Women and Girls

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      How ‘Rocks’ Made Stars of Its Schoolgirl Cast

      by

      By casting first-time actors, the film tells a story rarely seen onscreen: what growing up is like for British women of color.LONDON — Bukky Bakray never thought acting was a real possibility for her. So she’s struggling to get her head around winning a BAFTA — the British equivalent of an Oscar — for her first role.“It’s kind of unbelievable,” Bakray, 19, said in a video interview recently, searching for the words to describe her win for playing the titular character in the coming-of-age movie “Rocks.” “I just didn’t expect it at all.”“It still doesn’t really feel real to me,” said Bukky Bakray of winning the Rising Star Award at this year’s BAFTAs.BAFTA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt the BAFTA ceremony on April 10, Bakray took home the Rising Star Award and was also nominated in the leading actress category alongside the likes of Frances McDormand for “Nomadland” and Wunmi Mosaku for “His House.”Bakray said, “Sometimes when I look back at the pictures I’m like, ‘Did this actually happen?’”“I just feel really blessed,” she added.“Rocks” — which was the most-nominated film at this year’s BAFTAs — was released in Britain last fall to critical acclaim, and is now streaming on Netflix in the United States. The movie was shot in the summer of 2018, when Bakray was 15 and a student at a school in East London. Like most of the cast, she was discovered through open auditions and workshops at schools and youth clubs in the city.In the film, Bakray plays Olushola Joy Omotoso, known as Rocks, a 15-year-old British-Nigerian girl whose life is upended when her mother, who struggles with her mental health, disappears, leaving only an apology note and some cash. Rocks is left to care for her 7-year-old brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu), doing whatever she can to evade an intervention by the social services.“Rocks” is equal parts joyful and heart-rending: an ode to friendship and the beauty of girlhood, but also a deeply affecting exploration of how external forces can threaten the blossoming of those things.For many women who have been educated in London’s public school system, the scenes in Rocks’ East London school will feel deeply familiar and authentic. The girls dance and make up raps, and treat each other with a mix of impertinence and genuine love and care. In the school’s bathroom, we see Rocks’ best friend Sumaya, played by the British-Somali actress Kosar Ali, talk her through using a tampon for the first time.The director, Sarah Gavron, said in an interview that the idea for the film had started to emerge when she was traveling for her 2015 historical drama “Suffragette.” At screenings, she said, she heard young women connecting women’s suffrage to their own lives and concerns, piquing her interest in what contemporary girlhood was like. So she approached the producer Faye Ward with an idea: What if they made a film about girlhood and built it with the girls themselves?Having such an open-ended idea bred collaboration at all levels, Gavron said. “Everybody sort of fed into it because it was a bit like, ‘We don’t have a road map, how are we going to do this?’”The director Sarah Gavron, center, on the set of “Rocks” with, from left, Tawheda Begum, Afi Okaidja, Kosar Ali and Bukky Bakray.Charlotte Croft/AltitudeThe research process was kicked off by Lucy Pardee, the film’s casting director, who has built a reputation for discovering talent and who also won a BAFTA for her work on “Rocks.” She spent time sitting at the back of classrooms trying to glean the rhythms of teenagers’ lives, she said in an interview. It was during this phase that Gavron and Pardee first met Bakray.“We didn’t want to do that thing that lots of adults do, which is project our own memories and sense of what being a teenager was onto modern teenagers,” Pardee said in a video interview. “We wanted to get a sense of what their dramas were, what their lives were.”Open auditions were held to find the cast (Pardee and her associate Jessica Straker saw about 1,300 girls), while workshops were run with teenagers to help build the world and characters around the story that Theresa Ikoko, a British-Nigerian playwright, and Claire Wilson, a television writer, had in mind. Out of those processes, the main cast emerged.While the young actors don’t play themselves in “Rocks,” they were able to feed into the development of the characters. Ikoko brought the scene breakdowns to the actors and asked them to complete exercises, such as writing a diary for their character and deciding what their character’s favorite songs were. That information then informed the script.The actors’ essence was also a big part of the writing process, Ikoko said in an interview. She recalled speaking to Anastasia Dymitrow, who plays a character called Sabina, about her pride in identifying as Polish Gypsy. The comment was ultimately included in the film, when Dymitrow’s character talks about her grandparents and their imprisonment in Auschwitz.Referring to the process, Bakray said, “I’d never felt listened to like that before in my life,” recalling that a stray comment she had made about how she used to ritually buy a cake after school with a friend had ended up in a draft of the script. “It made you feel like you had something of substance to say,” she added.During the script’s development process, the actors’ own lives and backgrounds became part of their characters’ stories.Altitude“Rocks” is unusual even among Black British films, which are more likely to follow the narratives of young Black men.For many British women of color, the opportunity to see their lives and experiences reflected so accurately in film is extremely rare. Tobi Oredein, the founder of Black Ballad, an online platform for Black British women, wrote last year, “For the first time in my life, I saw a girl who looked similar to me and my friends as we ran around secondary school trying to figure friendships, education and life at large.”Ikoko — who hadn’t co-written a film before “Rocks” — credited Gavron and Ward for getting the movie made.“I wouldn’t have been able to make this film if I said ‘I want to make a film about being a young girl from Hackney,’” Ikoko said.“There needed to be a first, and the way the industry is set up, firsts have to happen when people like Sarah and Faye use their power and their privilege and share that and open those doors,” she added.When it came to shooting, the filmmakers were aware of practices or “invisible” training that could make it easier for the first-time actors. During preparation workshops, the girls were filmed so that they would become accustomed to being on camera, and the movie was shot in chronological order to help them to get into the story.There were a lot of scenes that required vulnerability, and the production gave the cast space to try and display those emotions.Bakray said that putting such feelings out in the open was tough. “Pre-shooting, we had a lot of conversations, because they were getting young women that were from backgrounds where we weren’t necessarily emotionally available, that’s not how we grew up,” she said.“We grew up to be strong,” she addedBakray likened her time on the film to an education. “‘Rocks’ was a university,” she said. “They weren’t just preparing us to act for ‘Rocks,’ but they were preparing us to act for the foreseeable.”For many British women of color, “Rocks” offered an extremely rare opportunity to see their lives and experiences reflected accurately in film.AltitudeThree years after “Rocks” was filmed, members of the production team are still taking an active interest in the careers of the young actors they helped put onscreen.Bakray, who spoke from Birmingham, where she is currently filming her next project, said she had work through the end of the year. She said she planned to go to drama school and has auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.“I feel like kids are sponges,” she said. “And these guys caught me at my prime sponge phase.” More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Amplifying the Women Who Pushed Synthesizers Into the Future

