Over Our Head Players is accepting submissions for the "2023 Snowdance® 10
Minute Comedy Festival." "Snowdance®" entry is open to original
10 minute or shorter comedies for the stage. 2023. Concluding each performance,
audience members can vote for their favorite individual comedy; the audience
favorites will earn cash prizes for the playwright.
***
Theatre Now New York is accepting submissions from across the country for its
Musical Writers Lab, a community of musical writing teams that meet biweekly
for feedback and developmental opportunities for both traditional and
genre-bending new work. There are two chapters; the local New York Group meets
in person in midtown Manhattan, and the National Group meets on zoom.
***
Echoes Writers Group at Primary Stages is a year-long, educational program
focused on finding, nurturing, and amplifying the voices of women, non-binary,
and gender non-conforming artists. It is a place for writers to develop their
practice in a supportive and creative community that grows together. Led by the
artistic team at Primary Stages, the group is comprised of writers who are just
starting to discover their voice and build their craft, particularly those who
are interested in learning about the art of playwriting.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site
at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** PETER BROOK ***
Mr. Brook was called many other things: a maverick, a romantic, a classicist.
But he was never easily pigeonholed. British by nationality but based in Paris
since 1970, he spent years in commercial theater, winning Tony Awards in 1966
and 1971 for the Broadway transfers of highly original productions of Peter
Weiss’s “Marat/Sade” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He staged
crowd-pleasers like the musical “Irma la Douce” and Arthur Miller’s “A View
From the Bridge.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/obituaries/peter-brook-dead.html
***
Peter Brook, the legendary film, theater, and opera director whose extensive
career spans 70 years, recently joined The Brooklyn Rail for a conversation via
Zoom hosted by President emerita of Brooklyn Academy of Music, Karen Brooks
Hopkins, and director of Theater of War and writer, Bryan Doerries.
https://www.tfana.org/education/digital-programming/peter-brook
***
"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 that is
needed for an act of theatre to be engaged."
"A critic is always serving the theatre when he is hounding out
incompetence. If he spends most of his time grumbling, he is almost always
right. The appalling difficulty of making theatre must be accepted: it is, or
would be, if truly practised, perhaps the hardest medium of all: it is
merciless, there is no room for error, or for waste."
"In a sense the director is always an imposter, a guide at night who does
not know the territory, and yet has no choice – he must guide, learning the
route as he goes."
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/jul/03/the-best-peter-brook-quotes
***
The monumental “Mahabharata,” adapted from the Sanskrit epic poem, had a cast
of 21 performers from 16 countries and toured for four years. (It was seen at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1987.)
A sworn, lifelong foe of colonialism, Mr. Brook found himself accused of
cultural appropriation.
“When we did it, Indians said, ‘Here you are, colonialists, stealing our
heritage.’ I said, ‘No, it belongs to the world.’ And I know that you have
little companies all over India who do Shakespeare. Has anyone ever said, ‘This
belongs to England’?”
An early pioneer in color- and gender-blind casting, Mr. Brook defines the
actor as a storyteller who transcends his visible physicality. He cites the
theater theorist Antonin Artaud’s phrase, “the actor and his double,” and says,
“This is the secret, an open secret: No actor and no audience believe for one
moment that this is the real person.”
“It’s like there’s the person, the role and in between is the space where the
two meet,” he continues. “That’s what the performance is, where it’s the
invisible becoming visible, it’s the space where the two meet.”
Theater reaches its apotheosis, he says, when such a space, outside of time, is
occupied by the audience as well as the performers. It can’t happen, he adds,
“if the actors are too tense or too ambitious, if the audience is too stupid or
laughs too easily. But if these two concentrations, two essences, really come
together, for a moment, it’s plain sailing.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/theater/peter-brook-interview.html
***
Peter Brook describes Threads of Time as ‘a relatively full answer’ to the
question ‘Why Paris?’ It is the first of his books not to have started out in
another form. The Empty Space (1968) was based on lectures; The Shifting Point
(1988) consists of articles, interviews, speeches, programme notes and other
occasional writings drawn from his whole career; There Are No Secrets (1993)
began life as three talks on acting delivered in Paris and Kyoto.
The new book is a memoir and started out as it is. Brook’s autobiographical
writing is recognisably clean, clear and colloquial, only occasionally falling
into what David Hare calls ‘the Esperanto patter of the higher mysticism’. From
the start, Brook avoids ‘personal relationships, indiscretions, indulgences,
excesses, names of close friends, private angers, family adventures or debts of
gratitude’, though there is a wistful moment later on when he speaks of the
‘book that is not to be written’, a family history of memories that belong only
to those who share them. Equally, he claims to have spurned ‘the well-known
splendours and miseries of first nights’.
Unencumbered by private or professional anecdotage, Brook is able to chart two
voyages of discovery. The first is his conversion from the magical illusion of
the toy theatre (what he calls the conventional ‘two room’ theatre of darkened
auditorium and blazingly illuminated stage) to the sterner, less flashy but
infinitely more powerful theatrical space that is the shared possession of
actors and audiences. Parallel to this journey is his trajectory from ambitious
theatrical prodigy to Zen pupil, from busy careerist to seeker after spiritual
truth. Like the rivers which provide so much of Brook’s theatrical and literary
imagery, these two courses eventually meet, as Brook starts to work
developmentally with small groups in the Royal Shakespeare Company. ‘For
years,’ he writes, ‘I had rigorously kept my inner explorations and theatre
experiments apart.’ However, ‘nothing can stay for long in watertight
compartments’ and in the early Sixties Brook realised that, far from being the
truth-seeker’s day job, ‘the theatre was becoming a practical field in which
the possibility existed of observing laws and structures parallel to those
found in traditional teaching.’
More...
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n22/david-edgar/showman-v.-shaman
***
ENCORE! - Legendary director Peter Brook delves into the human mind
Many consider him one of the most visionary and influential directors of the
past half century. In a career spanning over 70 years and several disciplines
from theatre, film and opera, he's continually pushed the limits.
British by birth and Parisian by adoption, director Peter Brook joins Jade
Barker on set to talk about his incredible career. Brook explains why he
decided to explore the workings of the human mind in his latest production
"The Valley of Astonishment", how Shakespeare will always be
relevant and why he decided to call France home for over four decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQSlQZxYvog
***
A Midsummer Night's Dream - Peter Brook - Documentary with original footage
excerpts - 1970
Peter Brook's landmark production featured a white box and trapeze set designed
by Sally Jacobs.
Brook approached the play with deliberate radicalism, taking up the baton from
Granville-Barker almost 60 years earlier who innovatively presented the play in
London on an apron stage with minimal set.
The 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of A Midsummer Night's
Dream was directed by Peter Brook, and is often known simply as Peter Brook's
Dream. It opened in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon and
then moved to the Aldwych Theatre in London's West End in 1971. It was taken on
a world tour in 1972–1973. Brook's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream for
the RSC is often described as one of the 20th century's most influential
productions of Shakespeare, as it rejected many traditional ideas about the
staging of classic drama.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdtlsWpeLDM
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