Washington Square News | Arts Issue 2019

ARTS ISSUE

SPRING 2019

DEFINING THE DREAM

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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have always been fascinated with the idea of the American Dream. It means something different to every single person, yet it has always instilled in people aspirations for something greater and of getting to the next stage of their life. But as America evolves, so does the Dream, and with it, the interaction between artists and the Dream.

An immigrant myself — I was born in Tamil Nadu, India and then moved to Boston in 2003 before coming to NYU — I share many experiences with the students profiled in this issue in their struggle with art and identity.

I often use my writing and films to articulate how I am feeling about issues in my life, in the U.S. and in the world, so art has always had a huge place in my life.

I specifically wanted to profile first- and second-generation and international artists for this issue. They offer a unique perspective of the Dream heard all too infrequently — absent, admittedly, from the Arts Desk itself. They and their parents came to this country following an American Dream of their own. This issue is about their successes and struggles with their identities, careers and passions.

In the pages that follow, you will see students’ stories of how they are tackling the modern American Dream through the fields they are in and adapting to life at NYU. We were able to find an amazing and diverse group of artists, and I am so happy to have included them all in this issue. To Alexandra, Luca, Michelle, Devanshi and Danielle, thank you for being so incredibly open and helpful

in bringing your stories to the page.

Paired with each profile is a piece about a major historical influence in each of these artists’ lives. The historical supplements examine the relationship between art and society as a two-way street. While art tends to be a reflection of current events, movements and trends, art — in all its various forms — similarly influences or changes society.

These analytical pieces talk about the history of a major influence on our artists in relation to how they were inspired by American culture when starting out and how they ultimately challenged America through their own art.

To my deputies, Claire Fishman, Alex Cullina, Nicole Rosenthal and Dante Sacco, thank you for sticking with my ambitious idea until the very end and usually getting pieces in on time. Thank you to fellow WSN staff members Anna de la Rosa and Alina Patrick for lending their talents to the issue on top of already handling a sizeable workload for each of their desks. And additional thanks to Fareid El Gafy, Julie Goldberg and Ethan Zack, three amazing staff writers for the Arts section, who are each working on their first Arts Issue. I’m sure it will not be their last.

Thanks to the whole Under the Arch team. I will forever be grateful for Pamela Jew’s support, guidance and edits from beginning to end. The hard work and encouragement from Yasmin Gulec, Natalie Chinn and Joel Lee were a huge help for all of the pieces. I am eternally grateful for your patience when articles came in late or in some

incomprehensible state.

The multimedia for this issue, done by Katie Peurrung and Justin Park, is, in my opinion, the most beautiful to ever grace an Arts Issue. Justin has also gone above and beyond in creating an experimental dance film for this issue, the first of its kind for a special issue. To Maxine Flasher-Duzgunes, thank you for all your amazing hard work and choreographing for the film. It is truly beautiful.

I have an apology and a thank you to our lovely design and layout team, comprised of Sophia Di Iorio and Priya Tharwala. As we had started off on a fairly vague note, there were multiple weeks of telling them that we would figure it out and leaving them hanging. But their collage designs and overall layout are phenomenal and a stunning representation of the abstract nature of the issue.

Thank you to the wonderful management team and copy team for providing the final round of edits on the pieces and helping to take the issue across the finish line in glorious fashion.

This Arts Issue has been as thought-provoking as it’s been creatively fulfilling, partly because we had to figure it out as we went. Of course, we were not as aimless as I make it sound, but my original pitch has definitely changed quite a bit along the way, and we deliberately took an unconventional approach to building the issue. This issue has been a creative challenge for all of our writers, editors, multimedia and design teams, but in the end, we have produced an amazing and experimental project. Enjoy.

GURU RAMANATHAN ARTS EDITOR

ALL STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHY BY

KATIE PEURRUNG

UNDER THE ARCH MULTIMEDIA EDITOR

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Luca Renzi Smith

4

Alexandra Muhawi-Ho

6

8 Devanshi Khetarpal 10

Danielle Braga Jones

Michelle Lee Bae

12

Dancing Through U.S. History

14

LUCA RENZI SMITH

From Bethlehem to Bleecker Street, It’s Queer Dance Jesus

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By CLAIRE FISHMAN Film & TV Editor

uca Renzi Smith is a little late to meet me at the La Colombe on Lafayette Street, though he’s neither out of breath nor flustered in any visible way. He walks in with the grace and body consciousness only expected from a lifelong dancer. Renzi Smith’s appearance, however, betrays this truth — a septum piercing adorns his face, and tattoos decorate his chest, arms and neck. He’s certainly no prima ballerina. In fact, the dance form Renzi Smith prefers is tattooed on the back of his neck in thin, black lettering: VOGUE. Clearly, this is a man devoted to his craft.

“Stylish,” I quickly scribble down in my notebook.

Yet, after five minutes of talking to Renzi Smith, I realized “stylish” was a severe understatement. This was a man who spoke, lived and breathed style; a man who thinks critically about what it means to be a dancer and what it means to be true to himself.

“Express yourself however you want to express yourself through movement,” he told me. “No one else out there will be coming out with these moves if you are in your body.”

This is not an exceptionally common philosophy in the dance community, which has generally prided itself on “traditionally advanced techniques,” like achieving the most perfect pointe possible.

And as this perfectionistic tradition erodes faster than ever, most professional dancers today still get their start at the barre, learning different positions in their leotards and tights. What is perhaps so refreshing about Renzi Smith, who is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Dance at the Tisch School of the Arts, is that he didn’t partake in this culture until he was well into his dance career, at age 19. He’s only 26 now.

Renzi Smith hails from Switzerland but has Italian roots; if he had ever wanted to be a ballerina, his genome might have helped. But, as it turns out, the world of prima ballerinas is an expensive one, open only to an elite group of which Renzi Smith is not a member. It’s a good thing he never wanted to join the club. Rather, the expressionist dancer, as he dubs himself, began his dance career with hip-hop in his hometown, a working-class suburb of Bern called Bethlehem.

And yes, he immediately pointed out the biblical implications of this.

Luca Renzi Smith was born to start a revolution.

The beginning of his dance career was unorthodox, to say the least. When he was 10 years old, an open-air, hip-hop musical came to his town and held auditions for dancers. “‘Damn, that’s so interesting,’” Renzi Smith remembered thinking at the time. “But I was way too shy to even go there, to introduce myself, who I am. I didn’t dance at that time.”

Thankfully, Renzi Smith had a good friend, Larissa Kläusli, who pushed him out of his comfort zone and urged him to audition with her. Together, they watched and copied the dance moves from “Honey,” a film that follows an aspiring dancer (Jessica Alba) in New York City as she decides whether or not she should perform sexual favors to get ahead professionally. The movie has not aged well, to say the least.

Nevertheless, the two 10-year-olds watched “Honey” over and over again until they had made their own composition of choreography from the moves in the movie. The two friends soon auditioned, and both were accepted to be a part of their first-ever dance performance, “Hip Hop Musical Bern West: Block a Dream.” Kläusli did not continue dancing afterward, but the same could not be said for Renzi Smith.

“And from then on, it never stopped,” Renzi Smith said.

It’s ‘Bitch, I’m fierce, I’m everything,’ and I’m like I feel so related to that.”

Despite Renzi Smith’s passion, however, he knew there would be pushback from his conservative community. He goes on, “But I knew that that would be, where I’m from, criticized as a man to do that. Like, ‘oh yeah, you’re a f-ggot for doing that.’”

Pushing the threat of alienation aside, Renzi Smith continued to dance hip-hop in his hometown in Switzerland. Still, he knew something was missing.

Years later, in his adolescence, Renzi Smith was surfing the internet for dance inspiration.

While browsing, he came across the LBGTQ documentary “Paris Is Burning.” The documentary, which follows New York drag queens in the late ’80s struggling to maintain their identities in the face of racism and poverty, changed Renzi Smith’s life. One of the stars of the film, Willi Ninja, helped perfect the dance form we now know as “voguing.”

Vogue is a modern style of house dance based on the methodical, picture-perfect movement of high-fashion models and has kept a strong presence in the New York City drag scene since its inception.

“I was like ‘Damn, what is he doing with his arms and all these straight lines?” Renzi Smith tells me. “‘What is that thing? It’s so exposed.

“I knew hip-hop was here [in New York], and I knew that we were in Switzerland doing something that actually does not belong to us,” he explained. “It belongs here.”

Without blinking an eye, he left his hometown in January 2016 and came to New York City where he could dance the way he wanted without fear of repercussions. He spent a year in the city dancing at the Peridance Capezio Center and Broadway Dance Center and diving into the voguing scene headfirst. The scene hasn’t changed much between now and then, Renzi Smith tells me. It’s still mostly centered around drag balls, parties and clubs like House of Yes, XL and Escuelitas.

