Ecodrama Playwrights Festival & Symposium

Earth Matters On Stage:
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> Ecodrama Playwrights Festival & Symposium
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> May 21~ 31, 2009 ~ University of Oregon
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> CALL FOR SCRIPTS
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> First place Award: $2,000 and workshop production
> Second place Award: $500 and workshop production
> Honorable mentions: public staged reading
>
> The mission of this Festival is to call forth and
> foster new dramatic works that respond to the
> ecological crisis, and that explore new
> possibilities of being in relationship with the
> more-than-human world. The Festival is ten days of
> readings, workshop performance/s, and discussions of
> the scripts that are finalists in the Playwrights'
> Contest. Some readings and workshops will be
> followed by facilitated talk-backs with the
> playwrights. In addition, a symposium of speakers,
> panels and discussions will advance scholarship in
> the area of arts and ecology, and help foster
> development of new works.
>
> Play Contest: At the core of the Festival is a
> playwright's competition carrying a cash award and
> workshop production. The Guidelines attached
> describe the kinds of new plays that may be
> submitted. Plays will be accepted from February
> through October 2008. The winning plays will be
> chosen by a panel of distinguished theatre artists
> from the USA andCanada, including:
>
>
> * Martha Lavey, Artistic Director, Steppenwolf
> Theatre Co., Chicago
> * Timothy Bond, Artistic Dir. Syracuse Stage; former
> Assoc. Artistic Dir. Oregon Shakespeare; faculty
> Syracuse University, NY.
> * Olga Sanchez, Artistic Director, Teatro Milagro,
> Portland
> * Diane Glancy, Playwright, Native Voices Award,
> faculty Macallister College
> * Jose Cruz González, Playwright, Cornerstone
> Theatre; founder Hispanic Playwrights Project;
> faculty Cal State LA
> * David Diamond, Headlines Theater Co, Vancouver BC
> * Marie Clements, playwright, founder Urban Ink, BC
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> Guidelines for Playwrights
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> What kind of theatre comes to mind when you read the
> term "ecodrama"? Political plays that advocate for
> environmentalism, or educational theatre about
> recycling? While these examples would fit, please
> let your imagination soar beyond them.
>
> Ecodrama stages the reciprocal connection between
> humans and the more-than-human world. It
> encompasses not only works that take environmental
> issues as their topic, hoping to raise consciousness
> or press for change, but also work that explores the
> relation of a "sense of place" to identity and
> community.
>
> Help us create an inclusive ecodrama that
> illuminates the complex connection between people
> and place, an ecodrama that makes us all more aware
> of our ecological identities as a people and
> communities; ecodrama that brings focus to an
> ecological concerns of a particular place, or that
> takes writer and audience to a deeper exploration of
> issue that may not be easily resolved.
>
> While many plays might be open to an ecological
> interpretation, others might be called "ecodrama,"
> Examples are diverse in form and topic: Ibsen's An
> Enemy of the People, in which the town's waters have
> become polluted and a lone whistle blower clashes
> with powerful vested interests; Schenkkan's The
> Kentucky Cycle, the epic tale of a land and its
> people - Indigenous, European, African - over seven
> generations; August Wilson's Two Trains Running that
> bears witness to the loss of inner city
> sustainability; Moraga's Heroes and Saints, about
> the embodied impact of industrial agriculture; Marie
> Clements' Burning Vision, which documents the impact
> of Canadian uranium mining on first nations
> communities and land; Giljour's 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;
> Norman's Secret Garden that consoles a child's
> grief; Albee's The Goat, or who is Sylvia, that
> confounds human species taboos; or Murray Schaffer's
> Patria Project, in which the landscape becomes a
> player.
>
> When we leave the theater are things around us more
> alive, do we listen better, have a deeper or more
> complex sense of our own ecological identity?
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> We need your voice, so does the theatre, so does our
> world. Imagine! Write! Submit!
>
> The Ecodrama Festival encourages submissions of
> full-length plays (30min. minimum, no max.) in
> English that do one or more of the following:
>
>
> * Put an ecological issue or environmental
> event/crisis at the center of the dramatic action or
> theme of the play.
> * Explore issues of environmental justice.
> * Interpret "community" to include our ecological
> community, and/or give voice or "character" to the
> land, or elements of the land.
> * Theatrically explore the connection between people
> and place, human and non-human, and/or between
> culture and nature.
> * Grow out of the playwright's personal relationship
> to the land and the ecology of a specific place.
> * Theatrically examine the reciprocal relationship
> between human, animal and plant communities.
> * Offer an imagined world where the characters'
> society is one that is more in harmony with
> principles