NYCPlaywrights November 1, 2025
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NYCPlaywrights
Nov 1, 2025, 5:05:13 PMNov 1
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
THE GHOSTMANS
by Jeannine Foster McKelvia
A Reading Series presentation by the Negro Ensemble Company, Inc., in association with Faith Steps Productions
Directed by: Petronia Paley
Actors Temple Theater Association
339 West 47th Street
New York, NY 10036
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-ghostmans-a-reading-tickets-1853675365919?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Eight Annual Eric Weinberger Award for Emerging Librettists
The musical must:
• Be a full-length show (at least 80 minutes)
• Have no more than eight actors (actors may play multiple roles, if so, please include a suggested breakdown of role distribution)
• Be complete and ready for readings, workshops and/or productions
• Have a demo that is an accurate representation of the music and style of the show (at least five songs)
• Have full underlying rights clearance of any pre-existing material used in the script (music, source material, etc.)
• Not have had a full production or be published in any way, even if with a different name.
***
NAMT's Festival of New Musicals 2026
Held over two days in New York City every fall, the Festival produces 45–minute presentations of eight new musicals before an audience of over 800 industry professionals with the experience and resources to move the work forward. We look for new musicals at all stages of development from the broadest possible range of voices.
***
The Artistic Home Call for Submissions: Cut to the Chase
This one-act play festival showcases six new plays with moment-to-moment acting in an intimate theater space. This year's festival will present the theme: I'm Still Here.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** PERFORMANCE ART ***
While the terms ‘performance’ and ‘performance art’ only became widely used in the 1970s, the history of performance in the visual arts is often traced back to futurist productions and dada cabarets of the 1910s.
Throughout the twentieth century performance was often seen as a non-traditional way of making art. Live-ness, physical movement and impermanence offered artists alternatives to the static permanence of painting and sculpture.
In the post-war period performance became aligned with conceptual art, because of its often immaterial nature.
Now an accepted part of the visual art world, the term has since been used to also describe film, video, photographic and installation-based artworks through which the actions of artists, performers or the audience are conveyed.
More recently, performance has been understood as a way of engaging directly with social reality, the specifics of space and the politics of identity. In 2016, theorist Jonah Westerman remarked ‘performance is not (and never was) a medium, not something that an artwork can be but rather a set of questions and concerns about how art relates to people and the wider social world’.
More...
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/performance-art
***
“London was the worst,” Carolee Schneemann groaned in an interview in 2014. She was justified in complaining, as she often did, about the English: they had not been her best audience. The 1964 London performance of arguably her most famous work, Meat Joy (1964), an “erotic rite” of men and women clad in fur-lined bikinis writhing in wet paint and raw meat was met with a reproachful and unresponsive crowd. When she returned in 1967 for the Dialectics of Liberation Congress, she was regarded as a second-class participant and was given the wrong address; her performance of Naked Action Lecture (1968) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts only drew outrage. This didn’t stop her from relocating to the city in 1970, though she never felt adequately understood or respected by the British art world. But the tides are turning thanks to her current landmark show at the Barbican Centre, Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics, her first retrospective in the United Kingdom and the first major presentation of her work since her death in 2019. Providing a long-awaited look into the full span of her prolific six-decade-long practice, it showcases her most iconic performances alongside lesser-known chapters of her revolutionary career.
More...
https://brooklynrail.org/2022/10/artseen/Carolee-Schneemann-Body-Politics/
***
***
***
***
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Curator, Christophe Cherix: In Cut Piece, members of the audience were invited to approach and cut away pieces of Ono’s clothing, as she knelt silently on a stage.
Yoko Ono: When I do the Cut Piece, I get into a trance, and so I don't feel too frightened. There's several layers of meanings. So of course I was saying, hey, you're doing this to women, you know? We're all in it. But also, at the time, it's much better to just go with it. And that thought of letting women know that, you know, we're all going through this, but don't fight, let it happen. By not fighting, we show them that there's a whole world, which could exist by being peaceful.
We usually give something with a purpose of ours. But I wanted to see what they would take. Also, I realized that when somebody's cutting you – geometrically, it's a line. But our body is a curve. And they're trying to cut the curve with a line, which is very strange. And that's what they do in life.
