scholarly journals “It’s All about Working with the Story!”: On Movement Direction in Musicals. An Interview with Lucy Hind

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
George Rodosthenous

Lucy Hind is a South African choreographer and movement director who lives in the UK. Her training was in choreography, mime and physical theatre at Rhodes University, South Africa. After her studies, Hind performed with the celebrated First Physical Theatre Company. In the UK, she has worked as movement director and performer in theatres including the Almeida, Barbican, Bath Theatre Royal, Leeds Playhouse Lowry, Sheffield Crucible, The Old Vic and The Royal Exchange. Lucy is also an associate artist of the award-winning Slung Low theatre company, which specializes in making epic theatre in non-theatre spaces. Here, Lucy talks to George Rodosthenous about her movement direction on the award-winning musical Girl from the North Country (The Old Vic/West End/Toronto and recently seen on Broadway), which was described by New York Times critic Ben Brantley as “superb”. The conversation delves into Lucy’s working methods: the ways she works with actors, the importance of collaborative work and her approach to characterization. Hind believes that her work affects the overall “tone, the atmosphere and the shape of the show”.

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Janayna Ávila

This article reflects on the issue of the refugees from four photographs of the series Exodus by Brazilian photographer Mauricio Lima, published on the North American newspaper The New York Times and Pulitzer winner in 2016. Its main objective is to analyze the boundaries between the duty of contemporary photojournalism and the obtainmentof images of refugees. For that, we used as theoretical reference reflections proposed by Appadurai, Bauman, Martínez, Sontag, Shore, Rouillé and Zanforlin. Methodologically, we worked with qualitative research and case study from the analysis of the images and bibliographic research. As a result, it is considered that Lima’s images bring original expressive dimension and seek personal interactions to build profound narratives.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 263-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Jane Hume ◽  
Megan Wainwright

In this paper, we draw on our own cross-cultural experience of engaging with different incarnations of the medical and health humanities (MHH) in the UK and South Africa to reflect on what is distinct and the same about MHH in these locations. MHH spaces, whether departments, programmes or networks, have espoused a common critique of biomedical dualism and reductionism, a celebration of qualitative evidence and the value of visual and performative arts for their research, therapeutic and transformative social potential. However, there have also been differences, and importantly a different ‘identity’ among some leading South African scholars and practitioners, who have felt that if MHH were to speak from the South as opposed to the North, they would say something quite different. We seek to contextualise our personal reflections on the development of the field in South Africa over recent years within wider debates about MHH in the context of South African academia and practice, drawing in part on interviews conducted by one of the authors with South African researchers and practitioners and our own reflections as ‘Northerners’ in the ‘South’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 255-275
Author(s):  
Yiqin Ruan ◽  
Jing Yang ◽  
Jianbin Jin

Biotechnology, as an emerging technology, has drawn much attention from the public and elicited hot debates in countries around the world and among various stakeholders. Due to the public's limited access to front-line scientific information and scientists, as well as the difficulty of processing complex scientific knowledge, the media have become one of the most important channels for the public to get news about scientific issues such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). According to framing theory, how the media portray GMO issues may influence audiences’ perceptions of those issues. Moreover, different countries and societies have various GMO regulations, policies and public opinion, which also affect the way media cover GMO issues. Thus, it is necessary to investigate how GMO issues are covered in different media outlets across different countries. We conducted a comparative content analysis of media coverage of GMO issues in China, the US and the UK. One mainstream news portal in each of the three countries was chosen ( People's Daily for China, The New York Times for the US, and The Guardian for the UK). We collected coverage over eight years, from 2008 to 2015, which yielded 749 pieces of news in total. We examined the sentiments expressed and the generic frames used in coverage of GMO issues. We found that the factual, human interest, conflict and regulation frames were the most common frames used on the three portals, while the sentiments expressed under those frames varied across the media outlets, indicating differences in the state of GMO development, promotion and regulation among the three countries.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 330-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trude Klevan ◽  
Bengt Karlsson ◽  
Lydia Turner ◽  
Nigel Short ◽  
Alec Grant

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how sharing stories of being a mental health professional and academic, based more broadly on serendipity and searching in life, can serve as means for bridging and developing cross-cultural understandings and collaborative work. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a relational autoethnography based on face-to-face and written conversational dialogue between five mental health academics from the UK and Norway. Findings The very practice of writing this paper displays and serves the purpose of bridging people, cultures and understandings, at several levels, in the facilitation of new research and writing projects. Troubling traditional boundaries between “us” and “them, and the “knower” and the “known,” the writing is theoretically underpinned by Friendship as Method, situated in a New Materialist context. Originality/value Through its conversational descriptions and explorations the paper shows how doing relational autoethnography can be purposeful in developing cross-cultural understandings and work at both professional and personal levels. It also demonstrates how autoethnography as relational practice can be useful in the sharing of this methodology between people who are more and less familiar with it.