      by

      Lisa Rovner’s “Sisters With Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines” spotlights the pioneers who harnessed technology to do more than “push around dead white men’s notes.”When you hear the phrase “electronic musician,” what sort of person do you picture? A pallid, wildly coifed young man hunched over an imposing smorgasbord of gear?I’m guessing the person you are imagining doesn’t look like Daphne Oram, with her cat-eye glasses, demure dresses and respectable 1950s librarian haircut. And yet Oram is a crucial figure of electronic music history — the co-founder of the BBC’s incalculably influential Radiophonic Workshop, the first woman to set up her own independent electronic music studio and now one of the worthy focal points of Lisa Rovner’s bewitching new documentary “Sisters With Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines.” (The movie is streaming through Metrograph’s virtual cinema from April 23 to May 6.)Born in 1925, Oram was an accomplished pianist who had been offered admission to the Royal Academy of Music. But she turned it down, having recently read a book that predicted, as she puts it in the film with a palpable sense of wonder, that “composers of the future would compose directly into sound rather than using orchestral instruments.”Oram wanted to be a composer of the future. She found fulfilling work at the BBC, which in the late 1940s had become a clearinghouse for tape machines and other electronic equipment left over from World War II. Gender norms liquefied during wartime, when factories and cutting-edge companies were forced to hire women in jobs that had previously been reserved only for men. Suddenly, for a fleeting and freeing moment, the rules did not apply.“Women were naturally drawn to electronic music,” Laurie Spiegel says in the film. “You didn’t have to be accepted by any of the male-dominated resources.”Carlo Carnevali/ via, Laurie Spiegel and Metrograph“Technology is a tremendous liberator,” the composer Laurie Spiegel says in Rovner’s film. “It blows up power structures. Women were naturally drawn to electronic music. You didn’t have to be accepted by any of the male-dominated resources: the radio stations, the record companies, the concert-hall venues, the funding organizations.”But in the years since, pioneering women like Oram and Spiegel have largely been written out of the genre’s popular history, leading people to assume, erroneously, that electronic music in its many iterations is and has always been a boys’ club. In a time when significant gender imbalances persist behind studio consoles and in D.J. booths, Rovner’s film prompts a still-worthwhile question: What happened?The primary aim of “Sisters With Transistors,” though, is to enliven these women’s fascinating life stories and showcase their music in all its dazzling glory. The film — narrated personably by Laurie Anderson — is a treasure trove of mesmerizing archival footage, spanning decades. The early Theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore gives a private concert on that ethereal instrument that one writer said sounds like the “singing of a soul.” The synthesizer whiz Suzanne Ciani demonstrates, to a very baffled David Letterman on a 1980 episode of his late-night talk show, just what the Prophet 5 synth can do. Maryanne Amacher rattles her younger acolyte Thurston Moore’s eardrums with the sheer house-shaking volume of her compositions.The doc’s archival footage includes Clara Rockmore giving a private Theremin concert.via The Clara Rockmore Foundation and MetrographMost hypnotic is a 1965 clip of Delia Derbyshire — Oram’s colleague at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who is perhaps best-known for composing the eerie original “Doctor Who” theme song — visibly enamored of her work as she gives a tutorial on creating music from tape loops, tapping her patent-leather sling-back flat to the beat she has just pulled out of thin air.Like Oram, Derbyshire’s fascination with technology and emergent forms of music came out of the war, when she was a child living in Coventry during the 1940 blitz experiencing air-raid sirens. “It’s an abstract sound, and it’s meaningful — and then the all-clear,” she says in the film. “Well, that’s electronic music!”These 20th-century girls were enchanted by the strange new sounds of modern life. In France, a young Éliane Radigue paid rapt attention to the overhead whooshes airplanes made as they approached and receded. Across continents, both Derbyshire and the American composer Pauline Oliveros were drawn to the crackling hiss of the radio, and even those ghostly sounds between stations. All of these frequencies beckoned them toward new kinds of music, liberated from the weight of history, tradition and the impulse to, as the composer Nadia Botello puts it, “push around dead white men’s notes.”The film includes footage of Maryanne Amacher cranking up her compositions.Peggy Weil/ via, Metrograph PictureFrom Ciani’s crystalline reveries to Amacher’s quaking drones, the sounds they made from these influences and technological advancements turned out to be as varied as the women themselves. Oliveros, who wrote a 1970 New York Times Op-Ed titled “And Don’t Call Them ‘Lady Composers,’” would likely deny that there was anything essential linking their music at all. But the common thread that Rovner finds is a tangible sense of awe — a certain engrossed exuberance on each woman’s face as she explains her way of working to curious camera crews and bemused interviewers. Every woman in this documentary looks like she was in on a prized secret that society had not yet decoded.Situating electronic music’s origins in awe and affect may be a political act in and of itself. In her 2010 book “Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound,” the writer and musician Tara Rodgers called for a history of electronic music “that motivates wonder and a sense of possibility instead of rhetoric of combat and domination.” Other scholars have suggested that electronic sound’s early, formative connection to military technology — the vocoder, for example, was first developed as an espionage device — contributed to its steady and limiting masculinized stereotyping over time.The pioneer Pauline Oliveros wrote a 1970 New York Times Op-Ed titled “And Don’t Call Them ‘Lady Composers.’” via Mills College and Metrograph PicturesAnd then there’s the commodifying force of capitalism. For a time in the 1970s — when much of the equipment used to make electronic music was prohibitively expensive — Spiegel worked on her compositions at Bell Labs, then a hotbed of scientific and creative experimentation. But as she recalls, the 1982 divestiture of AT&T had an unfortunate aftereffect: “Bell Labs became product-oriented instead of pure research. After I left there, I was absolutely desolate. I had lost my main creative medium.”Eventually, Spiegel took matters into her own hands, creating the early algorithmic music computing software Music Mouse in 1986. “What relates all of these women is this D.I.Y. thing,” Ramona Gonzalez, who records as Nite Jewel, says in the film. “And D.I.Y. is interesting because it doesn’t mean that you’ve explicitly, voluntarily chosen to do it yourself. It’s that there are certain barriers in place that don’t allow you to do anything.”Watching Rovner’s documentary, I could see unfortunate parallels with the film industry. Women were employed more steadily and often in more powerful positions during the early silent era than they would be for many years afterward, as Margaret Talbot noted several years ago in a piece for The New Yorker: The early industry hadn’t “yet locked in a strict division of labor by gender,” but in time, Hollywood “became an increasingly modern, capitalist enterprise,” and opportunities thinned for women.Suzanne Ciani, a synthesizer whiz who began working with the technology in the late 1960s.via Suzanne Ciani and Metrograph PicturesThe masculinization of electronic music likely resulted from a similar kind of streamlined codification in the profit-driven 1980s and beyond, though Rovner’s film does not linger very long on the question of what went wrong. It would take perhaps a more ambitious and less inspiring documentary to chart the forces that contributed to the cultural erasure of these women’s achievements.But “Sisters With Transistors” is a worthy corrective to a persistently myopic view of musical history, and a call to kindle something new from whatever it sparks in Daphne Oram’s revered “composers of the future.”“This is a time in which people feel that there are a lot of dead ends in music, that there isn’t a lot more to do,” Spiegel reflected a few decades ago, in a clip used in the film. “Actually, through the technology I experience this as quite the opposite. This is a period in which we realize we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible musically.” More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Ethel Gabriel, a Rare Woman in the Record World, Dies at 99

