Minnesota made history on primary night. For the first time, all of the candidates for the top political offices in Minnesota are women. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth will face each other for governor this fall, and Michele Tafoya and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan are vying for U.S. Senate.
Truth be told, there exists numerous feisty, principled candidates who are anti-fascist, unapologetically working class and who do not have monsters in their backgrounds. But you won’t find us in either of the two [corporate-backed “major”] parties. We are in third political parties, like the Green Party. Our platforms promote universal health care, peace through diplomacy, the environment, women’s rights and economic democracy. All our positions challenge the oligarchy and unfettered capitalism. Problem is, our voices are drowned out by the back-and-forth scandals of the two parties and a media that only reports on Democrats and Republicans, as if nothing else and no one else matters.
Above: Steve Young and Jane Kirby, Green Party candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor – June 2026. (Photo: Michael J. Bayly)
All the World’s A Stage is, at heart, a celebration of the many people a performer becomes in the pursuit of their craft.
Performing artists invest years of their lives learning how to transform into characters, stories, emotions and ideas. We train our bodies to communicate things that words cannot always express, often presenting the finished result as though it came effortlessly. Behind every moment onstage, however, is an enormous amount of work, vulnerability, repetition and courage.
Although this show contains more than dance, dance is its central pillar, so I want to take a moment to discuss something that has shaped both my relationship with the art form and the work I create.
Because dance is something that is watched, a dancer’s body can quickly become something that other people feel entitled to assess. Our bodies are discussed, compared, corrected and judged. We are told what shape we should be, how we should move and what we should wear. Over time, the body can begin to feel less like the home of the artist within us and more like the property of the audience (in the theatre or even more difficult to handle – online), the institution or the tradition.
I believe this has turned many people away from dance, particularly ballet, before they have never had the opportunity to discover what it might mean to them. When you spend so much time looking into a mirror, it can become difficult not to view yourself through the imagined eyes of everyone else.
Those experiences reach beyond body shape. Ballet has long carried strict ideas about gender: boys perform the large jumps, girls dance en pointe; boys lift, girls are lifted; tutus belong to one kind of body. Race, class and access create further barriers. For many people who are not white, wealthy or able to follow a traditional path through professional training, ballet can appear to be a world in which they were never meant to belong.
As a gay Black man from Trinidad and Tobago, dancing in pointe shoes and tutus in public places, I found freedom in going against what people expected ballet – and a ballet dancer – to look like. My work began as a way of creating space for myself within an art form I have loved for most of my life.
Over time, that personal act of freedom became something larger. It became a way of showing that ballet can be more than what we have been taught to expect.
I have never followed the traditional professional route. I dance because I love it. That does not make the joy, discipline or passion I find in ballet any less real.
Although ballet sits at the center of my journey, this programme aims to show much more than that. Every performer you see tonight has brought something of themselves to this work: their experiences, their imagination and their relationship with the stage. [NOTE: Along with Kadeem, others in All the World’s a Stage include dance artists Mercedes Prevatt and Rebecca Chan, singer and musical theatre performer Eve Shanu-Wilson, creatives Mandy Izquierdo, Two Thunder, and Storrveldi, performer Xavier Thomas, and choreographic duo Bloom Collective.]
I hope you will see more than technique or physical appearance. I hope you will see people following what makes them feel alive.
Whether you are here in the theatre or watching from somewhere across the world, perhaps something tonight will encourage you to begin (or return to) something you love.
Finally, a million thank yous to every one of you for supporting my work. By being here, whether in person or online, you are helping me to continue growing my mission of bringing ballet to more people.
Thank you for sharing this evening with us.
The genocide in Gaza is the moral issue of our generation. One reason that candidates are campaigning on it and succeeding is because of the moral clarity it generates. If you listen to these candidates, they are hardly one-issue nominees. They are concerned with capitalist overreach, want to hold Trump accountable for his crimes and misdeeds, advocate for health care for everyone, and want the world to be safer for everyone: immigrants, queer people, and other vulnerable populations. Such a world is much more possible, though, if the U.S. does not continue to commit billions of dollars to fighting wars and advancing genocide. The truth is as clear as spotting a seahawk characteristically singing its unmistakable call.
