J. Paul Getty Museum

• During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the character Oedipus and the ancient Greek drama based on his tragedy was suddenly everywhere.
• My new edited volume follows global trends in how theatre artists receive and interpret Greek tragedy in contextualizing a Montréal-based theatre company’s new translations of Greek tragedy.

Oedipus abounded

• In the first year of the pandemic, public commentary compared former U.S. president Donald Trump to Oedipus.
• In Los Angeles, a Chicanx version of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus El Rey, written by Luis Alfaro and directed by Chay Yew, was streaming live from the Center Theatre Group in partnership with the Getty Museum.
• The excellent Theater of War company, under the direction of Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Bryan Doerries, produced a star-studded zoom version in May 2020, The Oedipus Project, dedicated to first responders.

Theban plague parallels

• The play, directed by Bùi Nhu Lai, was performed and streamed at the 6th Asian Theatre Schools Festival held in Beijing, by the Hà Nội Academy of Theatre and Cinema.
• While some revelled in the fresh take on Oedipus these performances brought, at least one critic wondered if maybe we shouldn’t search for a direct parallel between the Theban plague killing Oedipus’s subjects and COVID-19.

Multiple crises

• As if in response, Doerries’ The Oedipus Project named its themes as the pandemic and the climate crisis.
• That is not only true of the pandemic; we are also the origin of an even bigger drama, the drama of our time: global warming.”

Montréal productions

• My edited volume Scapegoat Carnivale’s Tragic Trilogy documents how between 2010 and 2017, the Montréal theatre company Scapegoat Carnivale produced Euripides’ Medea and Bacchae, and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus.
• The Greek tragedies might have been written to work through fifth-century Athens’ own cultural anxieties, but even in Sophocles’ day, they did so through a mythical past, one as removed from Sophocles as he is from anyone today.

Plague concerns folded into myth

• If Sophocles wrote Oedipus Tyrannus in part as a response to the Athenian plague, he folded that concern into a myth that accommodates today’s diverse and changing global anxieties just as well as his own.
• As Aristotle says, poetry, unlike history, is not concerned with particular facts, but instead with general truths.

‘The city … unable to lift her head’

• In Scapegoat’s contemporary-set staged reading, Shragge’s clean style perfectly captured Sophocles’ irony, humour and pathos.
• Scapegoat’s minimalist staging favoured people over props, with a massive chorus composed of three local choirs.

Long-suffering Thebans

• To see Oedipus and all his long-suffering Thebans embodied onstage (for me, for the first time), mattered, despite Aristotle’s claim that the play is just as good without actually seeing this.
• And Scapegoat’s new translation, like countless others, waits for readers to find new delights in its words, audiences to find new terrors in its enactment and creators to make new meanings of its myth.

• CLAREMONT, Calif., Oct. 19, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- During its Annual Business Meeting, held at Pomona College in Claremont, California, the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities (AICCU) elected a diverse group of established statewide, higher education leaders to its Executive Committee, including non-president positions and officer positions.
• James Harris III , President of the University of San Diego; Krista Newkirk , President of the University of Redlands; and Daniele Struppa , President of Chapman University, were elected to the AICCU Executive Committee.
• "These highly regarded leaders in higher education and industrybring significant experience to the AICCU Executive Committee," said outgoing AICCU Executive Committee Chair and Golden Gate University President David Fike .
• The Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities (AICCU) is comprised of 86 independent, nonprofit colleges and universities, which make up the Independent California Colleges and Universities (ICCU) sector.

• an NFT Fine Art Photography pioneer and industry leader announced the "Innovation of Influence,'' a curated digital collection paying homage to one of the most photographed women in history: Norma Jeane.
• This extraordinary release of the Norma Jeane collection by Miller, which has beenexhibited, collected, and sold by institutions such as the Getty Museum and Christie's,features fascinating rare images of the storied starlet that will be sold as digital NFT collectibles for the very first time.
• "It has been a privilege to curate the collection, and we're elated to bring these rare, historic photographs to an audience of fine art enthusiasts and digital collectors around the globe."
• "Innovation of Influence" collection and others, or to submit photography for licensing consideration, visit Phto.io .

• Apple today previewed Apple Brompton Road, its newest store in London, located in the citys bustling Knightsbridge neighborhood.
• A stones throw from Hyde Park, Apple Brompton Road features design inspiration drawn from local flora, along with a new slate of community events and seminars to help customers learn, create, and get the most out of their Apple products.
• Created for Getty Museum and brought to life through Apple technology, the purpose-built app showcases the possibilities of creativity by reimagining the seminal artists work.
• Apple, the Apple logo, Today at Apple, iPhone, Mac, iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple TV, HomePod mini, and AirTag are trademarks of Apple.