      by

      For much of her more than 40 years at RCA, Ms. Gabriel was a producer, overseeing “Living Strings” and other profitable lines.Ethel Gabriel, who in more than 40 years at RCA Victor is thought to have produced thousands of records, many at a time when almost no women were doing that work at major labels, died on March 23 in Rochester, N.Y. She was 99.Her nephew, Ed Mauro, her closest living relative, confirmed her death.Ms. Gabriel began working at RCA’s plant in Camden, N.J., in 1940 while a student at Temple University in Philadelphia. One of her early jobs was as a record tester — she would pull one in every 500 records and listen to it for manufacturing imperfections.“If it was a hit,” she told The Pocono Record of Pennsylvania in 2007, “I got to know every note because I had to play it over and over and over.”She also had a music background — she played trombone and had her own dance band in the 1930s and early ’40s — and her skill set earned her more and more responsibility, as well as the occasional role in shaping music history. She said she was on hand at the 1955 meeting in which the RCA executive Stephen Sholes signed Elvis Presley, who had been with Sun Records. She had a hand in “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” the 1955 instrumental hit by Pérez Prado that helped ignite a mambo craze in the United States.She may have produced or co-produced the album that contained that tune, but April Tucker, lead researcher on a documentary being made about Ms. Gabriel, said details on the early part of her career were hazy. Ms. Gabriel often said that she had produced some 2,500 records. Ms. Tucker said officials at Sony, which now holds RCA’s archives, had told her that the number may actually be higher, since contributions were not always credited.In any case, by the late 1950s Ms. Gabriel was in charge of RCA Camden Records, the company’s budget line, and was earning producer credits, something she continued to do into the 1980s.In 1959 she began the “Living Strings” series of easy-listening albums, consisting of orchestral renditions of popular and classical tunes (“Living Strings Play Music of the Sea,” “Living Strings Play Music for Romance” and many more), most of which were released on Camden. The line soon branched out into “Living Voices,” “Living Guitars” and other subsets and became a big profit-generator for RCA — which was not, Ms. Gabriel said, what the boss expected when he put her in charge of Camden, a struggling label at the time.“I’m sure he thought it was a way to get rid of me,” she told The Express-Times of Easton, Pa., in 1992 (too diplomatic to name the boss). “Well, I made a multimillion-dollar line out of it, conceived, programmed and produced the entire thing.”Ms. Gabriel with her fellow producers Don Wardell, left, and Alan Dell at the 1983 Grammy Awards. They shared the award for best historical album for “The Tommy Dorsey-Frank Sinatra Sessions.” Ed and Nancy MauroThere were other profitable series as well. Ms. Gabriel was particularly good at repackaging material from the RCA archives into albums that sold anew, as she did in the “Pure Gold” series. In 1983 she shared a Grammy Award for best historical album for “The Tommy Dorsey-Frank Sinatra Sessions” By the time she left RCA in 1984, she was a vice president.Yet, unlike the top male record executives of the era, she rarely made headlines. Ms. Tucker, an audio engineer, said she had never heard of Ms. Gabriel until one day she went searching to see if she could find out who the first female audio engineer was. She brought Ms. Gabriel to the attention of Sound Girls, an organization that promotes women in the audio field, and soon Caroline Losneck and Christoph Gelfand, documentary filmmakers, were at work on “Living Sound,” a film about her.Ms. Losneck, in a phone interview, said they had been hoping to complete the documentary by Ms. Gabriel’s 100th birthday this November.Ms. Losneck said Ms. Gabriel had survived in a tough business through productivity and competence.“She knew who to call when she needed an organist,” she said. “She knew how to manage the budget. All that gave her a measure of control.”Many of the records Ms. Gabriel made fit into a category often marginalized as elevator music.“It’s easy to look back on that music now and say it was kind of cheesy,” Ms. Losneck said, “but back then it was part of the cultural landscape.”Toward the end of her career, as more women began entering the field, Ms. Gabriel was both an example and a mentor. Nancy Jeffries, who went to work in RCA’s artists-and-repertoire department in 1974 and had earlier sung with the band the Insect Trust, was one of those who learned from her.“Being a woman and having ambition at a record company in those days was something that just didn’t compute with most of the male executive staff, but I was fortunate enough to land in the A&R department at RCA Records, where Ethel was established as a force to be reckoned with,” Ms. Jeffries, who went on to executive positions at RCA, Elektra and other record companies, said by email. “She had developed a couple of deals that, while they weren’t particularly ‘hip,’ generated a lot of income and financed some of the more speculative workings of the department. Lesson one: Make money for the company and they will leave you be.”Mr. Mauro summarized his aunt’s career simply:“She was successful early on when the playing field wasn’t level.”Ms. Gabriel, interviewed by The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1983, had a succinct explanation of her ability to thrive in a man’s world.