“I knew I wanted to leave my country by that time because I couldn’t find space [in Switzerland] to really be myself,” he said. “I love to

dress up. I love to express, and Switzerland is very conservative.”

It certainly didn’t hurt that along the way, Renzi Smith met his now-husband, Broadway actor Britton Smith, and fell deeply in love. The couple, who frequently collaborate together artistically on Smith’s project, The Broadway Coalition, have now been married for two years.

Renzi Smith has performed with many artists including RuPaul and INNA, choreographed his own silent solo piece that premiered at Tisch last month and modeled in a campaign for L’Oreal at the recommendation of his friend and fellow Peridance instructor, Frida Persson.

He frequently teaches voguing and high-heeled dancing at the Peridance Capezio Center as well as choreographs and directs dance documentaries. He is currently working on a project with a renowned Cuban Broadway dancer that is set to release later this year. After he graduates from Tisch in May 2020, he’d like to start his own company that tells queer stories in order to promote awareness and acceptance in and out of the LBGTQ community.

When Renzi Smith was young, he never thought he would get a M.F.A. in dance — most professional dancers never do. But Renzi Smith knew he wanted to advocate for the LBGTQ community through choreography, and he saw Tisch as his entryway into the New York City dance scene.

“I made it into these schools, and now into Tisch, not because my ballet audition was good — it was actually f-cked up,” he said, reflecting on his audition experience. “But my solo presentation was very honest and it came from a place where I touched people through my movement and their emotions and I think that’s what it is.”

The school is known for its talent, but Renzi Smith thought something was missing.

“I saw so many solos there and I was kind of shocked because it was high leg, it was port au bras, and excellence and all these turns, seven pirouettes, but the eye was empty,” Renzi Smith said.

Ballet, it seems, was not the universal answer to the question of artistic identity, but rather an elaborate, daunting school of techniques. For Renzi Smith, these techniques had nothing to do with expressing yourself; they could not make up for the passion all dancers need to emote to their audiences and enjoy their craft.

“Ballet is that big like out-of-this-world, beautiful, graceful thing you want to achieve,” he said. “Is reality like that? No! That’s not reality.”

Instead, Renzi Smith urges other dancers to “dig deep into yourself and create out of there, instead of ‘I’m a snow white and I’m very gorgeous with long arms,’ and it means literally bullsh-t.” In other words, dance your dance and nobody else’s.

From Switzerland to our own Washington Square, it’s Luca Renzi Smith, or as I like to call him, Queer Dance Jesus.

Email Claire Fishman at cfishman@nyunews.com.

4

VOGUE

Restyling Glossy Print for the Ballroom Floor

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By ANNA DE LA ROSA Deputy Culture Editor

trike a pose.”

For many, the word “Vogue” brings to mind Madonna’s iconic 1990 black-and-white music video. In a sleek black pantsuit with her hair coiffed in a ’20s-reminiscent bob, the renowned singer hits and “clicks” her arms in sharp movements to frame her long lashes and sultry pout. Her movements, however, remain fluid rather than defaulting to a staccato.

People may assume Madonna’s model-like poses were inspired by the glossy pages of the acclaimed magazine of the same name, but this isn’t the full story. The pop queen’s video actually references dance moves — inspired by the fierce positions of the models in Vogue magazine — she saw at Manhattan’s Sound Factory Bar in 1989.

While voguers manage to look as if they were born naturally dripping in finesse, this physical prowess is only cultivated through hard effort and dedication from those seeking to achieve the rank of an icon. The angularity and rigidity of these precise arm and leg motions are softened by feats of flexibility. When performed correctly, the symmetrical movements appear effortless.

In the 1970s and ’80s, the underground drag ballroom scene brought voguing to center stage.

The balls were competitions that consisted of individuals, usually drag queens, who would perform in different genres and categories. During the ’20s, ball culture emerged in New York City as an exclusive phenomenon, which led black and LGBTQ communities in Harlem to establish their own in the 1960s — with a twist.

Queer individuals, particularly those of color, competed in various categories such as Butch Queen (cisgender gay men), Sex Siren (oozing sex appeal) and Face (emphasis on facial features).

While balls and competitions were taken seriously, they primarily offered a space for those not accepted by society to be who they wanted to be in a nonviolent and liberating way.

The epitome of acceptance and foundation for the communities within ball culture were the Houses. The Houses would compete against each other, and each typically had a defining feature that the members identified with — for example, the House of Xtravaganza was known for having the prettiest faces.

One House transformed the underground ballroom into a stage for dance. Willi Ninja, the founder of the House of Ninja, is recognized as the “Grandfather of Vogue.” He began dancing at seven and his self-taught talent led him to Greenwich Village in the late 1970s. While Ninja did not invent voguing, his stylized movements redefined and legitimized the dance form, making it something that could be taught to the Virgin Vogue, or the newcomers to the ball scene.

A living legend and the first Father of the House of Ninja, Archie Burnett saw Ninja as a brother. Burnett started voguing as the accidental product of being exposed to parties and clubs, such as Tracks Cafe, where voguing was taking off. He remembers the day when Ninja came bursting into rehearsal stating he was going to create a House. “[Willie] lived in Flushing, Queens, which was

a very Asian-populated neighborhood, and [he] was very interested in the martial arts,” Burnett wrote in an email to WSN. “He was an enthusiastic martial arts movie aficionado!”

Captivating every person’s attention at the ball, Ninja duck-walked while clicking his arms, moving seamlessly into a dip. He threw his legs over his shoulders while twisting his back and bending his fingers, leaving no body part stagnant as he performed. Burnett explained how voguing music — which evolved from disco and Philly soul to “pounding house beats” — was crucial to informing these sharp and agile movements.

“You are creating pictures and poses that move within [the] time aspect of music, and the goal is to make a perfect picture with each click or beat that the music provides,” Burnett said. “You challenge yourself to create patterns and musicality within the framework of how a two-dimensional source as a picture will be trans-

lated with a three-dimensional body on beat.”

Complete with pops and spins, voguing movements were used to throw shade, or subtly insult toward one’s opponents. While these motions made to kill the competition were jerky and contorted, Ninja was graceful, living up to his namesake.

Some balls were held to practice realness, or the ability for queer participants to pass as straight. Dancers dressed up as realities that they couldn’t take on, whether it was as a corporate executive or a supermodel. While some may argue that these behaviors qualify as glorification or stylization, they were merely means of survival — practicing putting on a convincing front to be able to survive the real world and its harsh view of queer and marginalized individuals at the time.

While the drag ball scene and voguing were products of the LGBTQ culture in New York City, they also served as gender fluid displays that both gave a home

to and reflected the many nonconforming voices in society.

Ninja was one of the stars of Jennie Livingston’s award-winning 1990 documentary, “Paris Is Burning.”

Livingston, who was first exposed to voguing in Washington Square Park while she was taking a summer class at NYU, highlighted the lives of the people in the Harlem drag scene during the late 1980s. Madonna released the music video for “Vogue” in the same year as the film’s release, thrusting voguing into the spotlight and pushing the drag ball scene from the hidden edges to a commercialized space.

Even as a current icon who lived during the birth of voguing and played a major role during its evolution, Burnett himself struggled with his identity within the voguing culture.

“Not being gay presents its own challenge in a culture that is identified as such,” Burnett said. “I have a saying — ‘you can be in the scene, but you don’t have to be of the scene.’”

Voguing has since grown to transform and inform other dance styles. A former Martha Graham Dance Company principal-dancer-turned-freelancer, Abdiel Jacobsen combines voguing with the hustle, a social partner dance performed in ballrooms and nightclubs to disco music.

“I work with Archie [Burnett] and take a lot of of the vogue elements of dancing and presence and integrate it into the hustle,” Jacobsen said. “That’s the way [I] can be more creative.”

Voguing has essentially become an accredited dance form that continues to be celebrated in pop culture, music and fashion. It is reaching new levels of folklore, and queer and transgender individuals have seen increased visibility as models, artists and musicians — all opportunities once seen as impossible by Ninja’s generation.

The 2018 FX series “Pose” created by Ryan Murphy, for example, offers an uncensored look into voguing culture and has been lauded by critics and viewers across the U.S. However, while transgender models like Leiomy Maldonado star in Nike advertisements and voguing dancers like Dashaun Wesley are being sent to dance schools in St. Petersburg to teach the dip, many transgender and queer people remain vulnerable.

This cultural paradox remains a struggle for many marginalized members of the community who are trying to achieve their dreams in a world where the American Dream seems unattainable.

