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Movers and Shakers

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Southern Rep is a non-profit regional theatre organization in New Orleans, whose core values can be summed up as professionalism, outreach, education, opportunity and sustainability . Because I can only speak from my experience under this company ( Eclipsed ), much of what I am going to discuss will be from a very limited perspective. For more detailed information, visit www.southernrep.com Professionalism: The company is dedicated to operating under the specific outline of the Actor’s Equity Association. Throughout the rehearsal process we followed the all working requirements and ensured that actors were not over/underworked. However, there was also freedom for spontaneous artistic engagement and all decisions were made with the full awareness, compliance and participation of all individuals concerned. The production of Eclipsed was (as far as I know) the first of its kind in the company to feature an all-black, all-female cast and director. The direc...
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Thoughts I have on Battlestar Galactica.

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No sci-fi movie/television series has struck more fear in me than Battlestar Galactica . That is probably the reason I cannot seem to get past the ninth episode of what is arguably the most nuanced and engaging futuristic portrayal of mankind (At least up until where I am). The gist of the story is this; Humans created intelligent robots called Cylons and it did not end well. The robots grew smarter than its creators and began to wonder why they had to take orders. The Cylons then exit to a planet far away, and peace is maintained by way of a meeting every so often on neutral ground. And the robots have never attended a meeting…until now. Turns out, the robots have managed to create human replicas right down to the blood, guts and sarcasm, and these replicas have been deployed into the human society in preparation for a doomsday event. And BOOM! The world as they know it is destroyed by a nuclear blast attack from the Cylons, while the remnant of the human race is le...
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A Gendered Humanity

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The concept of universality in theatre and film has always appealed to me as a utopian ideal, but never as something truly achievable. I had to look no further than the open scenes we worked on for a short while during our acting class; A: Good morning B: Good morning A: How are you feeling? B: Great A: I’m sure. B: What do you want for breakfast? A: Whatever The above characters are sexless, ageless, nameless beings, but even as I read that short exchange, it wasn’t difficult to establish a relationship. And within that relationship, it wasn’t a far reach establishing gender roles within the parameters of the exchange. These assumptions emerged out of a need to understand the material with which I was working, just as assumptions arise in my day to day interactions with the world. Universality then becomes heavily dependent on the subjective consciousness of an objective mass. If enough people understand the world through bi...
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