Multi-Tasking

After taking some down time to simply focus on being a student and teacher (and reminding myself what it is to sleep), I'm about to jump back into two exciting endeavors. The first, is a project that will be going up at the REDCAT Gallery as a part of an exhibit by Brussels-based artist Kobe Mathys. He's working on a gallery exhibition centered on art and intellectual property and one of the subjects in his gallery will be a copy of Waiting for Godot, serving to symbolize a production that was shut down by the Beckette estate in France because it starred two women in the leading roles.

Beckett's estate argued that to cast women in the roles changes the intent of the play, which I would argue. (The play has very little to do with sexuality in any form, if anything it focuses on friendship… but then again the characters in the play speak frequently about God and their relationship to the larger universe, and Beckett asserts his text has nothing to religion, so.)

I’ll be directing a fragment of the play to accompany a public discussion, and will be speaking as a part of a panel, which includes a Beckett scholar, a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property rights, a queer artist, and myself. Our goal is to excavate larger issues of copyright and see how they butt up against human rights. It should be interesting!

The second project I’m about to begin will be a three-week long journey with the epic, prolific, amazing Robert Brustein (founder of the Yale Rep and A.R.T. in Boston). More on that soon…

Moral of the story, I’m glad I took the holidays to give myself a mental break and catch up on sleep, because the calendar is about to burst.