Anna Aslanyan

Anna Aslanyan’s book, Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History, came out in 2021.

From The Blog
21 April 2026

In Nayatt School, Spalding Gray played a ‘pedantic schoolteacher’ and the psychiatrist from The Cocktail Party, using a recording of its 1949 production. ‘It was also about my mother,’ Gray wrote, ‘and the victimisation of women in male-dominated social structures. It worked on many levels for us all.’ The play has now been remounted by The Wooster Group. Nayatt School Redux, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, is on in London this week.

From The Blog
19 February 2026

‘Let the Minion skate!’ people were urging on social media days before the start of the Winter Olympics. Universal Pictures had refused Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté permission to perform his Minions-inspired figure-skating programme in Milan. Eventually ‘the internet did its thing’ and he was allowed to go ahead with his performance.

From The Blog
9 December 2025

On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library’s St Pancras building. ‘We’ve got a library with no books, no readers, no digital content, no front-facing staff and absolutely no clue!’

From The Blog
10 October 2025

John Heartfield was forced to leave Germany in 1933. Even before the Nazis put him on their hit list, his art had caused controversy. In 1928 he designed the cover for a book about the mores of the German top brass (Erotik und Spionage in der Etappe Gent by Heinrich Wandt). When it was banned, Heartfield produced another, turning the censor’s scissors against the censor.

From The Blog
7 March 2025

Schneewittchen, a film by Stanley Schtinter based on a text by Robert Walser, opens with a shot of a man in black lying in a field of snow, supine, one arm thrown out. The scene emulates photographs taken on Christmas Day 1956, when Walser left the asylum where he had spent 23 years to go for a walk, never to return. The images have inspired many reconstructions. The one in Schneewittchen has the director playing the writer. Not everyone who came to the film’s UK premiere at the BFI last month realised that Schtinter was in it.

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