Boston Globe reporter Don Aucoin spotlights the virtual MTA Playwrights Lab, an annual festival led by senior lecturer Ken Urban that features “staged readings resulting from collaborations between MIT students and professional theater artists.”
Former MIT Visiting Artist Pedro Reyes returns to the Institute with the premiere of his latest puppet play, “Manufacturing Mischief,” writes Jeremy Goodwin of The Boston Globe. Partially based on the writings of Prof. Emeritus Noam Chomsky, and featuring puppets of famous figures like Chomsky, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, the play is “about staging a conflict between opposing worldviews and opposing ideologies,” says Reyes.
Prof. Martin Marks hosted a conversation with Audra McDonald, the 2018 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT recipient, where she spoke about her personal experience as a Tony Award-winning actress and shared advice with the gathered students, writes Sophie Cannon for The Boston Globe. “Realize you have value and you have worth and what you maybe don’t have is experience but that is what you are here to get,” McDonald said.
David Weininger of The Boston Globe writes about the longest instrumental work composed by Prof. Keeril Makan, a 47-minute movement performed by the New York-based chamber ensemble Either/Or. “Makan creates a succession of fresh and inventive colors, especially when he places two unusual instruments — glockenspiel and cimbalom — in dialogue,” writes Weininger.
Senior Lecturer Ken Urban speaks with HuffPost reporter Michael Levin about the burgeoning theater program at MIT. “There is a lot of institutional support for the arts in all of its forms at MIT and I think it’s because that process of being creative and realizing that it’s super-important for engineers,” says Urban.
Russell Platt writes for The New Yorker about Professor Keeril Makan’s music. “The work’s brave exploration of expressive territory makes it memorable. It’s lulling, thrilling, and, at times, downright eerie,” writes Platt of Makan’s piece “Resonance Alloy.”
David Weininger reports for The Boston Globe on the Radius Ensemble’s performance of “Nothing is More Important,” a piece composed by MIT Professor Keeril Makan. “Makan's piece begins with an obsessive focus on a single note, from which it never completely escapes,” writes Weininger.
David Barnett of NPR speaks with Professor Tod Machover about the use of technology in modern opera. Machover’s most recent opera, Death and the Powers, tells the story of a man who wants to live forever and downloads himself into a computer consciousness called “The System.”