NYCPlaywrights November 23, 2024

[NYCPlaywrights]

Greetings NYCPlaywrights

*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***

Neighborhood Theatre Production Presents: Voices
Join Prospect Park Alliance, Professor Eugene Pursoo, and the Neighborhood Theatre Production for Voices at Lefferts Historic House. Voices is a series of monologues that tell the story of slavery drawn from oral histories collected in the 1930s. This production of Voices commemorates the 159th Anniversary of the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing slavery nationwide.

Friday, December 6 · 6:30 - 8pm EST
452 Flatbush Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11225

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neighborhood-theatre-production-presents-voices-tickets-1091481062239?aff=ebdssbdestsearch


*** RESISTING FASCISM ***

NYCPlaywrights is looking for monologues and 10-minute plays about resisting fascism.
NYCPlaywrights will select as many of the scripts that we like (and which meet the submission guidelines) as semi-finalists. One script will be chosen from the three finalists scripts to receive an award of $25.

For more information:
https://www.nycplaywrights.org/2024/11/nycplaywrights-seeks-monologues-and-10.html


*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

Live Arts is now accepting submissions for the third annual WATERWORKS, to be held
May 16 through June 1, 2025, in Charlottesville, Virginia. WATERWORKS is a celebration of
new theatrical works and voices at Live Arts and beyond! After two successful and
dynamic rounds, we are proud for WATERWORKS to return, continuing Live Arts' long
history of showcasing local and emerging playwrights.

***

The 50th Annual Concord Theatricals Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival is accepting submissions.
We are looking for original and captivating short plays to be a part of our annual celebration of writers and their work in New York City. To provide thorough and thoughtful consideration to each script in a timely manner, we will cap submissions at 850. Submissions will close when we reach either our limit of 850 submissions or our deadline of Tuesday, November 26, 2024. Learn more below about submissions to the 2025 Festival.

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Grosse Pointe Theatre announces their 12th Annual Ten Minute Play Festival June 12, 13 and 14, 2025. The winning plays will be presented on a black-box stage without doors or windows. In addition to a list of characters, the title page should include a three-sentence synopsis of the action of the play.

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** BIZARRE BALLET ***

The Cage centres around The Novice, a newborn in a tribe of insects led by a Queen. She must come to grips with her own body, and with her natural instincts, which kick in when a male intruder enters: his neck gets quickly crushed.

The original idea what for the women in this ballet to be Amazons, but, according to Robbins, “this conception did not yield sufficient movement ideas. Further investigation led to the use of insects, which fed naturally into the animal quality of the work already involved”.

Using insect-like movements helped the choreographer: “I did not have to confine myself to human beings moving in a way that we know is human. In the way their fingers worked, in the crouch of a body or the thrust of an arm, I could let myself see what I wanted to imagine”.

https://www.ballet.org.uk/blog-detail/five-things-robbins-the-cage/

***

Waves of happy laughter greet “The Hard Nut” from curtain-up to curtain-down, a tribute to the naughty theatrical brilliance of its choreographer, Mark Morris. His production, which turns 25 next month and which returned on Saturday for the first time in five years to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, feels mint-fresh. I witnessed early performances in 1991; in some ways it’s improved.

Part of the fun is that this is “The Nutcracker,” with Tchaikovsky’s score played complete and in the right order, transposed to America 40 or more years ago, with the children watching TV in the opening scene. In the Stahlbaum family, the elder daughter, Louise, is vain, pushy and plaintive; her mother needs a drink before the guests arrive; and a couple of the visiting husbands are enjoying a flirtation before the Christmas party is over. Everyone piles their coats heedlessly into the arms of the overworked, uniformed black maid (in drag).

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/14/arts/dance/review-mark-morriss-the-hard-nut-tchaikovsky-with-cartoon-wit-and-verve.html

***

Erik Satie ingeniously transferred this circus atmosphere of the music hall and cabaret into the multimedia spectacle and ballet called “Parade,” which premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on 18 May 1917.

