More Modern Shirtlessness

I had planned to post on Friday afternoon after a gig in the morning, but the events of the day made it seem ridiculous to post about shirtlessness.  There are some things that good male shirtlessness cannot fix, and senseless tragedy is one of them.  My weekend was spent alternating between obsessively watching the news and rehearsing for a show that my writers' lab produced on Sunday.  On Friday night, I felt foolish for rehearsing when something so terrible had happened in the world, but then I thought it would be more foolish not to rehearse.  Because terrible things happen in the world all the time, and the role of the artist in society is to carry on and hold up the mirror.  This doesn't mean that I shall be writing a play about gun control anytime soon, but it does mean that I can't stop doing what I'm doing and trying to make a difference in the way that I can.

Our show was a response to injustice of another sort.  The past year has offered many challenges to the Asian theater community as multiple theaters have been presenting Asian stories on their stages cast with white actors.  While there have been many forums for speaking out against this blatant racism, until Sunday night, no new work had been created from it.  The Ma-Yi Writers' Lab decided to do an evening of short plays which reappropriated Western fairy tales cast with Asian stories mixed with even shorter plays about the variety of reasons that actors of color do not get cast.  The evening was a wild success, and true to form, I managed to convince the directors to make one actor take his shirt off.  Since all the actors were on stage for the entire show, the moment he took off his shirt turned into a meta-theatrical moment when everyone watched him take off his shirt and then turned to me to see my reaction (which was clapping and cheering).  Said actor was Caucasian, and his dedication inspired me. Even people who are not directly effected by the issue can take action - white actors can speak out against casting inequity for Asian actors.  And so I walked away from the theater that night hoping that even people who were not personally effected by Friday's tragic events can still take action to make the world a better or at least safer place.

Today's picture was inspired by last week's post.  Modern dance has always done shirtlessness well, and I think that sometimes it is the wordless arts that can speak most clearly.  So here's to hoping that we can continue to create beauty from the world around us.

Yours in shirtlessness,
Nandita
President
IMS