“I didn’t know I was somewhere I shouldn’t be,” she said.Ethel Nagy was born on Nov. 16, 1921, in Milmont Park, Pa., near Philadelphia. Her father, Charles, who died when she was a teenager, was a machinist, and her mother, Margaret (Horvath) Nagy, took up ceramic sculpture later in life.Ms. Gabriel studied trombone in her youth and formed a band, En (her initials) and Her Royal Men, that played in the Philadelphia area. While at Temple she began working at RCA in nearby Camden putting labels on records and packed them before advancing to record tester.Ms. Gabriel at her home in Rochester, N.Y., in 2019. She had a succinct explanation of her ability to thrive in a man’s world: “I didn’t know I was somewhere I shouldn’t be.”Living Sound FilmAfter graduating in 1943, Ms. Gabriel continued her studies at Columbia University and worked at RCA’s offices in New York, including as secretary to Herman Diaz Jr., who led RCA’s Latin division. She spent a lot of time listening in on studio sessions, and by the mid-1950s trade publications were referring to her as an “RCA Victor executive.”In 1958 she married Gus Gabriel, who was in music publishing. The couple counted Frank Sinatra as a friend. In a 2011 interview with The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, she said that in 1973, when her husband was dying in a hospital, she walked into his room one day and found his nurses in a tizzy.“I asked, ‘What’s wrong?’” she recalled. “They said, ‘Oh, everybody got autographed pictures from Sinatra!’”Ms. Jeffries said that Ms. Gabriel had always mentored the women at the company no matter where they were on the corporate ladder. But her helping hand was extended to men, too, as the producer Warren Schatz found out when he joined RCA in the mid-1970s, as the disco wave was building.He had an idea for an album that might catch that wave, he said, and she came up with $6,000 to get it made. It was by the Brothers and included a song, “Are You Ready for This,” that became a dance-floor staple.“So Ethel basically started my life off at RCA,” Mr. Schatz said in a phone interview. Soon he was vice president of A&R, and she was reporting to him.“Whatever she wanted to do, I would just say yes to,” he said. “She was so calm, and so knowledgeable, and so self-sufficient.”Ms. Gabriel left RCA in 1984, in part, she said, at the urging of Robert B. Anderson, a former U.S. treasury secretary, who persuaded her to turn over to him her retirement package — more than $250,000 — so that he could invest it in the hope that the proceeds would finance future music ventures. The money disappeared, and Mr. Anderson, who died in 1989, was later convicted of tax evasion.Ms. Gabriel lived in the Poconos for a number of years before moving to a care center in Rochester to be near Mr. Mauro and his family. As she died at a hospital there, Mr. Mauro said, the staff had Sinatra songs playing in her room. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Erika Dickerson-Despenza Wins Blackburn Prize for ‘cullud wattah’

      by

      The play is about the effect of the Flint, Mich., water crisis on three generations of women.Erika Dickerson-Despenza quit her last non-theater job in 2019, ready to pursue a full-time career as a playwright in New York. And that career was looking good: she was wrapping up a fellowship at the Lark, starting a residency at the Public Theater, and working on a play inspired by the Flint water crisis.The Public scheduled a staging of that play — her first professional production — for the summer of 2020.You can imagine what happened next.The coronavirus pandemic shuttered theaters across America, and with it, scuttled her debut. But now the play, “cullud wattah,” is being recognized with the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a respected annual award honoring work by women and nonbinary playwrights. The prize is a distinctive one — $25,000 for the winner, plus a Willem de Kooning print — and many of its recipients have gone on to great acclaim (among them, the Pulitzer winners Annie Baker, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Wendy Wasserstein and Paula Vogel).Dickerson-Despenza, a 29-year-old Chicago native, is thrilled. “It’s a really affirming moment,” she said, “not only for me as an emerging playwright, but also for the way that I am doing my work as a queer Black woman who has intentionally decided to write about Black women and girls.”Her career, like so many others, has been upended by the pandemic. “cullud wattah” is on hold, but a spokeswoman for the Public said the theater still hopes to produce it once it resumes presenting in-person productions.In the meantime, she has been working on a 10-play cycle about the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005. The second play in the cycle, “[hieroglyph],” was staged (without a live audience), filmed and streamed earlier this year by San Francisco Playhouse and Lorraine Hansberry Theater. And next week the Public Theater will introduce an audio production of “shadow/land,” the first installment of her Katrina cycle.“I am interested in what we learn, and do not learn, and what history has to teach us,” she said.She said she had been following the news out of Flint for some time before deciding to write “cullud wattah”; for a while, she said, she just made notes about the crisis and posted them on her wall. The play imagines the effect of the water crisis on three generations of women.“I had a wall full of Flint, and I didn’t know what to do with it,” she said. “The play is not so much about Flint, as it is about how an apocalypse makes everything else bubble to the surface.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Crowns, Kinks and Curls,’ Getting to the Roots of Black Hair

