"Getting Played:" Kathleen Tarr's Third Annual Symposium on Equity in Entertainment
At “Getting Played,” the Third Annual Symposium on Equity in the Entertainment Industry and Awards, PWR lecturer Kathleen Tarr organized a variety of thinkers from Hollywood to academia to come together to interrogate the ways in which insiders and viewers alike can fight for equal opportunity behind and in front of the camera in entertainment media.
While this year’s Oscar awards ceremony and recent winners may reflect greater diversity than in years past, consumers must still demand that our media offer more opportunities for representation. As one of the event’s panelists, Stanford theatre professor Dr. Jennifer DeVere Brody, suggested, the nomination of films like Moonlight, Hidden Figures, and Fences to the “Best Picture” category is heartening, but it does not change the fact that La La Land, a film that explicitly celebrates white heteronormative standards, still clinched a record number of nominations and remains the front-runner for most of the top awards. Indeed, it is the fact that Hollywood still so often favors white narratives over any others that necessitates the continuation of conversations like those that happened at “Getting Played.”
Actor Rotimi Agbabiaka opened the event with a performance from his one-man show, Type/Caste. Through embodying several distinct voices - from a young woman appalled by a director’s suggestion that her natural hair prevents her from playing the “pretty” black girl to an older man who insists that black actors interested in performing Shakespeare will play Banquo but not Macbeth - Agbabiaka performed the struggles that black actors often face. As Agbabiaka shifted between his different identities, he established the kinds of conversations that would be an important part of the whole event.
To follow, Tamila Gresham, founder of and CEO of the nonprofit organization Represent, gave the keynote address and spoke to the legacy and importance of diverse representation in roles that move beyond stereotypes. She used the example of Nichelle Nichols, the black actress who played Lt. Uhara in the original series of Star Trek from 1966-1969, as an illustration of how powerful it could be when a black woman played an intelligent, charismatic, and courageous character. Gresham went on to explain how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of Nichols’s greatest fans; he told Nichols, in fact, that her work on Star Trek was a powerful form of activism. Gresham cited several studies to prove that children are particularly affected by seeing people who look like them in entertainment; in fact, children have higher self-esteem if they have been frequently exposed to empowering representations of their racial or sexual identities on television. She concluded by suggesting that in order for us to create a more equitable future, underrepresented actors must continue making themselves as visible as they can to help shape the future of entertainment.
A group of Kathleen’s students then corroborated much of Gresham’s statements by describing their research projects in Kathleen’s Advanced PWR course on inequity in the entertainment industry. Each student explored a different aspect of this inequity, from the psychological impacts that children may experience when they do not see people who look like themselves on television to some of the core reasons behind why talent agencies do not do more work to recruit underrepresented populations.
Panelists Dexter Davis, Felix R. Sanchez, Myrton Running Wolf, and Peter Soby then joined DeVere Brody and Gresham in further exploring obstacles and patterns of under-representation including of disabled, Latinx, Native American, and LGBTQ individuals. The recurring theme across all of the panels was the need for producers and actors alike to take on roles that honor their identities and give voice to authentic struggles. While Davis suggested that Hollywood itself may not change, consumers and insiders alike can show the demand and interest in art that captures the real conditions of underrepresented voices in the media.
Getting Played ended with awards honoring the contributions of Velina Brown, Adam Leipzig, Myrton Running Wolf, Lily Tung Crystal, and Torange Yeghiazarian toward equity in entertainment media. The following evening, Salesforce hosted the first “Getting PlayedX” at the Rincon Center in San Francisco for which Kathleen as a panelist focused on employment discrimination and violations of civil rights law that are frequently overlooked in discussions of entertainment industry inequities.
To learn more about the Symposium, visit the event’s website at http://kantonia.wixsite.com/symposium2017 and/or you can view a recording of the event. The recording is in three parts:
