Glitter & Doom

What is theatre? Is it a group of people watching actors on a stage? Is it a magical transportive experience that can only be experienced live? Does it need a crowd? Lines? Snarky will-call folks who can't spell your name? MacKenzie talks to Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, the duo that make up 600 Highwaymen – a theatre company "at the intersection of theater, dance, contemporary performance, and civic encounter" to try and answer some of these questions.

Their newest piece A Phone Call (a guided phone call between you [yes you!] and a total stranger) is available for attendance at the Public Theatre as part of the Under The Radar Festival 2021.

It's season three of Glitter & Doom, and this time around, we're tackling the theme of reinvention. With the concert series Celebrate Brooklyn! moved online this year, the programmers at BRIC had a decision to make: what would they do with the concert venue?

They tapped artists Oasa DuVerney and Mildred Beltré, together known as the Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine, to reinvent the Prospect Park bandshell as a public art space. Using neon ribbon, they created an installation featuring the woven words "come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed," from a poem by Lucille Clifton. MacKenzie talks to Oasa, Mildred, and Clifton scholar Rachel Harding about Black sisterhood, resilience, and community.

After the Red River War in 1874, drawing was one of the few sanctioned ways that the prisoners of Fort Marion were able to keep their cultural traditions alive. Back home on the Plains, they would have commemorated a successful battle by depicting it on a buffalo hide, but in Florida, where they had been shipped off and stripped of their communities, these men drew what they knew on what they had – and for some, it was lined ledger paper. Emil Her Many Horses (curator, Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian) speaks about the history, the practice and the people at Fort Marion.

In all of literature, Robinson Crusoe is certainly among the most isolated of characters. Dude was stranded on an island for 28 years. For most of that time he is entirely alone except for his pets and God, who is a notoriously bad conversationalist. But was Crusoe *lonely*? MacKenzie speaks to scholars about Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and how his loneliness speaks loudly in times of pandemics and major social movements.

Nelly Toll was eight or nine when she painted, “A Trip With Father: A Present for Good Behavior," in 1943. At the time she painted it, Nelly hadn’t been outside in probably a year. She was Jewish, and she and her mother were in hiding in Lwów, Poland. Today, Dr. Toll is self-isolating like the rest of us, and speaks to MacKenzie about her childhood in hiding and her watercolor box.

We’re back! Welcome to the second season of Glitter & Doom, where we’ll be exploring artists in isolation.

If you’re on Twitter, you might remember a meme-storm in early March after Roseanne Cash tweeted: “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.” With the help of Andrew Dickson, author of The Globe Guide to Shakespeare, we try and figure out if Shakespeare actually *did* write King Lear while under quarantine, and which one of Lear’s daughters was the actual, literal worst.

Hey there! What's everyone been up to? Anything new?

Glitter & Doom has been taking a short break but it's back for its second season and cooking up some new episodes for you to listen to while you switch from your night pajamas to your day pajamas.

What do Trump rallies, German interior décor and the Village People have to do with author, Dave Eggers?

Does satire still have a role to play when reality reads like an Onion article? Dave Eggers says yes. His new book, The Captain and the Glory, follows the grim misadventures of a narcissistic, incompetent sea captain steering a cruise ship called The Glory. Before long, he and his supporters are throwing dark-skinned passengers overboard to chants of “Drown the brown!” The metaphor isn’t subtle, but then again, these aren’t subtle times.

What do microaggressions, sea captains and spam email have to do with artist, Liana Finck?

As a shy person who struggled with social interactions, illustrator and cartoonist, Liana Finck made notes and drawings as a way to figure out how to fit in. “Passing for Human” is the title of one of her three books. But at a certain point, she started wondering, what if this isn’t just me? Liana would find herself in awkward situations because she was behaving in a way she wasn’t supposed to. But who decides how women are supposed to behave?