“I performed at Tiananmen Square in 1989, 15 days before the crackdown. I sang A Piece of Red Cloth (一块红布), a tune about alienation. I covered my eyes with a red cloth to symbolize my feelings. The students were heroes. They needed me, and I needed them. After Tiananmen, however, authorities banned concerts. We performed instead at “parties,” unofficial shows in hotels and restaurants”.
In 1988, rap group the N.W.A from Compton, California released their second album, “Straight Outta Compton”. Without any radio play or media coverage, the album still managed to become an underground hit, and the notorious rap group successfully introduced socially conscious gangsta rap into the mainstream.
Late last year the Spanish government passed a law that set extreme fines for protesters convening outside of government buildings.
In response to the controversial Citizen Safety Law, which will take effect on July 1, Spanish activists have staged the world's first ever virtual political demonstration.
Now that the dust has settled from the Met Gala, with all the excitement over Kylie Jenner’s bathroom selfie and Rihanna’s body-swallowing Comme des Garçons florals, it is worth pausing to consider a red carpet moment most people missed: the entrance of Joe Gebbia, co-founder and chief product officer of Airbnb, with Yeonmi Park, a North Korean refugee and international refugee activist.
"But Ms. Hojabri lives in Iran, where women are not allowed to dance, at least not in public. The 19-year-old was quietly arrested in May and her page was taken down, leaving her 600,000 followers wondering where she had gone.
In the mid early 2000s, religious advocates tried a new strategy: promoting the theory of “intelligent design” to be taught in schools. As the Kansas School Board considered the argument, Prophet Bobby Henderson saw an opportunity. His now famous, “Open Letter to the Kansas School Board” began:
In Louis Armstrong’s study in the Queens home he shared with his fourth wife, Lucille, bookshelves were filled with reel-to-reel recordings he made as a sort of audio diary. Those tapes and his letters — read by the rapper Nas — lay the foundation for the director Sacha Jenkins’s documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues.”
Thousand Kites, a nonprofit organization based in the Appalachian region, advocates for prison reform through performance.The following excerpt is directly quoted from the Thousand Kites website: "Starting 1998, as host of the rural, Appalachian region's only hip-hop
radio program "Lights Out," Thousand Kites media artist Nick Szuberla
received hundreds of letters from inmates recently transferred from distant
Zheng Xi 郑熹, a Ph.D. candidate with a focus on gender studies at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Zheng has launched a campaign asking city governments around China to display anti-sexual-harassment logos, complete with a groper’s “salty-pig hand” visual (etymological context here), alongside other commonly displayed public safety logos on places like subway trains and buses.
The Pilobolus Dance company, famous for their beautiful aesthetics of shadow play formed out of the dancer's bodies, started the #PilobolusVOTEproject, encouraging people to form the words VOTE with whatever material they had around them, take a picture of it and to upload it on instagram with the hashtag #PilobolusVOTEproject.
The No Hate Speech campaign has come to its fourth anniversary this week, because it was on the 18th of March 2013 when the Spanish Institute for Youth IMG_9707(INJUVE) officially launched the campaign in Spain, to commemorate the 21st of March, declared by the UN as Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination of that year.
Many may not realize, but legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday was a big part of the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, her 1939 song about lynching, “Strange Fruit,” made her a target of the FBI.
In conjunction with the GUTS world tour, Olivia has launched Olivia Rodrido’s Fund 4 Good, a global initiative committed to building an equitable and just future for all women, girls and people seeking reproductive health freedom.
A portion of the proceeds from all ticket sales at the GUTS world tour will go towards the Fund 4 Good.
As Denmark moves to deter refugees from crossing its borders, a new theater production dramatizing their plight seeks to change how many in the country perceive their new neighbors. Uropa: An Asylum-Seeker’s Ballet, [is] a dance piece performed in part by refugees portraying themselves.
CNN
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Environmental and indigenous groups have filed two separate lawsuits challenging the Willow Project on Alaska’s North Slope after the Biden administration approved the oil drilling venture on Monday.
Cops on Monday cleared an encampment at Yale University to protest the war in Gaza and arrested dozens of students, as demonstrators at New York University and The New School set up tents after a similar action at Columbia University led to the arrests of more than 100 protesters.
In Halt, a new solo piece premiered at
NYU Gallatin, dancer and choreographer
Jamar Roberts examined the language of
the body in protest. The work focuses
on what it means for human beings-the
committed individual and the organized
collective- to be equally the subjects
of progressive change and the targets
of unjust corporeal punishment.
It’s time to deport the Statue of Liberty.
That’s the latest mission for Legals for the Preservation of American Culture, an organization which has begun the “Deport the Statue” campaign for the removal of Lady Liberty through four Twitter accounts and a video that hopes to prove the iconic statue is not only an undocumented French immigrant but is “taking a job away from a qualified American statue.”
This demonstration was in response to a new law (as of June, 2012) imposing fines for unauthorized protest of up to $20,000 for organizers and $10,000 for participants. After activists were turned down for a more traditional protest, Lyudmila Alexandrova and others set up small dolls, teddy bears, and figurines with demonstration slogans. Two mini protests took place in January 7 and January 14, 2012.
This weekend marks the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump's inauguration. It also marks the one-year anniversary of the Women's March his election inspired, the largest single-day protest in the nation's history.