Author(s):  
Mira Kamdar

India is fast overtaking China to become the most populous country on Earth. By mid-century, its 1.7 billion people will live in what is projected to become the world’s second-largest economy after China. While a democracy and an open society compared to China, assertive Hindu nationalism is posing new challenges to India’s democratic freedoms and institutions at a time when illiberal democracies and autocratic leaders are on the rise worldwide. How India’s destiny plays out in the coming decades will matter deeply to a world where the West’s influence in shaping the 21st century will decline as that of these two Asian giants and other emerging economies in Africa and Latin America rise. In India in the 21st Century, Mira Kamdar, a former member of the New York Times Editorial Board and an award-winning author, offers readers an introduction to India today in all its complexity. In a concise question-and-answer format, Kamdar addresses India’s history, including its ancient civilization and kingdoms; its religious plurality; its colonial legacy and independence movement; the political and social structures in place today; its rapidly growing economy and financial system; India’s place in the geopolitical landscape of the 21st century; the challenge to India posed by climate change and dwindling global resources; wealth concentration and stark social inequalities; the rise of big data and robotics; the role of social media and more. She explores India’s contradictions and complications, while celebrating the merging of India’s multicultural landscape and deep artistic and intellectual heritage with the Information Age and the expansion of mass media. With clarity and balance, Kamdar brings her in-depth knowledge of India and eloquent writing style to bear in this focused and incisive addition to Oxford’s highly successful What Everyone Needs to Know® series.


1997 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Hart ◽  
James Simmie

This paper reports the initial findings of an ESRC-funded study in Hertfordshire into how award-winning innovative firms organise their production arrangements. The study is a pilot project which was based on three initial operational assumptions: first, that innovation is not entirely an aspatial phenomenon; second, that modern production structures are taking new forms - variously described as post-Fordist, or flexible specialisation (flex-spec) - particularly in areas which are rich in commercial research and development (R&D) activities; and, finally, that as a consequence innovative firms in these areas commonly form production linkages with each other to create local production networks (LPNs). The research was carried out in the county of Hertfordshire just to the north of Greater London. Hertfordshire was selected because, according to a number of measures, it is one of the key areas for R&D in the UK. On the basis of our initial, limited empirical sample of firms in Hertfordshire, a key finding of the research was that a significant majority of the innovative firms sampled - both large and small - were not actually organised in LPNs in any recognisable way and that local post-Fordist production was either extremely limited in its operation or, more commonly for most firms, was non-existent - instead, these firms normally acted as local, relatively free-standing entities which were much more likely to be in competition with other local firms, than form production linkages with them.


Author(s):  
Christian Ernsten

In this chapter I explore District One and District Six, two inner-city areas in Cape Town, South Africa, by means of a series of images gathered from its ruins. As a point of departure I quote Neville Lister. Lister is the first-person narrator of Ivan Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative (2011). He is a white middle-class young man from Johannesburg whose life overlaps with the city’s post-apartheid transformation. Vladislavić’s story, in which Lister becomes a photographer, was inspired by a volume of photographs of Johannesburg taken by renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt (Goldblatt 2010). As his protagonist finds himself in the post-apartheid city, Vladislavić highlights the complexities of attempts at representing a coherent visual narrative regarding South Africa’s disjunctive urban history. Over the course of the last decade or so I have visited Cape Town many times. My personal life converged with the city’s transformation as a result of fortuitous encounters I had first as a student, then as a tourist, and finally as a researcher. The six photographs discussed as part of this chapter are the product of collaborations in 2013 and 2014. Recalling the epigraph of Bettina Malcomess and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt’s book about Johannesburg, Not No Place (2013), I suggest the impressions conveyed by the images include, at best, ‘fragments of spaces and times’ representing post-apartheid Cape Town. Referring to Walter Benjamin and Thomas More, Malcomess and Kreutzfeldt describe the capture of the ‘double negative’ of the utopia (translated as ‘no place’), the materialization of ‘impossibility and always deferred potential’ (Malcomess and Kreutzfeldt 2013: 12). Like these critics, I focus on the difficulty of capturing the complex transformation undergone by Cape Town’s District One and District Six (see also Penrose, Chapter 8, for issues in capturing complex, capitalist transitions). Cape Town appeared as number one on the New York Times list ‘52 places to go to in 2014’. Journalist Sarah Khan wrote, ‘Cape Town is reinventing itself, and the world is invited to its renaissance’ (Khan 2014). It is a story about boutique shops, property values, gentrification, self-stylization, and the self-conscious craft of hipster appeal.


