman and Kaneza Schaal as Collins talking to the Howard students, this becomes a conversation between two Black women who, while each giving their own monologue — one taking place in a bathroom, the other at a lectern — end up, at times, dissolving into each other. All the while they demand the audience see Black women in public with the same clarity that we see ourselves in private.April Matthis and Stacey Karen Robinson performed “Begin the Beguine” at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut such revelations and reversal of gazes will also be critical to large swaths of the American theater community that is still grappling with debates about inclusion, equity and white gatekeepers as it seeks to attend to the harm of racism, and institutionalize the healing that Collins’s vision offers for her Black characters and for the Black female theater artists who embody them.After spending two weeks performing, and a couple of years studying Collins, Afrofemononomy decided to close with Davis’s music theater piece “The Essentialisn’t” in the group installation “Gold Taste,” and reimagine a much earlier moment when the Harlem Renaissance writers W.E.B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen debated racial representations in their era. It begins with the ever vexed question, “Can You Be Black and Not Perform?”Extending Collins’s legacy to Davis, the Afrofemononomy member Kaneza Schaal said, “Eisa is [also] sitting on a trove of plays she has written. And it is up to us, to see to it, that our own daughters are not the first people to produce that work.” She continued, “It is urgent to address Davis and Collins simultaneously. The intellectual harmony Eisa creates with her foremothers is astounding, and yet another extension of this fabric.”The Essentialisn’t: Gold Taste installationMay 29-June 27 at Performance Space New York, 150 First Avenue; performancespacenewyork.org. More

    • 38 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      That ‘Ziwe’ Look

      by

      On her new Showtime series, Ziwe Fumudoh’s feminine-with-a-wink style enables her sharp comedy.In the first episode of her new variety series on Showtime, the comedian Ziwe Fumudoh asks the writer Fran Lebowitz: “What bothers you more: slow walkers or racism?”“This character is hyperbolic,” Ms. Fumudoh said a few days before the premiere of “Ziwe.” “It’s only hyperbole that somebody would ask that question. And you see that reflected in how I dress.”Ms. Fumudoh was explaining how the wardrobe for the series came together: a tornado of pink that has sucked up a few feather boas, a mountain of crystal embellishments and an assortment of fuzzy hats, plastic visors, tiny sunglasses and opera gloves. When the costume designer Pamela Shepard-Hill would add a ring to an outfit, Ms. Fumudoh would ask for six more, “and then let’s do a cuff that’s entirely made of diamonds,” she said.On “Ziwe,” whether during a confrontational interview or parody music video, Ms. Fumudoh plays an audacious, quick-witted consumerist, whose attitude and armor is inspired by an unholy marriage of Dionne from “Clueless” and Paris Hilton in “The Simple Life,” along with a few other ultrafeminine pop culture figures of the 1990s and aughts. (In a sketch about plastic surgery, she wears matching pink sweatpants and a sleeveless crop top, wordlessly making a reference to Amy Poehler’s desperate mom from “Mean Girls.”)As a comedian who became famous for making people uncomfortable with questions about race and class, Ms. Fumudoh, 29, uses fashion like a weapon, creating an air of innocence with her Delia’s catalog looks, then slicing through it with the sharp heel of a Barbie stiletto.She is also an exceptionally physical performer, writhing and jumping through her musical numbers, whether channeling a jazzy “Chicago” siren or a girl-group member, circa 1999. Extensive legs-in-the-air choreography had to be taken into consideration when planning her ensembles, Ms. Shepard-Hill said.Ms. Fumudoh, in a LaQuan Smith catsuit, rose to prominence on Instagram Live, wearing equally bold outfits and makeup.Greg Endries/Showtime“We would have fittings, and I would be like, ‘OK, do your choreography,’” she said. “Then instantly: ‘That’s inappropriate. Take that off. That’s actually not OK for Showtime.”For the music videos in particular, hyperbolic Ziwe borrows from the real Ziwe’s closet. In a song called “Stop Being Poor” (a joke, in Episode 3, about people who believe being poor is a choice), Ms. Fumudoh wears a skintight all-crystal minidress by Aidan Euan of Akna.“How absurd is it to have a dress that luxurious in a time like this?” she said. “It so encapsulates the idea of ‘Stop Being Poor’ that I got it for ‘Stop Being Poor’ before we even wrote the song ‘Stop Being Poor,’ when I just knew that it was something I wanted to do.”In the 1920s-inspired number “Lisa Called the Cops on Black People,” she wears her own off-the-shoulder black velvet-and-mesh catsuit by LaQuan Smith.When putting together a mood board for the show, Ms. Shepard-Hill included iconic — a favorite “Ziwe” adjective — models like Donyale Luna and Naomi Campbell, as well as rappers like Rico Nasty and Saweetie. She included Josephine Baker, the music-hall star and World War II spy, too.“It was a real range of women that span time but are all iconic in their visuals, iconic in their style and sensibility,” said Ms. Shepard Hill, 37, who is also a stylist and instructor at Parsons School of Design.But in creating her wardrobe, Ms. Fumudoh was also thinking about the white comedians who dominate late-night TV and how to portray herself as the opposite of the suit-wearing men she calls “Jimmy, Jimmy, John, John,” whose wood-heavy sets are “really, really masculine — all blues and blacks and sharp images.”Ms. Fumudoh credits “Legally Blonde,” Rihanna and Lindsay Lohan (among others) as influences on her character’s style.Greg Endries/Showtime“If all of late night is painted with masculinity, my show is hyper-feminine,” she said. “I wear a lot of sparkles. You would never have seen John Oliver in a choker.“When I was growing up, and especially when I first started in media, the idea was to downplay your femininity. If a woman wants to be taken seriously, she wears glasses and pants and she talks with a lower voice like she works for Theranos.”On the wall of the set where Ms. Fumudoh conducts her interviews, there’s a large photo of a young Oprah Winfrey, who deeply influenced “Ziwe,” Ms. Fumudoh said. The Meghan Markle and Prince Harry interview was broadcast the night before the team began cutting the show, and the drama of it “really shaped the way we framed every episode.” It’s not a stretch to imagine Ziwe delivering the same scene-stealing “silent or silenced” line.There’s something else about the plastered photo of Ms. Winfrey that feels tied to “Ziwe”: In it, she’s wearing pink and pearls. Early in her career, Ms. Winfrey found a way to ask tough questions while communicating her femininity.In the first episode of “Ziwe,” when Ms. Fumudoh sits across from Ms. Lebowitz, Ms. Fumudoh wears a short black blazer dress with electric pink lapels, and her own thigh-high chunky-heel leather boots. It’s not a designer piece; it’s available at AD Los Angeles for $149.Despite the opulent aesthetic of “Ziwe,” the costume budget was somewhat limited, in part because it’s a new show, Ms. Shepard-Hill said. The dream, if there’s a second season? “A whole in-house team, where everything could be custom-built from head to toe,” she said.The blazer dress outfit was originally intended for a sketch in which Ziwe, channeling a billionaire Marilyn Monroe acolyte, announces her candidacy for New York City mayor. (“Gone are the days of old white men abusing the office of the mayor to do crooked favors for their ugly friends. Because I don’t have any friends, and I only do favors for myself.”)But Ms. Fumudoh felt strongly about wearing it for the first episode instead, using it to set that subversive anti-late-night host tone for the series.“That pink lapel is such a splash accent that it really captures what the show is,” she said. “All the outfits are telling a story in, like, 19 different ways, beyond the actual text that we write and say.” More