CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Poets Theater 2011

Dear Friends,

In a few months Small Press Traffic will be celebrating our ten-year anniversary of Poets’ Theater! Poets Theater is an annual festival in which innovative works are performed, enduring avant-garde plays showcased, and the boundaries of theater generally jostled by artists and writers in collaboration to ask questions around and negotiate the possibilities of poetics and – and in – performance.

Each year this event has brought large audiences in appreciation of, and in engagement with, this ongoing and evolving community of writers and performers, and is always one of SPT’s major fundraising events. This year we are delighted to announce two evenings of new plays and performance works and most importantly, we want you to be involved.
We’d like to invite you to consider contributing a performance to this year’s events, slated for January 2011.

Contributions could can range from brief play to improvised performance to participatory instructional pieces to cross-genre collaboration – or anything you might discover between or beyond those suggestions. For example, you could submit a two minute piece with the instruction to have it be performed four different times throughout the night by different performers. Or you could submit a more "traditional" 10 minute play or a set of instructions for the audience. You get the idea, right?

Unfortunately, given this is our big fundraiser, we won’t be able to offer payment for your participation, but the experience of the festival affords communion, conversation, sometimes a little collusion and always a lot of fun. We really hope you'll submit your ideas!

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
1. All proposals must be submitted September 15th to poetstheater@gmail.com.

2. Proposals must be no longer than one typed 8.5x11 page of text.

3. Proposals must be for performances that will not exceed 10 minutes in length.

4. Proposals should include the following: a basic idea (with maybe some lines of dialogue); general technical needs for the performance (music, lighting , props etc.); number of performers; and, if you are unable to attend but would like to send in a proposal for others to perform on your behalf, a suggestion for a director/performers.

5. Proposals should reflect the constraint of the performance space, which has a limited stage area, minimal lighting, and minimal rehearsal access.

We, of course, would love to accept every proposal we receive, but will sadly have to select only 15-20 proposals. We will notify contributors by October 1st regarding their submission, as well as next steps and further details for selected entries.

Please feel free to e-mail with questions and the like. We look forward to hearing from you.

Best,

David Buuck, Cecil Giscombe, Lauren Shufran, Karen McKevitt and Samantha Giles
The SPT PT ’11 Committee