Month: August 2021

When it comes to Opera InReach, the organization’s name says it all. Pre-pandemic, breaking apart opera’s white hegemony was on the minds of its co-founders Daevyd Pepper and Andrew Adridge.

“Opera InReach was born out of the BLM movement,” explains Adridge.

There’s no denying that opera, as the pinnacle of Eurocentric high culture, carries with it all manner of colonialist and classist baggage. For centuries, it was seen not only as the exclusive preserve of white performers and audiences, but of a certain upper class of the same.

Read more at the link.

All The Rage, the new book by internationally acclaimed Canadian playwright Brad Fraser, bears the subtitle A partial memoir in two acts and a Prologue.

“I don’t even use the word autobiography — it’s hardly exhaustive. That’s why I call it a memoir,” he explains. As a point of fact, it covers Fraser’s early life until the dawn of the 21st century.

Read more at the link.

From Cowboy Bebop to Sailor Moon, the 1990s was a pivotal decade for anime. The Ghost in the Shell manga had just launched and, within the same decade, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Dragon Ball, Lupin, and many other anime series now considered classics first hit movie and TV screens.

Read more at the link.

Scottish cellist and Deutsche Grammophon artist Peter Gregson has managed to carve out a career with about equal exposure to both his performing and composing talents.

The last few years have seen a steady rise to his profile as a composer of music for film with projects like Blackbird (starring Kate Winslet and Susan Sarandon), and music for the video game Boundless. He’s also known for his dance scores, having worked with the Joffrey Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, and Ballet BC, among others.

Read more at the link.

Anime movies based on video games can be a hit or miss proposition. In some cases, the anime actually came first, but when the video game is the source material, there may not be much other than fighting to construct a decent storyline with.

Read more at the link.