In many ways, Nagasaki is the modern A-bomb city, the city with perhaps the most meaning for us today. For one thing, when the plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki it made the uranium-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima obsolete.
And then there’s this: “The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable,” Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, once observed, “but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki” – which he labeled a war crime. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who experienced the firebombing of Dresden at close hand, said much the same thing. “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki,” he once said. “Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now.”
. . . When they’d learned of the Hiroshima attack, the scientists at Los Alamos generally expressed satisfaction that their work had paid off. But many of them took Nagasaki quite badly. Some would later use the words “sick” or “nausea” to describe their reaction.
As months and then years passed, few Americans denounced as a moral wrong the targeting of entire cities for extermination. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, however, declared that we never should have hit Japan “with that awful weapon.” The left-wing writer Dwight MacDonald cited America’s “decline to barbarism” for dropping “half-understood poisons” on a civilian population. His conservative counterpart, columnist and magazine editor David Lawrence, lashed out at the “so-called civilized side” in the war for dropping bombs on cities that kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. However much we rejoice in victory, he wrote, “we shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt which prevails among us. . . . What a precedent for the future we have furnished to other nations even less concerned than we with scruples or ideals! Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.”
There is one God and one truth, one religion and one mysticism; call it Sufism or Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism, whatever you wish. As God cannot be divided, so mysticism cannot be divided.
. . . The God of the mystic is to be found in his own heart; the truth of the mystic is beyond words. People argue and debate about things of little importance, but mysticism is not to be discussed. People want to talk in order to know, and then they forget it all. Very often it is not the one who knows who talks so much, but the one who wants to know. The one who knows but does not discuss is the mystic. She knows that happiness is in her own heart; but to put this into words is like putting the ocean into a drop of water.
. . . People strive for many different things in this world and last of all they seek the spiritual path. And there are some indifferent ones who say, “There is a long life before us and when the time comes that I must awake I shall wake up.”
But the mystic knows that the spiritual path [the inner life] is the one thing he must attend to, that all other things come after that. It is of the greatest importance in his life.
Should he, by working for realization of God, neglect his duties in the world? It is not necessary. There is nothing that a mystic need renounce in order to have the realization of life. She only needs to attach the greatest importance to what is most important in life.
The life of a mystic is meditative, but to him meditation is like the winding of a clock. It is wound for a moment, and all day long it goes by itself. He does not have to think about it all day long. He does not trouble about it. . . . The moments of meditation set the whole mechanism in running order, like a stream running into the ocean. They do not in the least keep the mystic from her duty; they only bless every word she speaks with the thought of God.
In all the mystic thinks and does there is the perfume of God, which becomes a healing and a blessing. And if one asks how a mystic, who has become so kind and helpful, gets on among the crowd in everyday life, since the rough edges of everyday life rubbing against him must necessarily make him heartsore, the answer is that they certainly do, and the heart of the mystic is even more sore than that of anybody else. Where there is only kindness and patience all the thorns will come. But just as the diamond by being cut becomes brilliant, so does the heart; and when the heart has been sufficiently cut it becomes a flame which illuminates not only the life of the mystic, but also that of others.
Andor broke the Star Wars franchise . . . in the best way possible.
Star Wars has always been known to be the pulpy action adventure we all know and love since the original trilogy. But Andor proved that you could explore more genres, tones and styles within our favorite galaxy far far away.
So let’s dive into what that means for Lucasfilm, Disney and Star Wars as we talk about Tony Gilroy and his addition to the franchise with Cassian Andor, Luthen Rael, Mon Mothma, Dedra Meero, Syril Karn, Major Lio Partagaz, Brasso, Wilmen, Saw Gerrera, Orson Krennic and more!
The American political establishment isn’t panicking because the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] has conquered the country. It hasn’t. They’re panicking because socialists have started proving that corporate money, incumbency and the blessing of professional political parasites do not make anyone invincible.