Despite the disparity, voguing represents resilience in a time when the future can appear bleak. The ability to form a new community in the midst of social persecution and create something beautiful and liberating speaks more to American grit than anything else.

“This is an urban art form that was born out of a certain type of struggle that speaks to a larger demographic — more than the one that it was intended for,” Burnett said.

Email Anna de la Rosa at adelarosa@nyunews.com.

5

ALEXANDRA MUHAWI-HO

Arab-Chinese Filmmaker Seizes Freedom of Choice

By GURU RAMANATHAN Arts Editor

E

arlier this year, Arab-Chinese American filmmaker Alexandra Muhawi-Ho stumbled across an old Moleskin journal that she took from her brother Phil — actually her cousin, but she refers to him as her brother — and used it for her classes in her junior year at Tisch School of the Arts. She flipped through the pages, rapidly scanning past notes, but then paused on a page from a year and a half ago.

The entry read: “A girl who’s struggling with the idea of losing her virginity — maybe her Arab family plays into it?”

Looking back, Muhawi-Ho, now a senior, laughed off her initial confusion.

She pitched the idea in her Fundamentals of Dramatic and Visual Storytelling class in fall 2017. Her classmates passed, suggesting she choose a different topic. Muhawi-Ho was briefly discouraged, especially because sometimes she feels she has to go lengths to validate her own ideas since they tend to be intimate relationship dramas as opposed to the wild, fantastical pitches she often hears in classes.

“Compared to the explosions or whatever that’s going on in [another] person’s script, it just seems very unimportant,” Muhawi-Ho said. “I have to constantly remind myself that it’s OK to tell these types of stories as well, and [that it’s] OK for me to love doing this.”

Muhawi-Ho followed her peers’ suggestion that semester, but never gave up on her original pitch. Rather, she has gone on to spend her senior year scripting that idea, now titled “Habibti,” and is now full throttle on pre-production.

She projects to shoot in May. “Habibti,” an Arabic word used as a term of endearment, will follow 33-year old Amira, an Arab schoolteacher who sets out to lose her virginity to escape her traditional Middle Eastern upbringing.

The film also explores her relationship with her mother, Nahla. While she does not intend for Amira and Nahla’s dynamic to be entirely antagonistic, Muhawi-Ho hopes to dive into the complications of a traditional-yet-caring mother afraid that her daughter is abandoning their culture. Amira is really just trying to experience the normalcy of relationships and sex for the first time.

Muhawi-Ho’s own mother, Grace Muhawi, who passed away when the filmmaker was young, immigrated from the predominantly Arab West Bank in the 1980s when she was in her 20s. Muhawi-Ho and her cousin Phil were predominantly raised by her aunt Hiam and grandmother Nuha. Her father, Antony Ho, is a first-generation Chinese-American whose parents immigrated in the 1950s.

Muhawi-Ho’s perspective on being American was particularly influenced by her Caucasian classmates at the all-girls school in Maryland she attended from sixth to ninth grade.

“I tried my best to wear bows in my hair, I straightened my hair for a really long time,” Muhawi-Ho said. “Because I have Arab waves but it’s dark like my dad’s.

So, yeah, I was really ashamed of that for a really long time. Then, when I got older, I was like ‘f-ck it’ and just left it natural since then.”

Muhawi-Ho often found comfort in the world of film instead. She grew up an avid movie watcher with her family, renting hundreds of DVDs from Blockbuster, including 1950s classics “Roman Holiday” and “White Christmas.” As a result of British colonization, both her parents grew up primarily exposed to European actors like Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, which is why those films were popular in their household. Muhawi-Ho rarely watched Arabic films growing up, but now makes it

a priority to engage with those artists.

The Muhawi-Ho household also revered classics for their subdued sexuality. Muhawi-Ho believes her parents shielded her from modern films’ explicit romances out of care for her, one of her many personal experiences that also influenced the relationship between Nahla and Amira.

Muhawi-Ho’s exposure to classics allowed her to gain a traditional idea of film that focused more on character dramas than big interstellar epics — though Muhawi-Ho is still a fan of all things Marvel and Star Wars. She notes one of her major modern influences is Oscar-nominated writer, producer and director Richard Linklater, known for films like “Boyhood” and the “Before” trilogy. Linklater’s films have been defined by naturalistic dialogue and

her family to pursue the arts.

Muhawi-Ho’s mother worked for a non-profit, the Jerusalem Fund, and her father was a banker. Her cousin Phil is a U.S. Army captain while most other cousins are lawyers, bankers and doctors, and her aunt is an English as a Second Language school teacher.

But Muhawi-Ho still cites her grandmother as a prominent inspiration. She wanted to be an actress or fashion designer, but her parents married her off in her teens and she became a housewife. Her grandmother knitted ornate sweaters for the family and was the first artist Muhawi-Ho knew in that respect.

“I thought about what if you’re not able to express your identity or have the freedom to choose when you’re this young,”

exploring intimate minutiae between characters.

“He follows people in their relationships and that’s all it’s about,” Muhawi-Ho said.

“It doesn’t have to be about something bigger than that.”

She notes that “Habibti” has been directly influenced by the women in her family as well.

“To see them navigate coming to this country and trying to find their place has just been really interesting,” Muhawi-Ho said. “[The U.S.] is their home now, but the idea that they had another home for a significant part of their lives is really interesting.”

Her film directly deals with a woman’s right to choose how to live her life, an idea Muhawi-Ho mulled over a lot because of her own experiences. Hesitant at first about her career path, the filmmaker is the first in

Muhawi-Ho said. “And maybe that decision comes later as it has for some of my family members. Not only in terms of sexuality, just like anything, you know? And that’s how Amira was born.”

When it came time to apply for college, Tisch was always her top choice, but Muhawi-Ho enrolled in Liberal Studies because she did not have an artistic portfolio to submit at the time. During her two years in LS, she took classes in theater, screenwriting and acting, before finally transferring to Film and TV the summer before her junior year.

The script she used for her application ended up being her Intermediate Film project, “Strangers,” which she shot junior year.

Muhawi-Ho, who is queer, focused on two girls who broke up because one was uncomfortable with her sexual identity and how they would navigate their future together.

“I really didn’t even know what types of films I wanted to make until I got to Tisch,” Muhawi-Ho said. “I’m always really interested in telling stories that are very real and very grounded versus giant space movies or anything like that.”

The summer before her senior year, Muhawi-Ho finally decided that she wanted to take part in the year-long Advanced Production Workshop class and have “Habibti” be her capstone project at NYU. Muhawi-Ho struggled with writing “Habibti,” questioning if she was “Arab enough” to tell Amira’s story. She gradually became more confident in her ability by pushing herself to continue writing it, incorporating her own family experiences and getting feedback from others.

She says that she is one of the few Tisch seniors who is Arab. Thus, she has also used the project to build out a new community with more Arabs in general, finally making the cultural connections she wished to have made all her life.

According to Muhawi-Ho, one of the best pieces of advice came from her friend, Ward Kamel, who is from Syria and is involved in the casting process. He noted that there needed to be a scene of Amira and her mother laughing together and sharing a sweet moment so as to not make the relationship overtly antagonistic. “[The mother is] loving, but there’s this other barrier of culture,” Muhawi-Ho said. “Everyone has a parental figure that they’ve struggled with their ideas, ideology and culture. I’m hoping it will resonate because it’s a lived experience for at least the women in my family and their friends and their daughters as well.”

In recent months Muhawi-Ho has also tended to other aspects of pre-production, namely casting and fundraising.

Muhawi-Ho is very passionate about choosing her cast — she has also interned at Avy Kaufman Casting, the same company that worked on “Brokeback Mountain” and “Life of Pi.” But she is having difficulty casting Nahla because the character requires an elderly actress who is also fluent in Arabic. She has been frantically reaching out to actors on social media and Arab organizations.

The team also recently launched the Indiegogo campaign with a flexible goal of $9,000 while the overall budget is around $14,000. Though she is uncomfortable asking directly for money, Muhawi-Ho has already started to reach out, knowing how difficult crowdfunding can be if she does not.

Of course, like any filmmaker, Muhawi-Ho is not interested in being put into a box. While these intimate portraits are near to her heart, she has just as much interest in writing something as absurd as recent Oscar-winner “The Favourite.” She is seizing the right to choose and wants to extend that right to her characters and the communities she puts up on screen.

Having the freedom to choose one’s identity is why Muhawi-Ho’s family immigrated to the U.S. in the first place. She struggled to define herself in her youth, from wanting to be like her classmates to adapting whatever her community at the time deemed normal. Through writing and filmmaking, however, Muhawi-Ho has grown comfortable with all her identities.