Initially, it was Jean Cocteau who dreamed up a scenario that would almost certainly antagonize and offend the audience. A Chinese magician, a little American girl and acrobats parade outside their tents giving free excerpts from their full performance in an effort to lure the audience into buying tickets. The crowd, however, mistakes their samples for the main show and disappears. To realize his vision of this multimedia spectacle and ballet, Cocteau assembled a unique meeting of the greatest artistic minds offered by Paris at that time. Serge Diaghilev and the “Ballet Russes” commissioned and performed the piece, Léonide Massine provided the choreography, Pablo Picasso designed and painted the costumes and the set—including the red opening curtain, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote the program notes for the first performance and invoked the word “surrealism” for the first time, and the “enfant terrible” of the Parisian café-concert scene Erik Satie composed the music.

More...
https://interlude.hk/on-this-day-18-may-satie-parade-was-premiered/

***

Ballet is a completely absurd art — and we love it to pieces: that’s what Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo proclaims with every move. The divas and cavaliers of this all-male troupe are — as they present themselves to us in performance — fabulously stupid, artificial, hammy, clichéd, superficial, dated, monstrous. But they simply adore dancing and their audiences, even more than they love makeup and costumes. So, while you laugh at their demented antics, you find yourself watching them with a special tenderness. You’re on their side.

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/arts/dance/review-the-trocks-delight-with-fabulous-charm.html

***

It was, said Rudolf Nureyev, like “graduating from finishing school,” a chance “to show what I learned about the West, and what I can do with it choreographically.” Last week at the Vienna State Opera, Nureyev presented Tancredi, his first try at choreographing a modern ballet. No pretty picture princes, no fluttering ballerinas in cupid wings this time. He turned the old love-triangle theme into an exploration of neurosis from womb to tomb, into a balletic adventure that was, as one critic put it, “for the Jung in heart.”

The role of Tancredi, danced by Nureyev, was conceived as the only flesh-and-blood character on stage; the rest of the roles were grim and ghostly reflections of his troubled personality. To achieve a fittingly “queasy-uneasy” setting for the journey into the subconscious, Australian Set Designer Barry Kay studied various plants under a microscope, then conjured a shadowy, organic world streaked with veins like a bloodshot eyeball. Into this membranous setting, Tancredi is symbolically born, wobbling to life to face his first crisis. It comes in the form of two female images representing sacred and profane love. Torn between the two, he suffers a series of hallucinations and his second personality emerges. This leads to a violent, schizophrenic pas de quatre, and ultimately Tancredi No. 1 and Tancredi No. 2 are reduced to zero—death.

More...
https://time.com/archive/6629733/dance-for-the-jung-in-heart/

***

Angelin Preljocaj’s Spectral Evidence turns as far from Wheeldon’s semi-traditional world as possible. It opens in silence with the four men seated on a monolithic white set piece. The women emerge behind them snaking arms around their heads and chest in silence. From this haunting and abstract beginning, Spectral Evidence takes a series of jarring unexpected turns. Dressed in black pants and jackets with white collars, each of the four priests (they can be nothing else) is partnered with a witch. Their partnerships are fraught and uneasy, characterized by quirky gestures and thrashing limbs. Unfortunately, the audience is not allowed to draw their own conclusions – they are literally told what is taking place on stage. The women burn to the soundtrack (music by John Cage) of a crackling bonfire and lighting design that includes realistic orange flames. The one solo, bravely performed by Robert Fairchild, brings Spectral Evidence as close to the horror genre as any ballet has dared to go.

More...
https://bachtrack.com/review-nyc-ballet-contemporary-choreographers-oct-2013

***

A pitiful speck of a body, more boy than man, twists, rolls and bounces on the ground to the sound of resonating pings. A femme fatale moves her limbs in hingelike angularity to the rhythm of repeated creaks until her huge cape billows over the entire stage and swallows her along with the crumpled male figure at her feet.

A picture of devouring passion or of predatory death and human angst?
More plainly, the woman is the door or ''porte'' and the man is the sigh or ''soupir'' in George Balanchine's ever-provocative ''Variations Pour une Porte et un Soupir,'' which the New York City Ballet revived on Friday night at the New York State Theater.

More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/arts/dance-review-and-again-balanchine-provocatively-stirs-the-pot.html