Zohran Mamdani won New York City. Chris Rabb won in Philadelphia. Claire Valdez won in New York. Donavan McKinney knocked a sitting congressman out of office in Detroit. Across the country, DSA candidates are beating people the party establishment had already selected for power.
Then Abdul El-Sayed [left] defeated the establishment’s chosen candidate for Michigan’s Senate nomination despite being massively outspent.
El-Sayed isn’t a DSA member, but he ran on the same material politics: Medicare for All, free childcare, taxing billionaires and rejecting corporate control. This wasn’t some tiny socialist enclave hidden behind a Brooklyn coffee shop. It was a statewide primary in Michigan.
The right immediately began screeching about “Islamo-communism,” because apparently universal healthcare plus a Muslim candidate equals the Bolshevik caliphate now. Marx is coming for your riding mower and he brought hummus. These people have one terrified little Mad Lib and they just keep changing the nouns.
The Democratic establishment has spent decades telling working people that affordable housing, universal healthcare and taxing billionaires are wonderful ideas that must never actually happen. There’s always some consultant, donor or procedural excuse standing between the public and the policies the public wants.
Then socialists show up with volunteers, knock on thousands of doors and beat candidates with enormous campaign accounts and endorsements from every professional ass warmer in Washington. Suddenly, the machine looks less like an unstoppable force and more like three lobbyists stacked inside a trench coat.
The ruling class understands something it desperately hopes working people never learn: political power comes from organization. Wealth dominates because wealth is organized. Corporations dominate because capital is organized. Workers remain weak when they are isolated, exhausted and convinced nothing can change.
That is the DSA’s real threat. Not one candidate, but the possibility that working people might organize around their shared material interests instead of letting billionaires divide them over bathrooms, immigrants and whatever beer can made conservatives piss their pants this week.
Democrats fear losing control of their primaries. Republicans fear losing socialism as their favorite boogeyman. The donor class fears both.
Different panic. Same underlying terror.
The political establishment just discovered it can bleed.
Today Michigan answers the biggest question facing the Democratic Party.
Does it want a progressive firebrand – or an establishment “centrist”?
Abdul El-Sayed – physician, former Michigan gubernatorial candidate, backed by Bernie Sanders, AOC, the UAW and 200+ endorsements – is facing Rep. Haley Stevens, backed by Chuck Schumer, Gretchen Whitmer and nearly $50 million in AIPAC spending.
This is the most consequential Democratic primary of the 2026 cycle.
Here’s why it matters beyond Michigan:
This seat is genuinely winnable in November. Michigan is a battleground state Trump won by less than a point in 2024. The Republican nominee is Mike Rogers – endorsed by Trump.
If El-Sayed wins: the progressive movement will have proven it can compete in a state Trump won – against $50 million in establishment money.
If Stevens wins: the establishment will claim the center holds – and the progressive movement’s winning streak ends here.
Three democratic socialists swept New York in a single night.
Troy Jackson clinched Maine.
James Talarico leads Ken Paxton in Texas – in three consecutive polls.
Cori Bush is fighting to take back her Missouri seat tonight too.
Tonight Michigan decides.
I’m going to write something here that we all know is true but few are willing to just say out loud: There is a non-zero chance that the national Democratic Party, its donors and its media will decide to abandon/sabotage populist anti-establishment Democratic nominees in the upcoming general election.
Many in this corporate faction would rather such nominees lose – even if that means Democrats losing the Senate and governorships – than see these candidates win.
Why? Because if these candidates win, they threaten to change the Democratic Party and make the corporate faction irrelevant.
Why have Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Sens. Chuck Schumer and Gary Peters endorsed Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary?
At a rally in Grand Rapids, The Lever’s David Sirota put that question to progressive Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed argues that party leaders aren’t worried he’s unelectable – they’re worried he’ll win and challenge a political system fueled by corporate money.
El-Sayed says AIPAC, Big Tech, Big Pharma, DTE, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and other powerful interests have helped drive nearly $70 million in spending against him.
“I’m not going there to make friends,” El-Sayed told Sirota. “I’m going there to get stuff done.”
