A Russian court has turned down an appeal by jailed Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina, who has requested to serve the remainder of her prison sentence in the future when her 5-year-old son turns 14. She had argued that their separation has damaging his development.
Amnesty International criticized the ruling. “We are clearly deeply disappointed with the decision because basically it’s a further travesty of justice in this case,” Natalia Prilutskaya, a campaigner for Amnesty campaigner Natalia Prilutskaya told Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. “We think that the three girls shouldn’t have been arrested, first of all, and they shouldn’t have been prosecuted in a criminal procedure.”
Via RFL/RL.
Are you curious what goes on in the mind of a queer Islamaphobe? Or perhaps you’d rather pick the brain of a polyamorous lover?
No, I’m not suggesting you call up your cable provider and subscribe to TLC. Rather, you should step away from the screen and hit up the Human Library, which provides an unscripted opportunity to learn more about real people who may not share the same values or culture as you.
Click to continue »
I’ve been looking for nice ways to start the new year. Typically, I am diligent about making reviews of past years, goals for upcoming years, a handful of resolutions – but this December the time to do this slipped from my fingers.
Shunpo landed in my inbox last week and when I finally found time to watch it today it was, perhaps, a good stand-in for what I was looking for. A short reminder to step away from your box, to explore, to dance, and to imagine.
Shot in 13 locations in Paris and at Tuz Golu salt lake in Turkey by Steven Briand.
Austerity measures in Spain have increased taxes on nearly everything. Tax on theatre tickets was bumped from 8 to 21 percent, and in an already challenging economy, theatre companies were naturally worried about whether higher costs would keep the public away.
In the town of Bescanó, two hours north of Barcelona, one theatre applied their creative smarts to the tax issue and came up with a fresh solution. Rather than selling tickets, the 300-seat Teatre Bescanó began selling carrots.
Click to continue »
Artists invite Montrealers to share 9 day cultural festival
by Michael Lithgow on November 13, 2012
This is an amazing event! ATSA — the collective nom de plume of artists Annie Roy and Pierre Allard — have announced FIN NOVEMBRE: THE DNA OF A PUBLIC SPACE. Montrealers are invited to join the artists from Nov 16 – 25 in yet another of their experimental communities at Place Emilie-Gamelin, a gathering of privileged and underprivileged in an improvisational exploration of space, place, history, humanity and social struggles.
This is an event for everyone intended to give the homeless and other Montrealers the opportunity to get involved as on-site volunteers and participants in “an incomparable atmosphere of mutual aid and social solidarity made possible by support from the artistic and business communities as well as the institutional sector and community-based organizations.”
Here is a schedule of the performances (including music and circus acts), storytelling, public speeches, a conference, and a grand soiree:
Click to continue »
I am no stranger to war history or art history, having studied both in some depth at university. So the idea of attending a play based on Pablo Picasso’s painted representation of one of the most destructive acts in the period between the world wars, the bombing of the small Basque town of Gernika, sounded interesting. A play by Erika Luckert, Guernica attempts to bring life to Picasso’s grotesque cubist forms, bringing us the stories of five very different people as told to the mysteriously shirtless and watchful Candlebearer.
Click to continue »
Thanks in large part to the hyper-mediated and celebrity-driven character of the contemporary LGBT movement, the issue of queer youth suicide has rightly found its way into the public spotlight. Stories of young queers taking their own lives as an escape from bullying have become tragically commonplace in recent years.
This newfound attention, necessary as it is, however, comes with a certain danger that isn’t often addressed. When a young queer commits suicide, a deluge of stories, news reports, memorial pages, scholarship funds, and images now steps in to fill the absence they leave behind. In what sometimes feels like an almost desperate refusal to admit the traumatic loss of a queer body, we tend to insist that the memory and presence of the victim will be carried on, that their spirit lives in us all.
Again, crucial as such acts of remembrance are, they raise for me an important question: if mourning must always be a kind of filling-in of the absence left by suicide, what space can there really be to meditate on the absolute trauma of death, to reckon with a loss in which we are all implicated? By never allowing absence to register as absence, do we deny and shirk responsibility for the actual gone-ness of the body?
Click to continue »
Play on human trafficking touches without playing the guilt card
by Amanda McCuaig on September 11, 2012
Three white cloaked figures move in and out of the set, whispering layers of thought from behind the scared eyes of Number 18 – a 15 year old prostitute being forced to work in Bangkok. The rise of music and emotional of the small 5 member cast of the play She Has a Name has people in the audience standing by the end of the show, clapping hard, speechless.
She Has a Name, on now during the Vancouver Fringe Festival, is without a doubt the most worthwhile piece of theatre I’ve ever seen. It elegantly mixes the heart wrenching horror of sex slavary with the real-life difficulties of heroism.
Click to continue »
The Troubles (Resounding Scream Theatre)
The Vancouver International Fringe Festival is underway in Canada’s westernmost metropolis, with 97 shows on offer during a program that lasts over two weeks. This year there are several plays that tackle political issues, touching on themes like human trafficking, homelessness, teen suicide, bilateral relations, war, resource exploitation and more.
Click to continue »
Review: The Robinson Institute by Patrick Keiller at Tate Britain
by Terry Fairman on July 15, 2012
Portrait of Patrick Keiller. (Photo: Samuel Drake)
It is not always the case that definitive moments in art history can be precisely located. Certainly not the first act of artistic creation, that “strange beginning” of Gombrich’s Story of Art — a 35,000 year-old mammoth ivory carving, perhaps?
The American architectural theorist, Charles Jencks, controversially proclaimed one such moment, the death of modernism in architecture, on July 15th, 1972, at 3:30 in the afternoon. A rather more convincing turning point came in 1917, with R. Mutt, a.k.a. Marcel Duchamp’s seminal urinal ‘Fountain’ even if it was rejected at the time and probably thrown away.
Yet another occurred half a century later, in 1967, when the twenty-year-old Richard Long walked up and down a field in Wiltshire, photographed his transient intervention and announced to the world the creation of ‘A Line Made by Walking’. The field of minimal, environmental and land art has not been the same since.
Click to continue »
