• The 22-year-old ballet dancer Jeppe Hansen had danced on stages around the world and earned a spot (and a scholarship) in the prestigious Royal Winnipeg Ballet School's professional division—until the school found out he had done a single porn film under the name Jett Black. In April, not sure what else to do, he moved to New York to make porn full-time, CBC News reports. Will watching Hansen do a grand jeté or lift a ballerina somehow corrupt a ballet audience? Is an orgy going to break out in the boxes? And if you want to stop someone from doing porn, is this the best way? What might have been dabbling or an adventure is now a career. Good work, pornphobes.
• What's with the strange performances at the Hedreen Gallery recently? They're part of Yellow Fish festival, curated by choreographer Alice Gosti. The strangeness has included Gosti mummifying herself with toilet paper, Tyler P. Wardwell pressing his sweaty body against the windows, and Reilly Sinanan setting traps on the sidewalk. Pedestrians have been baffled and beguiled. A different artist is there every day through July 15, with Spike Friedman and Satori Group on July 10.
• Crazy-pants British playwright Snoo Wilson died suddenly July 3 at age 64. A contemporary of Howard Brenton and David Hare, Wilson was political but more satirically subversive—and weirder—than his peers. In his 1971 play Blow-Job, he infamously had raw meat thrown onto the stage to represent an exploded Alsatian dog. A remembrance by Simon Callow described him as political "in the way that Aristophanes was political—rude, lewd, uproarious, anarchic."
• In other British news, University of Manchester professor Maggie Gale says England produced more plays by women during the suffragette era 100 years ago. From the Telegraph: Gale "estimated that around 8–12 percent of today's plays are written by women, compared with 18.4 percent in 1923, 20.4 percent in 1936, and 22 percent in 1945." Why? "There were a lot of people writing new plays and a lot of tryouts," Gale says. "It was a commercial system which relied on experimental work coming in from the sides. Women's work fare[d] quite well because production companies knew it would sell."
• The cast of The Seagull, which rehearsed Chekhov's play for many months and performed it at ACT Theater earlier this year, has reportedly received a $50,000 grant from the US government to create a new version of the play in Tashkent, Seattle's sister city in the former USSR. They will work in conjunction with the Ilkhom Theater, an Uzbek company that came to ACT in 2008, just months after its provocative artistic director Mark Weil—who outraged Communist apparatchiks, Muslim fundamentalists, and the Uzbek dictatorship alike—was assassinated on his front steps.
• President Obama gave out the annual National Arts and Humanities Medals this week to a list of creative people including Joan Didion. As writer Rachel Syme tweeted beforehand, "Joan Didion's and Obama's hands are going to touch... Start your fanfic." 