“Being American is a melting pot,” Muhawi-Ho said. “You can be from a certain place and look like a conglomeration of a bunch of different things. You are each of those things.”

Email Guru Ramanathan at gramanathan@nyunews.com.

6

RICHARD LINKLATER

Everyday Realities in a Cinematic Dream

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By FAREID EL GAFY Staff Writer

woman in a tie-dye shirt and dark glasses leans against a low stone wall in an Austin parking lot. She shuffles a deck of cards. “They’re Oblique Strategies,” she informs a cowboy type as he approaches. “No two cards are alike.” Spread out behind them is a boombox and an artistic model of the menstrual cycle represented with bowls in various shades of red. The Texan takes a card and reads, “It’s about building a wall but making a brick.”

Since the late ’80s, Richard Linklater has sought to capture the spirit of an oblique strategy, or a challenging game intended to break creative blocks, in film. Linklater’s characters are outcasts — he shines a spotlight on them and occupies the viewer with their daily lives, whether through a scene of a hippie in a parking lot with a deck of cards or a washedup musician teaching at an elementary school and inspiring the kids to enter a Battle of the Bands competition. From the periphery, they offer a window into the American Dream.

Linklater’s audience relishes his fascination with the misfits. They find his outside-looking-in stories relatable. In his early work, even the structure of each film breaks the mold. The filmmaker abandons a traditionally cinematic narrative formula. There are no great heroes or villains, no great journeys, no great developments in the classic Linklater. Instead, he reveres the everyday reality, the United States that we all live in. Alfred Hitchcock once mused that film is “life with all the boring bits cut out.” But it’s in the quotidian that Linklater thrives.

“He wants to put the boring bits back in,” Tisch Experimental Animation Professor Jeff Scher said.

To accomplish the static, ordinary realism of his early films, Linklater used an ensemble cast, allowing him to explore multiple stories and themes instead of restricting himself to a singular point-ofview. The filmmaker is freed. He sees no requirement to have a character develop through to the end or offer a concrete suggestion of where to go next.

Paired with a loose narrative structure, he affords himself a fluidity that breathes life into the setting, itself a character in the feature.

Linklater’s first cult hit, “Slacker,” meanders its way through a day in Austin. A Texas native himself, Linklater also stars in the 1990 film as a character known simply as “Should Have Stayed at the Bus Station,” while the supporting characters are played by a host of other Texans. It’s a breathing portrait of a major U.S. city, and one that embodies Linklater’s own experience.

As the film opens, Linklater’s character expounds on dreams from the back of a taxi. “Every dream you have becomes its own reality,” he rambles. A girl in a wide-brimmed baseball cap intrudes upon a conversation between old friends. “I’ve got something that will blow your minds,” she grins as she dips into her jean pocket. “It’s a Madonna pap smear.” The film embodies the spontaneity of his youth and the era of the late-20th-century United States that he felt was thriving.

Linklater makes space for the strange in his America, especially in the Bohemian haven of Austin. An ordinary laborer reveals that he refuses to take a job, and announces to his fellow workers that “every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death.” He’s an odd brand of Marxist, but he belongs in the world of “Slacker.” Austin is the star of the film, and the players make it up as they reflect on our society at large.

Linklater moved away to study film at Austin Community College and remains in the city to this day. The city has an old, rich art scene, and it’s exactly that culture Linklater taps into. His preoccupation with the American Dream as a reflection of himself confuses Hassan Elgamal, a CAS junior studying Metropolitan Studies.

“It feels like all his movies are about himself […] I don’t know how many movies I could make about myself,” Elgamal said.

For “Dazed and Confused,” Linklater brought together soon-to-be household names Matthew

McConaughey and Ben Affleck. The 1993 film depicts the drama of Austin high schoolers maneuvering hazing rituals in 1976. Texas as a microcosm of the United States is on display. The Lone Star State is massive, bursting with self-identity, home to progressive liberals and far-right conservatives alike. It’s a classic high school drama riddled with the oddity of “Slacker.” It’s set in the liberating, revolutionary post-Vietnam United States, where McConaughey’s character drives around town with high schoolers, though he graduated a few years prior. The kids do drugs, they drink, they fight, they navigate love and they take refuge in rock ‘n’ roll, sacred to the rebellious youth of Linklater’s age.

In his most recent work, Linklater depicts coming-of-age. “Boyhood” tracks the life of a boy as he grows up in Austin, filmed over the course of 12 years and released in 2014. Mason (Ellar Coltrane) endures an abusive stepfather, economic hardship, constant relocation and social difficulty due to the recklessness of the adults around him. During the course of filming “Boyhood” and as Linklater approached middle age, the Great Recession of 2008 placed many Americans in dire straits. The American Dream became less attainable than in Linklater’s youth.

Mason’s journey toward maturity bestows a sense of clarity, an ability to see through the fa-

cades we buy into as children. Yet again, Linklater finds a metaphor to play against American culture, another lens through which to view our society.

The United States changes as Mason grows, and he comes to understand the world around him better.

The passage of time, much like the loose narratives and ensemble casts of Linklater’s earlier films, gives character to the setting. Mason goes off to college and finally becomes independent. In many ways he’s a product of the U.S. he grew up in. He didn’t choose it, but it shapes him — just as the ’70s and ’80s shaped Richard Linklater.

Email Fareid El Gafy at arts@nyunews.com.

7

DANIELLE BRAGA JONES

A Brazilian Bostonian Photographs New York City

By DANTE SACCO Deputy Arts Editor

P

hotography is both an art and an industry. By nature, it depends upon patronage.

Public opinion holds that the artistic and corporate ends are incompatible; that when the two meet, it’s rarely in collaboration but in conflict.

This view misses the precise technical and artistic skill of the corporate creative.

If you’re skeptical, go photograph a Whopper Jr. and see if your best editing efforts can make your burger look as edible, never mind as mouthwatering, as it looks in advertisements.

Though there is little fanfare for those behind creative advertisements, landing a job with a brand allows the photographer to pursue the career of their dreams.

This puts many photographers in a paradox.

The corporate photographer must take photos to support their outside passion project.

Tisch Photography senior Danielle Braga Jones is an artist who will face this corporate reality in the coming years. Jones already has done creative direction and social media for Theory, a contemporary fashion label, and currently interns at Winky Lux, a makeup and beauty brand.

Directing the creative vision of a brand is an artisically challenging job, even if the photography is seen across Instagram feeds, glossed over in many a coffee table photography book.

She has pursued a career in photography, following a dream that many of the visually inclined might’ve been too timid to embrace.

“I guess I’m always shooting,” Danielle told me, referring to her photography career and she started young.

“The f irst time I ever took photos was in computer class.”

Her sixth-grade computer class set her down the career path she’s followed to this day. Then, with access to a dark room in high school, her pastime matured into a passion.

“That was when I was really like ‘I love doing photography,’” Jones said.

While her passion started when she was young, her artistic perspective has been molded by a wide range of inspirations.

“I think I’m all over the place with different photographers,” Jones said, and indeed her influences are widespread. Among them, she lists Nan Goldin, Mike Brodie and Ren Hang.

On Goldin, Jones said, “She’s amazing. She just shot photos of her friends and the scenes she was in. A lot of flash, and I like using flash, so that kind of inspires me.”.

One photographer stood apart from the rest in his apparent influence on Jones’ style.

“I love Daniel Arnold,” Jones said.

“He’s like the king of wandering around. He captures these crazy moments that other people can’t just because he does it all the time.”

Arnold has worked for vaunted publications such as Vogue and operates a famous Instagram account, which allows him to make money a living off his photography, as Jones hopes to do.

When asked about her favorite type of photography, Jones’ interests mirror Arnold’s. “Street photography,” Jones

ter life for us,” Jones said.

Living in the U.S. allows Jones to have more opportunities, but that same advantage has increased the pressure on her to succeed.

“If I’m doing something, I have to go all in on it because I think about how much my parents, especially my mom, had to sacrif ice in her life to make things happen for me, then I have to go all in,” Jones said.

First-generation college students

said. “I love capturing moments when people aren’t really paying attention.”

It’s in these shots that Arnold’s influence on Jones is clear (or blurry, depending on the photo). Many of her photographs are taken through the eyes of the urban observer. When she’s working for herself, unconstrained by the f ixed demands of a brand or class assignment, she takes energetic, living photographs. Several of the pictures in her portfolio evoke manic, alcohol-fueled revelry. Even her shots of adults expose a latent youthful energy. Others capture New York in scenes of collective serenity, each shot a snippet that works smoothly unto itself, unwitting of the hectic metropolis it inhabits.