      by

      Keli Goff’s series of vignettes feature Black women recounting how their hair affected their school lives, relationships or careers.I have 4b hair that remained virgin hair, mostly styled in box braids and cornrows with extensions, until I was 13, when I got my first relaxer. My scalp has known chemical burns, hot comb burns, curling iron burns, flat iron burns and the unrelenting throbbing that comes with hours of tight root-wrenching braiding. I got my big chop at 21 and have been natural — years of T.W.A.s and twist-outs and wash ‘n’ go’s — ever since.Do you get what I’m saying, or am I speaking another language?I’ve written about my hair before, and every time I do I’m well aware of the vocabulary, which I’m sure is unfamiliar to many non-Black readers. Though it’s not just a matter of terms or phrases: Black women often encounter unprovoked opinions and wrong assumptions from employers, strangers — even family and friends — about what their hairstyle says about their professionalism, their social status or their relationship to Blackness.The personal, cultural and political implications of Black hair are at the root of the well-meaning but less than inspired “The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls.” (And yes, pun definitely intended.)Written by Keli Goff and produced by and filmed at Baltimore Center Stage, “Crowns, Kinks and Curls” is a series of vignettes, each one featuring a Black woman recounting how her hair affected her school life, relationships or career. The piece channels the spirit of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls,” though the writing, albeit earnest, is far less poetic.The actresses Stori Ayers, Awa Sal Secka and Shayna Small embody all of the fictional women, donning different do’s to do so. (Nikiya Mathis handled the eclectic mix of hair and wig designs.) Most of the scenes are monologues, though occasionally two or three women meet, say, in the office of a mostly white law firm, where an older straight-haired lawyer named Sharon (Ayers) berates a younger one, Ally (Sal Secka), for wearing her hair in braids: “I’m sorry, I can’t let you meet a major client looking like this.”Gaby (Small), with sleek face-hugging Josephine Baker-style finger waves, recalls her mother’s distress that she cut her “good hair” for her wedding day, showing how hair reflects the generational trauma held by some Black women. Wanda (Ayers), in bouncy mocha and champagne blonde curls, recounts how an ex-boyfriend reproached her for pressing her natural hair for an interview, illustrating how “authentic Blackness” is often policed even within the Black community.And so every tale has its moral, none of which should be new to any Black woman. They certainly weren’t for me, a woman who has had white people make awkward comments about my hair, ask questions and even ask to touch my crown in admiration.Which is to say “Crowns, Kinks and Curls” excited me more conceptually than it did in its actual execution, which was all perfectly serviceable, from the performances to Bianca LaVerne Jones’s staging, to Dede Ayite’s set, with a big, puzzling backdrop of large flowers.Scenes span recent history, some taking place during the Obama Administration and others referencing former President Trump and 2019’s Crown Act against hair-based discrimination. These glimmers of vibrancy underscore the timeliness of the topic, given how the social consciousness of Blackness has shifted since the Obama era.In one humorous monologue, Sal Secka, wearing an Afro pony — ethereal and exquisitely cloudlike — plays a woman named Adaora who has accompanied her biracial daughter to see the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and cheer on the Black princess.In a somber scene, two unnamed women (Sal Secka and Ayers) unwrap and unpin their hair in silence, as “Strange Fruit” is sung offstage; they are preparing to go to a funeral for a Black husband and son unjustly killed. It’s the one sequence in which hair is not so explicitly the topic of discussion, but rather is powerfully positioned as part of a larger expression of the Black experience, particularly at this moment in history.In a somber scene, Stori Ayers unwraps and unpins her hair in silence.Diggle/Baltimore Center StageThe show’s program includes a brief timeline of the history of Black women’s hairstyles and hair practices, referencing enslaved women’s use of head wraps and braids before enduring the Middle Passage, along with the work of hair pioneers like Madam C.J. Walker and George E. Johnson Sr. There’s so much to be mined in the history of Black hair that “Crowns, Kinks and Curls” feels like it has missed opportunities to go further — or even incorporate real stories.Why not use the smart, funny and vulnerable voices of real Black women? Why not devise scenes that are more than neatly prepared monologues?And because it is a rarity to see Black women talking about their Black hair onstage, what I saw only made me hungry for more: I wanted to see more Black women of different shades, in not only wigs and weaves but also their own natural ‘fros. I was disappointed, in scenes where women were supposed to be wearing natural hair, to see false approximations.I believe this very capable show — which had a creative team entirely comprising Black women, to my utter delight — can be more. I hope it happens if and when it’s staged in person, as it’s the kind of work I both want and need to see, as a Black female critic and as a Black woman writing about an art form that too often fails people of color.So as I undid my own head of flat twists this weekend in preparation for a much-needed trip to the salon, this earnest request crossed my mind: more Black women, and more (and more and more) of those curls.The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and CurlsThrough April 18; centerstage.org More