2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-197
Author(s):  
David Krasner ◽  
Lisa M. Anderson ◽  
Nadine George-Graves ◽  
John Rogers Harris ◽  
Barbara Lewis ◽  
...  

David Krasner: In surveying contemporary London theatre, New York Times critic Ben Brantley reported that the Tricycle Theatre hadinaugurated a season of African-American plays with the commandingly titled but obscure Walk Hard, Talk Loud, a play by Abram Hill from the early1940's. Abram who? The name meant nothing to me, but Abram Hill (1910–1986) was a founder and director of the American Negro Theater in New York (1940–1951) and a playwright, it seems, of considerable verve.3That Abram Hill and the American Negro Theatre—the most important black theatre company during the mid-twentieth century—has flown below the radar is indicative of how much work still needs to be accomplished.


2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-132
Author(s):  
NEIL A. WYNN

The HBO television series The Sopranos, produced by David Chase, achieved unprecedented critical acclaim and quickly established itself on both sides of the Atlantic as cult viewing. The fourth series, shown in the UK on Channel 4 in spring 2003, had already attracted record audiences in America and received 13 Emmy Award nominations. Not surprisingly, The Sopranos has generated several web sites and a considerable amount of literature, ranging from the usual spin-offs of television series, cds, scripts, collected reviews, and a number of more academic studies ranging from cultural studies through to explorations of the psychological aspects of the programme. At least one MA has been written dealing with the portrayal of psychotherapy in this series and in films. This is not as remarkable as it might seem given that therapy is central to the whole story. The main character, Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini), is the head of an Italian–American family living in New Jersey. However, like his name itself, “family” has a double meaning. Tony is also the head of a Mafia-style gang of mobsters, operating a “waste management company” and night club (The Bada Bing!). The two roles of family head are explored when Tony talks (or “sings”) to a psychiatrist (in addition to his gang-land counsellors) as a result of his anxiety attacks and depression. Thus, Tony Soprano, mobster, is presented as a troubled family man – troubled by his relationships with his wife, daughter, and son, and their futures, but also troubled by business rivalries and problems that arise from the nature of his “work” and colleagues. As one commentator writes, Tony is the subject of “profound moral ambiguity” and it is his struggle to come to terms with this that makes it possible for viewers to identify with him. It is also the focus of his sessions with the therapist, Dr Melfi (played by Lorraine Bracco).


2001 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Michael Goss

This investigation examines over 300 articles in The New York Times from 1993 that concern the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In constructing a critical analysis of The Times's discourse on NAFTA, I begin with an overview of the factors that impact on contemporary media-government relations in the United States (e.g., “information subsidy,” stereotyped narrative forms into which news accounts are typically organized). Thereafter, I demonstrate how the private sector's and Clinton government's emphatic support for the agreement was regularly insinuated into The Times's coverage. Despite “legitimate controversy” that surrounded NAFTA, The Times's sourcing patterns distinctly shaded toward pro-NAFTA sources. Moreover, the Clinton government's “market/democracy” and “economic invasion” appeals for NAFTA became prominent storylines in The Times despite their implausibility. Conversely, The Times's treatment of the NAFTA opposition (most particularly, the opposition of unions and Ross Perot) was harsh and encased within personalized narratives that skirted away from substantive analysis. Given the stakes involved in this complex, high profile, and consequential issue, I conclude by theorizing what The Times's NAFTA discourse implies about journalism and U.S. democracy.


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