Jones is the inheritor of a rather unique generational path. Her mother is Brazilian and settled in Boston, where there is a large Brazilian community.

“Being able to live here means a bet-

bear an additional burden — the inherited weight of their parents’ sacrif ices.

For Jones and others, loved ones have struggled to support their own dreams, and that can lead to a simmering indebtedness to their heritage.

Homages to her Brazilian background often appear in her photography. Jones’ culture inevitably shapes her view of the world, and photography, after all, necessitates capturing the world as one sees it.

She also connects back to her cultural roots through music, which appears in her photography in subtle ways.

Jones names Gilberto Gil and Seu Jorge as a few of the many Brazilian musicians whose music inspires her and her art. When Jones takes portraits, she treats her subjects with a uniquely tender intimacy, even when the photo has rough implications. Brazilian culture, Jones explained, is more tight-knit and

affectionate than the isolated keep-toyourself ethos of New York and the United States at large.

Jones made sure to mention that music is a second form she has a passion for. When prodded for her favorite band, she said “Overall? All time?

Nirvana.” This explains the picture of a young man shredding on his guitar featured prominently on her website.

Jones plays the guitar herself and hangs out with a musically-inclined crowd.

Jones believes in the American Dream and even that it lives on today. But she also says, “The American Dream is an idealized term.”

Jones points to precarity of the Dream: there is nothing innate or special about America that keeps the Dream alive.

It lives only as long as its practitioners continue to nourish it. That it survives despite a current, public example of the American Dream beginning with a “small” million dollar loan, is no small miracle.

As Jones points out, even when the dream is thriving, “The beauty of it is that there’s always room for improvement.”

For Jones, the central tenet of the American Dream is that anything is possible if you work hard enough. She has lived her life with the ambition and drive necessary to make her own dream of success in photography a reality. So far she’s done work for the brands Eastern Sling and Supply, Flesh Beauty and Red Flower. The photography industry can be diff icult to break into and even harder to make a name in.

Her senior show, titled “Cachaça e Café,” after a Seu Jorge song was a collection of photographs from a summertime trip to Brazil.

She describes it as a “visual manifestation of emotions which connect me to parts of who I am.” It is likely the def ining work of this young artist’s juvenilia.

“Cachaça e Café” explicitly captures her roots and the culture which informs the rest of her work.

Now, Jones is continuing to work on a photo series about Brazilians in New York. She took her camera to Astoria, Queens where there’s a signif icant population of Brazilian people. Jones went to different restaurants, interviewing Brazilian patrons and taking their photographs.

For Jones, a full-time job in photography would be the ultimate payoff after many years of work and many more rolls of f ilm. She wants to be compensated for her work — every artist’s dream — and continue personal artistic exploits on the side. In a f ield that is both competitive and diff icult to monetize, Danielle Braga Jones has found an approach that will allow her to work on her passion for years to come.

Email Dante Sacco at dsacco@nyunews.com.

8

NAN GOLDIN

The Queen of Drag Photography

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By ALINA PATRICK Photo Editor

hotography emerged in the 1800s and became the most democratic medium of the art world. It can be reproduced easily, performed by anyone willing to engage with their subject and allows for people of any background to become the subject matter. This ability to document a variety of subjects and use the medium to connect with them is the foundation of Nan Goldin’s work.

Goldin was one of the f irst artists to take photography and use it to give dignif ied images to sexual minority groups in the U.S. She began her work in the 1970s, photographing drag queens in Boston and New York, and decades later, she worked in Paris, Berlin, Manila and Bangkok. Goldin’s photographs portray the glamour and elegance of the queens along with the highs and lows of their everyday lives.

In “The Other Side,” Goldin’s photography book published in 2000, she documents the lives of drag queens worldwide and demonstrates how she came to acquire such a deep understanding for the communities with which she spent so much time. In the introduction, she explains how the portraits “are not of people suffering gender dysphoria but rather expressing gender euphoria.”

Tisch Photography and Imaging junior Jay Arora noted that Goldin’s identity as a bisexual woman and her closeness to the subjects make the portraits more intimate. “[In] each project, either the ‘The Other Side’ or ‘Sexual Dependency,’ her relationship with the subject drastically changes the image because she is documenting her life with the LGBT community instead of from afar,” Arora said.

Goldin does not shy away from taking raw, telling photographs, but her work does not reduce the experiences of drag queens to lives of isolation or sadness. Rather, Goldin’s work highlights the truly American experience of living outside of an accepted identity group and scraping together a full life.

The 1970s was a decade marked by change for the LGBTQ community, and Goldin documented it. The Stonewall Riots of 1969 brought the community out of the darkness, marking a political surge in LGBTQ activism. Charles Kaiser, author of “The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America,” called the 1970s “a period of transformation for gays and lesbians, particularly those living in America’s coastal cities. At its core, that transformation was about visibility.” Visibility is exactly what Goldin’s work achieved, especially as she continued into the 1980s. During the AIDS

crisis, she created a dignif ied and diverse image for the LGBTQ community.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s hit the drag community hard. An already ostracized communit became further isolated and feared by American society. Goldin’s work complemented the activism that grew out of the LBGTQ community during this

traits are OK […] but perhaps it’s harder for a woman to be a documentarian and be taken seriously,” Tisch Photography and Imaging junior Katie McGowan said.

Goldin attempted to neither romanticize nor vilify the communities she documented.

There is a great variety within the images she created, from glamorous shots of beautiful

period by allowing for people to see a community they were constantly attempting to look away from. Furthermore, as a female photographer working in the documentary f ield, Goldin has become an inspiring f igure for many women hoping to break into such a male-dominated industry.

“Women are put into a box where self-por-

women out on the town to vulnerable, raw portraits of half-naked men alone in their homes. Images, such as “Christmas at The Other Side, Boston” (1972), showed a drag queen in pearls and a classy Audrey Hepburn-esque dress pretending to light a cigarette for the painting of a man hanging on the wall. This black and white image shows

beauty and conf idence as well as unabashed sexuality.

The photographer grew to respect the drag community because, as she explained in her book, “most people get scared when they can’t recognize others — by race, by age, and most of all, by gender. It takes nerve to walk down the street when you fall in the cracks.”

Images, such as “Ivy in the Boston Garden, Boston” (1973), reinforce Goldin’s claim that she attempted to portray the drag queens how they presented themselves. In this case, as a glamorous classy woman.

The image is also black and white, but with a softer focus, and shows Ivy gliding through a park, smoking a cigarette like a model or an actress from a 1960s f ilm.

As Tisch Photography and Imaging senior Kodie Harris said, Goldin’s pictures “are, in the technical sense, not great photographs; they are blurry, badly lit and chaotically organized. What makes the photos great are the lives that they portray and the stories that are told within them.”

Not all portraits Goldin created depict glamour and fun. “Roommate with teacup, Boston” (1973) shows a more masculine f igure with muscular arms and a flat chest leaning forward and staring seemingly at the floor. The soft lighting, introspective expression and view of the shirt falling off the roommate’s shoulder to reveal a lack of breasts shows a more intimate view of this subject’s personal life than the other images of parties and fashion.

In “The Other Side,” Goldin reflected that she “never saw them as men dressing as women, but as something entirely different — a third gender that made more sense than either of the two. I accepted them as they saw themselves; I had no desire to unmask them with my camera.” Portraits, such as “Roommate with teacup, Boston,” reveal that view of a third gender and the honesty Goldin was attempting to display. Yet Goldin chose not to include simply reflective or even sad moments in her photographs. She displayed a full life of euphoria and contemplation alike, so as not to reduce the community to a stereotype in either direction.

Goldin lived and worked in the LGBTQ community before the U.S. took pride in it. To her, “it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody — it’s a caress [...] I think you can actually give people access to their soul.” The close personal connection she feels toward her subjects is evident not only in the access she was able to gain to their working lives, homes and sexual experiences, but also in the rare moments of introspection photographers can be lucky enough to witness in a subject’s gaze.

Her determination to grant this community living between identity groups a dignif ied image for the time was monumental and a true representation of the American Dream.

Email Alina Patrick at apatrick@nyunews.com.

9

DEVANSHI KHETARPAL

An Indian Poet Finds the Sublime in the Everyday

By ALEX CULLINA Theater & Books Editor

D

evanshi Khetarpal doesn’t know what kind of writer she wants to be.

“My interests are all over the place,” she said. “Writing is a constant, although writing about what and how keeps changing.”

Regardless, the 20-year-old Indian poet already has a resume longer than many professional writers. She has two books under her belt, with a poetry collection set to debut later this spring, not to mention a slew of pieces for online publications. In 2014, she co-founded the literary magazine Inklette; as editor-in-chief, she commands a staff of about 20 volunteers around the world.

