Love's Labors Lost: What I'm doing now: forming playwrights of color group

January 26, 2010

What I'm doing now: forming playwrights of color group

Via our Craigslist ad (h/t LaSmartOne):

Are you a playwright of color with little or no production experience?

A new weekly or bimonthly playwriting unit of 4-6 writers is forming with the objective of assisting in the development and critique of new work and to collectively explore avenues of production.

Once or twice a month, we will have an in-depth discussion of your script. This group will not only provide the accountability you need to get your first script on paper, but also feedback from other writers on perceived strengths and weaknesses, applications of drama theory, writing ideas and more. Occasionally, we may network with established writers and theater professionals. After a few months, we would like to self-produce a night of readings or a series of small-scale staged productions. We have full-time access to rehearsal loft space in Brooklyn.

We would prefer to work with writers on the more experimental/avant-garde scale. As of now, the group's plays deal heavily on the social and historical dynamics of race and racism but this isn't the only topic that interests us. Please, no Tyler Perry/urban drama/gospel plays. We welcome writers who take inspiration from the likes of Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan Lori-Parks, George C. Wolfe. We also welcome beginning and established playwrights writing traditionally structured plays like those of August Wilson, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry. You should be queer-friendly but all sexual orientations are welcome and sexuality does not have to be a focus of your writing.

We hope you will join us in helping to build this collective. With dedication and directed energy to each other and to our craft, we can broadcast our voices and ensure each other's success.

And wouldn't you know? We had a few people contact us, and we got our ad posted on InfiniteBody too!

3 comments:

cgeye2/01/2010 12:05 PM
*squee*

May all go well.
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Unknown5/20/2011 4:08 PM
Hello my name is Anthony Wills and I am very interested in your collective. My work tends to lean towards performance art I would love to send you a writing sample you can also read a little about me as a writer and performer at my website www.anthonywillsjr.com
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RVCBard5/21/2011 5:57 PM
Thanks for your interest, Anthony. You can find more information about working with Crossroads Theatre Project here.
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Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932