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      Her Film on Sex Assault Depicts Her Own and Fuels a #MeToo Moment

      by

      Danijela Stajnfeld included her account of being assaulted in a film that has led to contentious debate in Serbia and prompted other women to come forward to say they were sexually abused.Her face graced billboards in Belgrade. She appeared regularly in Serbian movies, magazines and television shows. Trained at the prestigious Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Danijela Stajnfeld had, by the age of 26 in 2011, won two major theater prizes and was a permanent member with the esteemed Belgrade Drama Theater.The following year, she abruptly and mysteriously dropped from public view. It wasn’t until last summer that she publicly revealed why.In her documentary, “Hold Me Right,” about victims and perpetrators of sexual assault, Stajnfeld said that she too had been sexually assaulted eight years earlier by a powerful Serbian man, which had prompted her move to the United States.When the film premiered last year at the Sarajevo Film Festival, Stajnfeld said she was nervous but could not imagine its causing waves. “I thought no one remembered me, I didn’t keep in touch with anyone in Serbia,” she said in an interview.The media firestorm that erupted within days of the premiere proved her wrong.The film “Hold Me Right” presents possible reactions, some constructive, some not, to sexual assault.   Hold Me RightStajnfeld’s face was suddenly all over the Serbian press again. Television and online commentators praised her for speaking out or savaged her for not disclosing the man’s name.She said she did not identify the man because she wanted the film to focus on survivors and healing, rather than singling out a perpetrator. But the country’s tabloids speculated wildly about his identity. Reporters approached Stajnfeld’s unsuspecting parents in their small village. Critics questioned her motives. “Sick!” read one headline. “Actress made up the rape to advertise her film.”Even for someone who had grown up in Serbia, where sexism and male chauvinism are deeply entrenched, the blowback was stunning, Stajnfeld said. While the country has taken steps to advance the cause of women’s rights in recent years — in 2013 it ratified a human rights convention addressing gender-based violence — in Serbia, as in the surrounding region, sexual harassment and assaults are still only rarely reported, and victim shaming abounds.“After opening up, it was so liberating; I thought the narrative was in my hands,” Stajnfeld said. “But it caused even more unsafety and ridiculous dehumanization.”But in recent months, spurred partly by the film, the mood in some quarters has changed. In January, several other Serbian actresses came out publicly with allegations that they had been raped, and a MeToo-like movement roared to life in this region where the culture of calling out abusers had yet to gain a foothold.Using the hashtag #NisiSama, which means “You are not alone,” and on the Facebook page Nisam Trazila, or “I didn’t ask for it,” which has 40,000 followers, supporters urged that victims of sexual harassment be believed and perpetrators be held to account.“We have followed what was happening around the globe with the #MeToo movement, but I think we needed authentic voices of women from this region in order to have this kind of reaction,” Sanja Pavlovic, of the Autonomous Women’s Center in Belgrade, said in an email.Last week Stajnfeld, who lives in New York, flew to Serbia, met with the police and prosecutors and identified the man who she said assaulted her as Branislav Lecic.Branislav Lecic, a celebrated Serbian actor, has denied that he ever had a sexual encounter with Stajnfeld. Darko Vojinovic/Associated PressHer disclosure refueled the media blitz, in part because Lecic, 65, is a famed figure in Serbia, not only a prominent actor but also a professor and former minister of culture. Only weeks ago, he had spoken out against sexual assault.“When a woman says no, that’s the end of it. I don’t understand that someone can’t control their urges,” he told one Serbian newspaper.Stajnfeld says that statement, in part, was what compelled her to publicly name him.Lecic has denied any sexual contact with Stajnfeld, with whom he acted in a play, “Daily Command,” at the time in 2012 when she says the assault occurred.“I have never had sexual contact with her. Everything else would be a lie!” Lecic wrote in a WhatsApp message.But Stajnfeld provided prosecutors and members of the media with an audio recording of her confronting him in a Belgrade restaurant in December 2016, in which he acknowledges that she said no to his advances. Excerpts of the audio, distilled from a longer tape, with the man’s voice disguised, are included in the film.In the recording, she says several times that she wishes he had respected the fact that she had objected to his actions, but she does not go into detail about what then transpired.“Back then I felt jeopardized. Can you understand that?” Stajnfeld says on the tape.“I can understand that, but it’s a big mistake, because my expression of tenderness indeed means my respect,” Lecic replied, saying it was an achievement “that you triggered my attention and feeling.”Stajnfeld and Lecic in a scene from the play “Daily Command.”Belgrade Drama TheaterLecic said what happened ought to “feel like an honor, not to put you in jeopardy.” “Who do you think I am?” he continued. “As if I don’t respect who I am.”In the recording, Lecic also pushed back on Stajnfeld’s assertion that if she says no, she means no. