Hamilton is ‘the musical of the Obama era’, according to Adam Gopnik in a recent article in The New Yorker. It is a story about one of America’s Founding Fathers, brought to the stage via the medium of hip-hop, along with many other modern musical styles—from R&B and soul through to boogie-woogie and Britpop. And it is clear that the show’s prodigiously talented creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is keen to be associated with Obama, and vice versa. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: March 2016
Introducing Sweet Tooth
Elaine performing work in progress on ‘Sweet Tooth’ with Sylvia Hallett.
How do we make sense of slavery? How can we represent its legacies? Historians try to do those things through the acts of writing and speaking. But how could the work of bearing witness to the part-hidden histories of enslavement, forced movement, suffering and renewal be transformed by other modes of performance? Mixing the words of a historian of slavery with other types of sound and movement, our ‘Sweet Tooth’ project explores new ways of confronting and feeling a past that continues to groan and shift, restlessly in our present.
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