Guidelines for Playwrights submitting to Earth Matters On Stage 2004: An EcoDrama Playwrights' Festival
What kind of theatre comes to mind when you read the term "ecodrama"? Political plays that advocate for environmentalism, educational theatre that teaches the advantages of recycling? While these examples would fit, please let your imagination soar beyond them.
Think Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, set in a 19th century town known for its health baths where the waters have become polluted and a lone whistle blower clashes with powerful vested interests. Think The Kentucky Cycle , the epic tale of a land and its people - Indigenous, European, African - over seven generations. Think Alligator Tales , a one-woman play by a Louisiana Cajun native about her relationship to her neighbors, the weather, the oil rigs off the coast and the alligators on her porch. Think Secret Garden in which Nature consoles a child's grief. Think site-specific plays like Dragon Island in which the landscape becomes a player.
Think too of a play, perhaps your own, that brings focus to an ecological question of a particular place, walks the line between readily available positions, and takes writer and audience to a deeper exploration of an issue that may not be easily resolved.
If you're still with us you are helping to create an inclusive ecodrama that inspires us to explore the complex connection between people and place. This is an ecodrama that makes us more aware of our ecological identities as a people and communities. We need your ecodrama, so does the theatre, so does our world. Imagine! Write! Submit!
The Festival encourages submissions of one-act or full length plays that do one or more of the following :
- Put an ecological issue at the center of the dramatic action or theme of the play.
- Put an event of environmental crisis or conflict at the center of the play.
- Explore issues of environmental justice.
- Interpret "community" to include our ecological community.
- Attempt to give voice or "character" to the land, or elements of the land.
- Explore the connection between people and place, and/or between culture and nature.
- Develop a sense of connection between human and non-human communities.
- Grow out of the playwright's personal relationship to the land and the ecology of a specific place.
- Examine the reciprocal relationship between human, animal and plant communities.
- Demand a specific sense of place in their scenic requirements and which construct person and place as permeable spheres.
- Invite audience members to examine their own personal relationship to the land, and/or to those who work the land.
- Attempt to find common ground among diverse stakeholders invested in a certain place or resource.
- Offer an imagined world where the characters' society is one that is more in harmony with principles of sustainability than we find in today's modern world.
- Critique or satirize patterns of exploitation, consumption, or other ingrained values that are ecologically unsustainable.
- Are written specifically to be performed in an unorthodox venue such as natural or environmental setting and integrate this setting in the context of the play.
Additional submission guidelines:
• One acts (30 minutes or longer) or full-length plays written for primarily English speaking audiences.
• Previously un-produced (Readings, workshops, amateur or school productions are fine).
• Send two copies of manuscript without author or contact information on any pages including cover & title page. Include author and contact information on a separate loose page. Scripts will be adjudicated anonymously. Manuscripts will not be returned.
• For 2004 Festival submissions will be accepted September 1, 2003 to April 5, 2004 (must be received by that date). Mail to:
Dr. Theresa May
Re: Earth Matters
Theatre, Film & Dance TA20
Humboldt State University
1 Harpst St.
Arcata, CA 95521
Selection process(1): Humboldt County artists & academics will review all submitted scripts. Festival Artistic Director, Larry K. Fried, will select a small group of finalists. A distinguished national panel of judges will review selected finalists for awards.
Award & Recognition Announced by late-July, 2004: Festival Winner will receive a Certificate of Artistic Achievement and $2,000 prize.
Winner of Festival may also be recommended and promoted for full production to selected regional & educational theatres throughout the US and Canada.
In addition, all submitted plays of merit will be considered for readings and workshop productions during Sept/Oct 2004 Festival: Earth Matters On Stage: A Redwood Coast Festival of New Plays(2). Playwrights will be encouraged to attend, and if funding allows we will be able to defray some or all travel costs.
For more information contact, please e-mail or fax:
Larry K. Fried
Artistic Director
lkf@naturalchoice.net
Fax: (270) 294-3179
At this time we are not accepting phone calls, but if you would like to talk about the Festival, please e-mail or fax your phone number and perhaps good times to reach you.
(1) Subject to change
(2) More details & scheduling forthcoming
|