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said, later adding, “Life is unpredictable, like a game.”In recent days, Lecic, communicating over WhatsApp, said that he and Stajnfeld met at the restaurant to discuss a potential collaboration, and that the audio provided by Stajnfeld was incomplete: A longer version, he said, would reveal the broader context, that they were merely improvising dialogue, and that she was possibly claiming he assaulted her to gain publicity for her film.“Maybe she was expecting something more, maybe it’s because nothing happened that she wants revenge, and maybe she wants to build her story through me,” he wrote. “Bad marketing is also marketing.”But Stajnfeld provided a 77-minute audio file that she says represents nearly all of their roughly 90-minute conversation: The tape cut off, she said, when her phone battery died. Parts of their conversation are inaudible, and drowned out by background noise. Still, there is no indication they were rehearsing dialogue. Though the voices are muffled at times and the banter often seems friendly, Stajnfeld’s voice gets sterner as she describes how hurt she was by his actions. Lecic responds in a way that suggests he believed that what happened was consensual.When they began rehearsing the play, Stajnfeld said she viewed Lecic as a mentor and a friend, until he began propositioning her to have sex. Then, one day, in his dressing room, she said he abruptly shoved his hand up her dress. Stajnfeld said she pulled away and fled, stunned, but opted not to tell the director because she was worried she wouldn’t be believed, and that it could hurt her career. Lecic denied any sexual encounter took place.At the time, she said in an interview, she had already approached Lecic, who she viewed as an influential political figure, for a reference letter to apply for an American work visa. She said she was looking for opportunities in the United States, but never intended to abandon her Serbian career.She said Lecic first insisted they walk in a park nearby. Then, she said, on what she assumed was a lift home, he drove in the wrong direction, frightening her, and telling her he was taking her to see a beautiful view of Belgrade.An image from the film “Hold Me Right” that depicts how sharing stories of sexual assault and receiving support are vital to healing. Hold Me RightWhen they arrived at a house on a hill in the city’s outskirts, she said Lecic undressed her and sexually assaulted her, despite the fact that she was crying and repeatedly said no.“In that moment, I was so tortured,” she continued. “He was asking me to do stuff for him. I wanted to do anything for this torture to stop. I couldn’t move my arms, my mouth, I couldn’t stop crying,” she said.Franz Stefan Gady, who used to date Stajnfeld and was living in Stockholm at the time, said within days she had provided him with an account of having been sexually assaulted by the “older guy” in the play.Stajnfeld said she told police and prosecutors last week the same details of her encounters with Lecic in the dressing room and at the house. But she had not gone to the authorities at the time, she said, because she feared her story would be leaked to the press and her career ruined. Instead, she booked a ticket to the United States where, in New York, she began to unravel. She had panic attacks and later considered suicide, but with the help of therapy and victim support groups, she became determined to overcome the trauma. She began interviewing and filming survivors, and what started as a 10-minute short ended up growing, over the course of three-and-a-half years, into her first feature-length film as a director.Stajnfeld said she never intended to insert her own story into her film, but after seeing the rough cut, she knew she had to include her experience too.“For the sake of justice, for the sake of my healing, for the sake of other victims in the region, I’m speaking out now,” she said in the interview with The Times.The film is scheduled to screen at the Martovski film festival in Belgrade later this spring, she said, followed by a U.S. release.After the premiere of Stajnfeld’s film last summer, media commentators said she should be ashamed, that she had slept with a man to get a role, that she should name him or else be prosecuted, that she dishonored women who had really been raped, and that she looked too happy in a recent televised interview to have been a victim.“The public opinion took a tabloid approach, hungry for blood, public humiliation, shame and guilt,” said Snezana Dakic, a Serbian television presenter. “And that is exactly opposite from how this problem should be treated.”Whatever personal catharsis the film represents, more people are seeing Stajnfeld’s film as a spark for the groundswell of support for sexual assault victims underway in Serbia and the surrounding Balkan region.“Danijela’s case gave wings to other women, actresses, to talk about what happened to them,” said Dragana Grncarski, a former model and public figure. “Coming out in the open, they prevent things like that from happening to other women.”Indira K. Skoric provided translations. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      In the Shadow of Nollywood, Filmmakers Examine Boko Haram

