Lydia R. Diamond via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Lydia R. Diamond:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Lydia R. Diamond
- City: Chicago, IL
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Lydia Diamond is a prolific playwright and teaching artist whose plays include Smart People, Stick Fly, Harriet Jacobs, Voyeurs de Venus, The Gift Horse, The Inside, and her
adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye. Her early works were nurtured in Chicago theatres like Congo Square, MPAACT and Chicago Dramatists, and have gone on to enjoy productions around the country at theatres including: Arena Stage, Company One, The Goodman, The Guthrie, The Huntington, Kansas City Rep, Long Wharf, The McCarter, Second Stage, Steppenwolf, True Colors, and her Broadway run of Stick Fly at the Cort Theatre on Broadway.
Her work has been commissioned by theatres including: Arena Stage, The Huntington, The Humana Festival, The McCarter Theatre Co., The Roundabout, Second Stage,
Steppenwolf, and True Colors. She has been tapped by HBO to develop an original series, and writes for Showtime’s The Affair.
Ms. Diamond is on demand as a speaker on the radio, at universities, conferences, and institutes around the country. She has held fellowships and residencies at Harvard’s
Radcliffe Institute, The DuBois Institute at Harvard, Arena Stage, TCG/NEA Residency at Steppenwolf, and was a resident playwright for over fifteen years at Chicago Dramatists.
Ms. Diamond is a graduate of Northwestern University, and has taught at DePaul, Columbia College, Gallery 37, and was on faculty for eight years at Boston University.
Text from https://theatreandmusic.uic.edu/directory/lydia-diamond
Contact Information
- Email: lydiad@uic.edu
- Telephone: 312-996-2866
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
