hysterically_adq wrote: ↑Sat Jan 15, 2022 5:39 pm
lanouk wrote: ↑Sat Jan 15, 2022 5:03 pm
Thanks for providing this follow-up. I am struggling to understand this one piece here from their website:
How does that 3rd line work with the first line where it says ALL ROLES? I think most of the requests are reasonable but the problems come with contradictions or confusing rules. I don't want to doxx myself here and it would be easy to because I am a mixed race person from an uncommon minority and I immediately question the idea that they are going to actually enforce a "original ethnicity" concept, and if they do, I immediately question the harm that would come from one group deciding that mixed race people like me aren't ________ enough for them. If an Ethiopian woman were to take on the role of a Black american from the 1800s that would technically go against their own school of thought here.
Sorry, I'm really not trying to derail the otherwise important point they are trying to achieve, but these are the details that make it hard to actually enact change when you are actually on the ground and doing the work to improve communities.
I think in order to answer that question I would need to be at the table during the dialogues they want to have and I am not. So, I can't answer your question but only say that they have asked trained professionals to be hired and I would assume that those people would be part of the work being done so someone like you wouldn't have to come to the question you're having.
The company that puts on dickens was known for rarely presenting BIPOC historical figures at the forefront and when they did, they often whitewashed the roles and cast white actors in those roles (happened a lot with Indian historical figures, mainly) and rarely cast BIPOC actors in any major roles at all, even when changing the race of the character wouldn’t have been intrusive in anyway. There were a handful of BIPOC characters that were cast but those roles were outnumbered by the BIPOC actors auditioning for them, when in reality they could have expanded the number of BIPOC characters in general (because there were plenty of non-white people in Victorian London, many with high profile roles and jobs), but the company didn’t want to increase the cast size or get rid of existing roles to make room for more BIPOC characters. BIPOC actors that were cast in main character roles were almost always white passing, too. The current Prince Albert is Turkish (as in actually from Turkey, born and raised), for instance, but just looking at him, you would just think he’s a white guy. They passed on casting a girl who was Cuban American, I think, for the role of Victoria because she was basically not white enough, despite being a great actress who could have done well in the role.
Basically, if you were white or white passing, you had a much bigger shot at being cast in a main “character” role, even if the role may have actually been based on a BIPOC person, while BIPOC actors were very rarely cast in any major character roles regardless of the race or ethnicity of the character. So this was trying to address that.