      by

      “The Milkmaid” and other African productions are putting extremism under the microscope and drawing diaspora audiences in the process.In the moving Nigerian drama “The Milkmaid,” Aisha and Zainab are Fulani sisters taken hostage by Boko Haram insurgents, the extremist group that in 2014 kidnapped more than 250 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok. With sweeping landscapes shot in Taraba State in the northeastern part of the country, the film, written and directed by Desmond Ovbiagele, deftly tells a story both hopeful in the possibility of reconciliation and harrowing in the journey to get there.The film is the latest entry in a growing body of African cinema focused on the grim toll exacted by the terrorists of Boko Haram. In addition to “The Milkmaid,” there’s Netflix’s “The Delivery Boy”; “Stolen Daughters: Kidnapped by Boko Haram” on HBO; and “Daughters of Chibok,” a documentary short that won Best VR Immersive Story at the Venice Film Festival in 2019. Each has examined the magnitude of violence the extremist faction has inflicted on northern parts of Africa’s most populous country and the neighboring countries of Niger and Cameroon.When Nigeria’s film regulatory board recommended that 25 minutes of footage be cut from “The Milkmaid” and then curtailed showings in theaters there in the fall, the producers and director sought to cultivate audiences in Zimbabwe and Cameroon; the drama eventually earned the prize for best film in an African language (the story is told entirely in Hausa, Fulani and Arabic) at the 2020 African Movie Academy Awards. It was also Nigeria’s selection for the international feature Oscar, though the movie did not make the final cut.Despite the censorship and truncated distribution, however, “The Milkmaid” and other movies in this emerging genre have found a diasporic audience abroad.“‘The Milkmaid’ is anchored to a certain social discourse we’re seeing unfold currently,” said Mahen Bonetti, founder of the New York African Film Festival, which chose the drama as the opening selection last month for its 2021 edition. “We’re seeing a rise of extremism and religious fanaticism, particularly amongst youth, and witnessing the disintegration of families and bonds that once held communities together. And young filmmakers are being brave and telling these stories.”The amplification of these stories, namely those of Boko Haram’s female victims, was especially important to Ovbiagele, who also produced “The Milkmaid” over the course of three years.“I felt we didn’t hear enough from the victims of insurgency and who they really were,” Ovbiagele said in an interview by phone from Lagos. “They’re not always educated” like the Chibok schoolgirls, he added, and “most don’t get international attention. But despite that, their stories deserved to be heard too.”Kalunta, front, and Maryam Booth as sisters captured by Boko Haram.The Milkmaid/Danono MediaAnd so, Ovbiagele sought to recreate the plight of Boko Haram victims the best way he knew how as someone with little intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the organization. After a community of survivors from northern Borno State relocated near his home in Lagos, he spent months gathering first-person accounts from survivors — women and girls who were piecing their lives together, he said, and making sense of their new realities as orphans, widows and victims of sexual assault. He also asked local nongovernmental organizations who were working with Boko Haram victims to properly assess the challenges faced by the survivors.In “The Milkmaid,” the young title character, Aisha (Anthonieta Kalunta), is captured, along with her sister, Zainab (Maryam Booth), by Boko Haram insurgents who turn the women into servants — and soldiers’ wives — in a terrorist camp. Aisha is able to escape but eventually returns to the settlement to find Zainab, hardened and indoctrinated with zealous devotion, now enlisting female volunteers for suicide missions.But creating a movie in Nollywood — the nickname for Nigeria’s thriving movie industry — is not without challenges. Certain elements of producing a full-length film — financing, endless paperwork and audience building — would be familiar to filmmakers everywhere. But making a serious drama about Islamic fanaticism — in a country where roughly half the residents are Muslim and where recent instances of religious terrorism have gained unwelcome global attention — makes such a task especially daunting. And driven to make a movie that appealed to a larger international audience accustomed to sleek, big-budget Hollywood productions, Ovbiagele reasoned that “The Milkmaid” wasn’t a Nollywood production but rather its own form of cinema in Nigeria.The Nigerian movie business has its origins in local markets, where storytellers on limited budgets readily met the sensibilities of local viewers. Eager to generate profits and offset rampant piracy, filmmakers would quickly churn out full-length, shoddy productions.However, the sometimes hackneyed movies served a purpose, explained Dr. Ikechukwu Obiaya, who, as the director of the Nollywood Studies Center at Pan Atlantic University in Lagos, studies movie productions. Nollywood has always been “a chronicler of social history,” he said, paraphrasing the Nigerian film scholar Jonathan Haynes. Obiaya added, “During Nollywood’s early years, often something that happened one week would be depicted in a Nollywood film available at the local market the next.” And the industry has made movies about Boko Haram. But productions like “The Milkmaid” have “shown greater creative growth in the industry as a whole and in turn, demonstrated a greater interest from the rest of the world in Nigerian stories.”Ultimately, Ovbiagele wants to continue making films he feels passionately about and hopes the film will impart a lasting impression on viewers. “I hope audiences will leave with a deeper insight into experiences and motivations of both the victims and the perpetrators of terrorist organizations and specifically the resilience and resourcefulness of the survivors.” More

    • 100 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Klauss Dörr Quits Volksbühne Over Sexual Harassment Allegations

      by

      Klaus Dörr resigned as head of the Volksbühne after 10 women accused him of sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment.The director of the Volksbühne theater in Berlin quit on Monday after accusations of sexual harassment, creating a hostile work environment and humiliating older actresses were published in a German newspaper. Klaus Dörr had led the Volksbühne, one of Europe’s most influential theaters, since April 2018.His resignation, which the theater confirmed in an email, came just days after Die Tageszeitung, a daily newspaper, said that complaints against Dörr by 10 women were being investigated by Berlin’s culture ministry, which oversees the playhouse. The women said Dörr had stared inappropriately at women who worked at the theater, made sexist comments and sent inappropriate text messages, the newspaper reported.City officials received the complaints in January and were investigating them, the ministry confirmed in a statement released on Saturday. Dörr was interviewed as part of this process at the start of March, the statement added.“I take full responsibility, as the artistic director of the Volksbühne, for the allegations made against me,” Dörr said in a statement released by the theater.“I deeply regret if I have hurt employees with my behavior, words or gaze,” he added.A spokeswoman for the theater declined to comment further.Dörr’s resignation is only the latest scandal to hit the storied Volksbühne. In 2018, Chris Dercon, its previous director and the former leader of the Tate Modern museum in London, quit just months into the job after widespread protests over his appointment. Those included an occupation of the theater by left-wing activists; at one point, someone left feces outside his office.The activists, who included members of the theater’s staff, accused Dercon of trashing the company’s tradition of ensemble theater, in which a permanent company of players creates a rotating repertoire, and turning it into a space for visiting international performers to mount their shows. Many saw the strife around Dercon’s appointment as a proxy for debates about gentrification in Berlin.Dörr was meant to be a stabilizing, if temporary, force at the theater until a new permanent director could be found. In 2019, René Pollesch, an acclaimed German playwright and director, was named as the new leader, set to take up the role in summer 2021.The latest problems at the Volksbühne emerged at a time of focus on the behavior of male leaders in Germany toward female members of staff. On March 14, Julian Reichelt, the editor in chief of Bild, Germany’s largest newspaper, took a leave of absence after women who worked at the paper accused him of misconduct.A law firm is investigating the allegations, which have so far not been specified. Reichelt denies all wrongdoing.Jagoda Marinic, an author who has written extensively about the #MeToo movement in Germany, said in a telephone interview that she saw Dörr’s resignation as a watershed. That the revelations in Die Tageszeitung concerned a group of women, rather than an individual accuser, was significant, she said, adding that the case was also the first time someone in Germany had resigned so quickly after a complaint became public.“My hope is it spurs other people to speak out,” Marinic said.On Tuesday, the Volksbühne’s ensemble expressed its “unreserved solidarity” with the women who spoke out against Dörr, in a message posted on the theater’s Instagram account. “Our industry suffers under outdated power structures,” the message said. “This discourse must not end with Klaus Dörr’s resignation.” More