When she was 12 years old, Khetarpal published her first book, a young adult novel called “Welcome to Hill Top High” about a young girl’s adventures during her first year of boarding school, through a small local publisher in India and Kids Pub Press in Boston. Now, though, she sometimes wishes she hadn’t.

“I haven’t kept track of that, and I don’t think I want to,” she said about the novel, which she calls “a very horrible one,” with a wry smile.

But by her teenage years, Khetarpal, now a CAS sophomore studying Comparative Literature and Creative Writing, had begun taking writing seriously as a career.

Khetarpal grew up in an upper middle class household in Bhopal, a large central Indian city. Her father is a pediatrician who owns a private hospital and her mother is a professor of forensic medicine. Khetarpal started her literary education at an all-girls Catholic convent school. The English literature curriculum at the school, which she attended from kindergarten through high school, was focused heavily on white, colonial-era British writers like Enid Blyton and Rudyard Kipling.

“We never heard that Kipling was the one who basically coined the term ‘white man’s burden,’” she said, “but we would read him, and he would be like this grand figure of literature in our textbooks.”

Although she did read some Indian literature at school, like the work of the great novelist Premchand, overall, she was dissatisfied with the breadth of the curriculum.

“It was kind of very English- and North America-oriented,” she said.

As she delved deeper into work by Indian writers like Premchand and Rabindranath Tagore on her own, she came to appreciate how important it is for Indians to read Indian literature.

“It helps you get in touch with the lives of people around you,” Khetarpal said. “I think in India it’s very easy, especially for a person who’s relatively privileged, or who’s not living in poverty, or who’s not from a lower caste to sort of dismiss those problems.”

Like many Indians, Khetarpal grew up speaking multiple languages. She speaks Hindi with her family, while her education was conducted in English.

“To grow up bilingual is a complex thing to navigate,” she said. “Though I write in English, I kind of feel guilty about writing in English and not in other regional languages sometimes, or Hindi.”

While English was a required subject for every year at her high school, other language study was not; Khetarpal stuck with Hindi through her senior year by choice — she wanted a better understanding of the literature of her first language.

Hindi literature “was just looked down on,” she said. People she knew generally didn’t treat it as seriously as English literature.

“I think because we grew up with a colonial mentality that English is great, and Hindi is not,” Khetarpal said. “It took me a long time to sort of wrap my head around the fact that Hindi is sort of my mother tongue, and always will be.”

To push back against that, she tries to read Hindi literature as well as work that has been translated into Hindi.

As she began to hone her craft, Khetarpal

spent her high school summers studying at well-regarded writer’s workshops in the U.S. and U.K., one being the Iowa Young Writers Studio. She’s still in touch with many of the other young writers she met during her summers abroad; some of them are now Inklette staff members.

Khetarpal decided to come to New York City for college so she could participate in the city’s world-renowned literary scene.

“I really love New York,” she said. “If I want something entertaining to do for tomorrow, or the next day, or I want to attend a literary event, something’s going to be going on somewhere.”

Her first taste of New York literature was on the internet, through the online presence of American literary magazines like The Paris Review and The Adroit Journal. This community of writers and readers solidified her goal of becoming a writer and sparked her desire to move to New York.

It was also online where she found contemporary Indian writers she loves, like Akhil Katyal, a poet and translator who promotes his work largely through social media. A major inspiration for her next collection, “Small Talk,” Katyal also wrote the foreword to the book.

Katyal’s work — he writes in both Hindi

and in English — is epigrammatic. Many of his poems are barely longer than a tweet. He’s unapologetic in the way he collapses the distance between the personal and the political, or between the broad and the particular — his most recent collection is titled “How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross?”

In “Small Talk,” which Khetarpal wrote during her final two years of high school and her first year of college, she explores similar thematic territory and is correspondingly concise.

“I think it’s pretty clear that in some poems I do talk about national issues, or political issues, or social issues that cause me pain, but I think it turns more into a telling of why I feel pained by them,” she said. “I think they become kind of like, I think, tellings of pain or trauma, in my own voice.”

In the foreword to “Small Talk,” Katyal writes of Khetarpal’s work, “she marries the precise to the ponderous, the small to the sublime.”

Khetarpal opens the poem “Night & Back,” with a direct address: “Kashmir, you are a name / I once had.” She writes about the conflict in Kashmir with explicitly personal, even bodily terms. Expressing how close she feels to it both emotionally and physically, she writes, “The

gulmohar falls / on my chest like a stone.”

Almost none of the poems in the book are longer than a page; many are only a few lines. But Khetarpal’s work is nevertheless wide-ranging — she cites Sufi poetry, known for invoking natural elements like snow or rain, as another influence on the collection.

Each poem is crystalline and exact — entire universes of feeling and expression compressed into a dense, compact gem of language. The entirety of “Nomenclature”: “The sun spills / through the seams / of your saree. // The light grows.” Like the best of Khetarpal’s work, it’s simple, declarative and yet profound.

As for her future as a writer, Khetarpal isn’t quite sure what it’ll look like, as she’s writing more essays, experimenting with translating Hindi literature to English and exploring the possibility of writing about her childhood.

The final poem of “Small Talk” is titled “Endnote: June 2018, New York City,” written just after the end of her first year at NYU. It begins, “What if I were to ask if / I could manage it?” It’s safe to say, if she were to ask, the answer would be a resounding “yes.”

Email Alex Cullina at acullina@nyunews.com.

10

LEAVING

a poem by Devanshi Khetarpal

from her forthcoming collection‘Small Talk’

listen: I play dead with everyone all the time but here’s the thing: mother keeps this shadow & cleans these bones the water kneading my toes into lattice-work pulling it like a drop out of the ocean but please listen: make this grave with your feet in such quiet that no noise can act like it has seen a body before birth

THE PARIS REVIEW

The Dream of Literary Success

E

By JULIE GOLDBERG Staff Writer

quipped with big dreams and elite university educations, Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton left the United States in the late 1940s for Paris.

WWII had just ended, and the city’s literary culture was booming. They, like many privileged twenty-somethings today, searched for fulfillment abroad. They believed Paris’ intellectual and creative environment would project them into literary stardom, or so they hoped.

Within their first few years, they brushed elbows with fellow literary hopefuls — James Baldwin, Irwin Shaw and William Styron. In 1953, looking to provide a platform for hoards of talented, unpublished writers they encountered, the friends decided to start a literary magazine called The Paris Review.

The Paris Review, then and now, prides itself on original creation rather than criticism, moving away from the literary world’s mounting preoccupation with critical essays. The Paris Review focuses on stories and poems to uplift creative work itself as opposed to the criticism being written about it. It welcomed a variety of writers, although many of them came from the founders’ inner circles.

After moving its headquarters from Paris to New York City in 1973, The Paris Review quickly emerged as a fixture in American literary culture. Yet, The Paris Review is an undeniably global institution. For the magazine’s first issue, illustrator William Pène du Bois fashioned the logo of a bird gripping a pen in its claws, donned in a French Revolution-era bonnet rouge to represent the merging of two nationalities.

Publication in the magazine promised success for unknown writers, embodying the meritocratic ideal of

the American Dream.

Said Sayrafiezadeh, contributor to The Paris Review and creative writing professor at NYU, said that publication in the literary magazine is, and has long been, the dream for many young, aspiring writers in the U.S. “Jerry Seinfeld,” he commented, “speaking about being an up-and-coming comedian in the early 1980s, described how the ultimate place where every comic desired to be seen, was on ‘The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.’ The Paris Review has always held a similar sway over writers.”

This American Dream for writers, although, came with costs — one being a degree from or even a stint at, an elite U.S. university. Humes briefly attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Matthiessen completed his degree in English at Yale University and Plimpton went to Harvard University where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. Plimpton, who served as the editor of The Paris Review until his death in 2003, holstered his connections to snag the magazine’s big literary names for its inaugural interview series, “Writers at Work.”

The founders of the magazine aligned themselves with “the silent generation,” refusing to affiliate with any political, cultural or social discourse. As they matured into adulthood during the McCarthy Era, they were wary of speaking publicly on political issues, and were hesitant to engage in the unstable post-WWII landscape.

But the apolitical stance of these young men was also a matter of privilege — they saw no pressing issues that demanded any kind of impassioned response because they were not personally impacted by the myriad social and political injustices occurring across the globe. The U.S. enacted Jim Crow laws, Algeria fought for independence, the Korean War raged

on overseas — all while these men’s lives remained unphased.

In supporting young, unpublished writers, however, they did indeed take a political stance, asserting that great writing could be found anywhere and seeking to give a platform to voices that had not yet been recognized by literary critics, or even by the general public.

Even now, The Paris Review maintains a certain class of writers and editors; its current editor, Emily Nemens, is a Brown University graduate and many of its interns come from Ivy League backgrounds. After she assumed her role as editor in April 2018, Nemens told Vanity Fair that she peruses the slush pile and plans on diversifying the publication’s voices.

NYU students pursuing literary careers still maintain a certain skepticism, concerned for their futures.

A junior in the creative writing program who wished to remain anonymous said The Paris Review’s barriers to entry limit the publication’s variety.

“Overall access to that publishing culture is reliant upon race, class and nepotism,” they said. “While The Paris Review consistently puts out good work, it’s nearly impossible to work for or have work published by [it] as an up-and-coming writer.”

CAS junior Griffin Vrabeck, also on the creative writing track, echoed this sentiment. “[The Paris Review] publish[es] people who are already famous, and people it wants to make famous,” Vrabeck said. “Once they find those people, [it doesn’t] actually care about making unknown people famous.”

As the 1960s saw the rise of celebrity culture as a result of mass media, writers became celebrities. And The Paris Review sought to revere them as such.

In its early days, The Paris Review leveraged its interviews with the most prolific writers of the time

— Truman Capote, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, to name a few — to cajole readers into taking a look at the poems and stories being published alongside them, which were largely the work of new and emerging writers.

With the seminal “Writers at Work” interview series in 1977, the magazine endeavored to create a self-portrait of the artists it profiled. The interviewers took a more passive approach, allowing the artist to speak freely about themselves and their work.

Since its inception, the magazine has made efforts to respond to the changing tides of American culture. Its website has implemented a paywall, similar to many media publications now, but lifts it on Sundays to reach a wider audience that might not be able to afford its $59 subscription. In 2012, it launched The Paris Review app for Apple products, hoping to bolster both young adult readership and provide a new means for longtime subscribers to engage with content.

A magazine that was founded in one city and rose to prominence in another, that bears an undeniable legacy of exclusivity since the day it was founded despite its professions of egalitarianism, “The Paris Review” is indeed fraught with contradictions and holds a complex place in our cultural consciousness.

The Paris Review still lives on in its Chelsea, New York office with only 11 full-time employees and puts out a quarterly print edition. In a time when compensation for writing is steadily decreasing, The Paris Review can seem like a mecca out of reach.

For many young writers and young people more generally, the American Dream remains just that: a dream.

Email Julie Goldberg at arts@nyunews.com

11

MICHELLE LEE BAE

K-Pop Prodigy Defines Her Own Sound “There are days that I think / I should just burn it and leave / it won’t get you anywhere.”

By NICOLE ROSENTHAL Music Editor

H

er lyrics are bluntly dark and honest, spitting witty one-liners of personal confessions.

Her instrumentation is equally complex, with layers of sparkly synths drizzled over brooding basslines and hard-hitting drum machines. It is an eerie dichotomy of dark and light that has defined her career thus far.

Michelle Lee Bae, known onstage as Min.a, is a sugary-sweet, electronic virtuoso whose combination of dark techno and soulful pop music doesn’t fit into a neat label, much like the artist herself.

“In my music, I try to incorporate both Korean and English lyrics,” Bae said. “That’s what makes up my persona as an artist.”

The Korean American producer’s real name is Michelle Lee Bae. Her Korean name, which she uses interchangeably with Michelle, is Minah.

“I can’t really have one without the other,” the Clive Davis sophomore said. “Understanding the importance of both of my cultures through the perspective of Min.a is how I’m trying to stay true to the duality of my identity as a Korean American.”

It is this struggle of finding her place between her heritage and her birthplace that has characterized her artistic breadth. It was a struggle Bae was forced to acknowledge when she was thrust into the spotlight at just 14 years old. She became a finalist in the South Korean singing competition “KPOP STAR3.”

Bae cites the cultural divide between her and her fellow contestants on the singing show — all of whom had only lived in Korea — as the inspiration for her lyrics.

“Growing up, I struggled a lot with accepting my culture,” said Bae, who moved to Korea with her family at age 10 for her father’s new job. “As a Korean American, sometimes you don’t feel like you’re American, but then you also don’t feel like you’re Korean.”

Bae was raised by her mother, who majored in flute performance and pinored in piccolo performance, and her grandfather, who played the violin. Although she was reluctant at first due to stage fright, as well as anxious over being an American-born artist on a foreign singing show, Bae won the hearts of the judges and placed eighth in the competition. Yet the struggle of honoring her heritage without compromising her American identity was a weight that lasted long after the season ended.

While performing on “KPOP STAR3,” Bae was given virtually no freedom, artistically or otherwise — she ate on a strict diet of apportioned meals and was given specific songs to sing. Bae was thrust into the spotlight in a short white dress with black bows accented throughout, black stockings and matching black gloves. Her long brown hair was curled neatly in place.

To the audience, the young singer appeared to be adorably dolled-up. For Bae, however, who prefers gender-nonconform-

ing attire, the outfits were an uncomfortable weight to bear.

Sporting a short, black bob haircut and baggy black clothes during our interview, Bae clearly defies strict gender expectations, something that is likely to raise eyebrows in Korea.

Korean culture has been marked by a level of misogyny. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2016 Global Gender Gap Report, South Korea ranks 116th out of 144 countries in terms of gender equality. (The U.S. ranks at 45.) Korean women are expected to be

can eat in a day into three small cups. What’s more, BTS’ Park Ji-min subjected himself to extreme dieting after his supposed attempt to “become handsome” for a music video shoot.

There are countless video compilations of K-pop stars collapsing onstage due to malnutrition and exhaustion.

Each week, thousands of viewers watched as Bae sung her heart out with a bashful smile and rosy cheeks. From afar, one could envision that Bae’s dream of being a renowned musician had been realized. However, Bae

dolled up and presentable for the male gaze, such as in Korean singer Psy’s music video for “Gentleman.” The multi-instrumentalist Bae competed in the competition round after round, wearing frilly pink skirts and doused in makeup. The very same conditions impelled down on her.

“I was struggling with body dysmorphia and body image in general,” Bae said. “Being told, ‘Do you like just eat constantly all day?’

Having producers be like, ‘You need to like suck in your tummy’ or having a stylist be like, ‘I don’t know if you’re going to fit in this.’”

K-pop icons have revealed dangerously unhealthy dieting habits, from IU’s 300-calorie daily diets to Nine Muses’ fitting all they

was quick to confess that being on the singing competition did not foster a healthy environment for a young teen.

“I was diagnosed with a couple of mental illnesses [and] being on that show was definitely a very big source of that,” said Bae, tensely adjusting her loose-fitting jumpsuit.

“There are a lot of traumatic things that happened.”

Yet, in what was perhaps the most shocking, the 14-year-old was bombarded by producers with emotionally abusive comments and recommendations for illegal plastic surgery.

“It felt like it was time to go,” Bae said of her elimination toward the end of the compe-

tition. “Those kinds of singing competitions are so strategically planned from the very beginning. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to move on any further than I did.”

Yet the singer-songwriter did not see her removal from the show as the end of her career. Instead, Bae’s mother encouraged her to expand her musical palette and sign up for electronic music production classes during her sophomore year of high school, fresh off of “KPOP STAR3.” She has been producing ever since.

As she moved back to the U.S. to attend NYU, Bae sought to be an artist on her own terms with Min.a.

“My musical career started off with me as ‘Minah’ on [‘KPOP STAR3’], and I wanted to honor this culture that makes up half of me. I’m Korean and I’m American, and that doesn’t make me any less of either. Branding myself as a Korean American self-produced artist, the self-produced part being what gives me this control of my narrative [and] lets me embrace both parts of my ethnic identity.”

Before she graduates from NYU, Bae hopes to get signed to a small label, specifically the U.S. entertainment label 88Rising, which has propelled Asian artists such as Joji and Dumbfoundead to popularity. Bae sees herself rising as an artist in the U.S. first before transitioning to stardom in Korea.

“English is my first language, and also I think I resonate more with, at least currently, the music scene in the U.S.,” Bae said.

“In Korea, there aren’t that many artists that are like more experimental in that sense or electronic. It’s more K-pop, which I love — but it’s not totally me.”

Currently, Bae is working on music videos for her recently released debut EP “Glitch,” a five-track compilation of glitchtinged R&B pop reminiscent of Billie Eilish and Mitski.

Without any upcoming performances scheduled, the artist hopes to record more music for a full-length studio album. Bae hopes to address mental illnesses within her music with lyrics that are culturally and personally significant to her experience.

While she expresses her anxieties about constant competition within her major that causes her to question if she is already too old for a career in music, Min.a provides Bae with the authenticity and creative control that she was robbed of as a young artist.

“With the control that I have as a self-produced artist, I get to choose who I present myself to be and the sound that I’m associated with,” Bae said. “Having significantly more freedom [after ‘KPOP STAR3’] has also helped me understand what I don’t want to do. I’ve been trying to make as diverse music as possible and with that practice, I’m slowly approaching a sound that I can fully stand behind.”

Email Nicole Rosenthal at nrosenthal@nyunews.com.

“I’m just 19, I have time to think it through.”

12

AMERICAN IDOL

Face the Reality of Music Competitions

C

By ETHAN ZACK Staff Writer

arrie Underwood. Jordin Sparks. Adam Lambert. One Direction. Fifth Harmony.

These musical powerhouses all got their start on the TVs of millions of households worldwide. Almost everyone has seen at least a snippet of a musical competition reality show like “American Idol,” but few know what being part of one is really like. Beneath what seems like a clear shot at early success and popularity for aspiring musicians lies an intimidating demand for personal sacrifice.

Musical competition shows have been a staple of international television for over two decades now. For all the credit that “American Idol” gets as the first show of its kind to carve a place in the public consciousness,

the genre has roots far from U.S. soil. “American Idol” based itself off the British series “Pop Idol,” which was inspired by New Zealand’s “Popstars” that began in 1999. While television executives were skeptical of the popularity such a show could have in the United States, the debut of “Idol” in 2002 proved that the premise was universally-loved.

“There’s something about seeing someone sing a song, relating to it in some type of way based on who they are, how they present themselves and the genre and supporting them because they represent you or who you want to be,” said Lexi Riesenberg, a Gallatin senior and one half of the pop duo “strangers.” “Then you add in the competition factor and it sort of serves as a microcosm of the real world. It’s a hierarchy of different identities and it helps you figure out where you stand.”

“American Idol” draws in viewers of all ages with its

celebrity judges and engagement with the audience.

At home, fans of the show can submit their votes to decide which contestants advance to the next round.

Shows like this are a launching platform not only for the contestants, but also for the young viewers watching at home. Riesenberg said she watched music reality shows for years as a child, starting with the night Kelly Clarkson won “Idol’s” first season. “‘American Idol’ was a huge part of what inspired me to become a singer,” Riesenberg said. “It might have had something to do with how cool it seemed.

You got to go to Hollywood and live in a big fancy mansion and sing songs. It also exposed me to a lot of different kinds of music and helped me learn some classic songs I might not have heard otherwise.”

The international popularity of American music reality shows in the early 2000s led to a larger crop of similar shows across the world, such as the South Ko-

rean music reality show “K-pop Star” and the British show “The X Factor.” In turn, some of these programs have influenced U.S. shows like “The Masked Singer,” a 2018 adaptation of the similar South Korean show “King of Mask Singer,” where unknown celebrities compete in costumes, only revealing their identity upon elimination. The music competition genre quickly became a web shared by numerous cultures.

“It’s a lot about the fact that everyone has that internal desire to be the person who has the it factor and can be famous,” Gallatin first-year and singer-songwriter Jesse Blumenfeld said. “That’s international. Everyone can relate to that.”

As Riesenberg and her generation grew up, she started to see music reality shows in a different light.

The commercial aspects became more overt and the idealistic vision of the shows giving musicians a helping hand in their careers grew muddier. Sob stories and background motivations for contestants were played up to bolster ratings. Tearful moments — like Sir Tom Jones singing a heartfelt duet with Donnie Lonegan’s son earlier this year on “The Voice” — became an expected, near-comical staple of the genre.

“These shows are made for TV, not for music,” Riesenberg said. “The reason we fall in love with so many contestants for one season and then never hear of them again is because ‘American Idol’ isn’t made to help an artist develop a long and successful career. It’s made to entertain you and keep you watching.”

The music competition industry hasn’t been a stranger to outright controversy either. One hotly debated subject is the restrictive nature of the contracts the contestants must sign with companies like 19 Entertainment to participate, which often requires them to yield their creative control and profits from a prospective career to the show’s studio. “American Idol” winner Phillip Phillips grew to fame in 2015 when he filed a petition to free himself of his contract, claiming he was being “manipulated.” “[‘American Idol’] limits artistic freedom and expression,” said Tori Amah, a Liberal Studies first-year and former participant in the NYU music competition UltraViolet Live. “So I made it this far to sing pop songs because my label thinks that’s my vibe? What about what I want to say and write?”

Blumenfeld said he believed that musical reality shows have their benefits, but their very existence places a dangerous, competitive layer over a treasured method of self-expression.

“A lot of times when you put yourself out there and you try and win this competition and you have judges who rank you, you immediately see yourself in this spectrum of talent,” Blumenfeld said. “That should never be how it is.”

Email Ethan Zack at arts@nyunews.com.

13

DANCING THROUGH U.S. HISTORY

Directed by Justin Park

Under the Arch Deputy Multimedia Editor

Audio by Guru Ramanathan Arts Editor

Edited by Guru Ramanathan and Justin Park Choreographed by Maxine Flasher-Duzgunes Voices Editor

G

Performed by Taína Lyons

oing beyond the theme of the issue, this f ilm is meant to explore the larger historical evolution of the United States from the mid20th century to the modern day.

Conceived by Justin Park and choreographed by Maxine Flasher-Duzgunes, “Considerable Evidence” is an experimental dance f ilm in which our character (Taína Lyons) weaves in and out of different time periods and takes us on a journey through the land of the free and home of the brave. Her stunning movement is underlaid with an expansive dialogue, edited by Guru Ramanathan, that is a compilation of different f ilms and historical speeches that reflect the different generations of the U.S. and how each decade was complicated by drastically different conflicts and consequences. The audio is complemented by a series of video clips that are used to depict the time periods that the dialogue is taken from. The f ilm was projected onto the floor on which Lyons danced, allowing her movement to intersect and respond to the speech, and the U.S. at large.

nyunews.com/dancing-through-us-history-video

14

“This might just do nobody any good. At the end of this discourse a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest. And if what I say is responsible, I alone am responsible for the saying of it. Our history will be what we make of it … It occurs to me, that there’s a bigger issue here today than whether or not I am a Communist … We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life will be violent and all will be lost …

We suffer political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation, all of them from the same enemy.

The government has failed us, you can’t deny that … And you and I live in a country which is supposed to be the citadel of education, freedom, justice, democracy, and all of those other pretty sounding words … But in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. And we were afraid of a doomsday gap … If nothing in life is worth dying for, then when did this begin? Should the patriots of concord bridge set down their guns and refuse to fire the shot heard around the world. Where then is the road to peace? Well, it’s a simple answer after all. All this stuff you heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dump. American, traditionally, love to fight. You know the results of the latest Gallup poll? Half the country never even heard of the word Watergate. Nothing’s riding on this except the First Amendment of the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.

During this fight, I seen a lot of changing. There are two guys killing each other, but I guess that’s better than 20 million. If I can change, and you can change, everybody can change. Hate — it was with this hand that Cain iced his brother. Love — these five fingers go straight to the soul of man. Static. One hand is always fighting the other hand. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe. We reached for the stars. First step in solving any problem is recognizing that there is one. ‘I thought the punish usually came after the crime.’ ‘We can’t afford to wait that long.’ ‘Who’s we? This isn’t freedom, this is fear.’ Our character, our rights, have all been under attack. *We are america. And we are here to stay.* Because we are different, aren’t we ladies and gentlemen? If we just talked about the fact that we are different and acknowledge why were are different, instead of pretending that nobody is different, and still secretly thinking we are different, we might finally all be on the same page and be less different. I began by saying our history will be what we make of it. *To those who say people wouldn’t look, that they wouldn’t be interested, they’re too complacent, indifferent

15

Washington Square News Staff Sakshi Venkatraman

MULTIMEDIA Katie Peurrung DEPUTY MULTIMEDIA

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CREATIVE WRITING

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Director of Marketing and Logistics

Multimedia

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Arts

ABOUT WSN: Washington Square News (ISSN 15499389) is the student newspaper of New York University. WSN is published in print on Mondays and throughout the week online during NYU’s academic year, except for university holidays, vacations and exam periods.

CORRECTIONS: WSN is committed to accurate reporting. When we make errors, we do our best to correct them as quickly as possible. If you believe we have erred, contact the managing editors at managing@nyunews.com.

Akiva Thalheim INSTAGRAM Abby Hofstetter SENIOR Guru Ramanathan FILM Claire Fishman THEATER & BOOKS Alex Cullina MUSIC Nicole Rosenthal ARTS Dante Sacco

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Rachel Holliday Smith