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
THE GHOSTMANS
by Jeannine Foster McKelvia
A Reading Series presentation by the Negro Ensemble Company, Inc., in association with Faith Steps Productions
Directed by: Petronia Paley
Actors Temple Theater Association
339 West 47th Street
New York, NY 10036
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-ghostmans-a-reading-tickets-1853675365919?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Eight Annual Eric Weinberger Award for Emerging Librettists
The musical must:
• Be a full-length show (at least 80 minutes)
• Have no more than eight actors (actors may play multiple roles, if so, please include a suggested breakdown of role distribution)
• Be complete and ready for readings, workshops and/or productions
• Have a demo that is an accurate representation of the music and style of the show (at least five songs)
• Have full underlying rights clearance of any pre-existing material used in the script (music, source material, etc.)
• Not have had a full production or be published in any way, even if with a different name.
***
NAMT's Festival of New Musicals 2026
Held over two days in New York City every fall, the Festival produces 45–minute presentations of eight new musicals before an audience of over 800 industry professionals with the experience and resources to move the work forward. We look for new musicals at all stages of development from the broadest possible range of voices.
***
The Artistic Home Call for Submissions: Cut to the Chase
This one-act play festival showcases six new plays with moment-to-moment acting in an intimate theater space. This year's festival will present the theme: I'm Still Here.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** PERFORMANCE ART ***
While the terms ‘performance’ and ‘performance art’ only became widely used in the 1970s, the history of performance in the visual arts is often traced back to futurist productions and dada cabarets of the 1910s.
Throughout the twentieth century performance was often seen as a non-traditional way of making art. Live-ness, physical movement and impermanence offered artists alternatives to the static permanence of painting and sculpture.
In the post-war period performance became aligned with conceptual art, because of its often immaterial nature.
Now an accepted part of the visual art world, the term has since been used to also describe film, video, photographic and installation-based artworks through which the actions of artists, performers or the audience are conveyed.
More recently, performance has been understood as a way of engaging directly with social reality, the specifics of space and the politics of identity. In 2016, theorist Jonah Westerman remarked ‘performance is not (and never was) a medium, not something that an artwork can be but rather a set of questions and concerns about how art relates to people and the wider social world’.
More...
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/performance-art
***
“London was the worst,” Carolee Schneemann groaned in an interview in 2014. She was justified in complaining, as she often did, about the English: they had not been her best audience. The 1964 London performance of arguably her most famous work, Meat Joy (1964), an “erotic rite” of men and women clad in fur-lined bikinis writhing in wet paint and raw meat was met with a reproachful and unresponsive crowd. When she returned in 1967 for the Dialectics of Liberation Congress, she was regarded as a second-class participant and was given the wrong address; her performance of Naked Action Lecture (1968) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts only drew outrage. This didn’t stop her from relocating to the city in 1970, though she never felt adequately understood or respected by the British art world. But the tides are turning thanks to her current landmark show at the Barbican Centre, Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics, her first retrospective in the United Kingdom and the first major presentation of her work since her death in 2019. Providing a long-awaited look into the full span of her prolific six-decade-long practice, it showcases her most iconic performances alongside lesser-known chapters of her revolutionary career.
More...
https://brooklynrail.org/2022/10/artseen/Carolee-Schneemann-Body-Politics/
***
It's a warm and rainy evening in August of 1952. The place is a tiny auditorium, appropriately called the Maverick Concert Hall. Built in the early part of the century by an eccentric poet and novelist named Herve White, the building is at the end of a dirt road in the middle of the forest near Woodstock, New York, an artists' community about two hours north of New York City. The Maverick is a lopsided plank-and-nail affair that seems a cross between a barn and a country church. The support beams are stripped logs. On one side, a huge oak tree grows through an opening in the moss-covered roof. The doorways are set at odd angles and window panes are scattered across the whitewashed pine walls like dominoes.
In the audience is a broad cross-section of the city's classical musical community, including composers like Morton Feldman and Earl Brown, whose works are being performed this particular night. Also present are some vacationing members of the New York Philharmonic, looking to keep up with the antics of the new music renegades, and composer John Cage, who's premiering two new works. For the first, which would later become known as "Water Music," pianist David Tudor, a lifelong Cage collaborator, plays prepared piano, a duck call and a transistor radio. For the second, the provisionally entitled "Four Pieces," Tudor starts a stopwatch, sits down in front of the piano, closes the lid and begins a performance in which he never plays a note.
After 30 seconds of silence, Tudor resets the stopwatch and times another two minutes, 23 seconds of silence, then another one minute, 40 seconds of silence. But is it silence?
More...
https://www.npr.org/2000/05/08/1073885/4-33
In the audience is a broad cross-section of the city's classical musical community, including composers like Morton Feldman and Earl Brown, whose works are being performed this particular night. Also present are some vacationing members of the New York Philharmonic, looking to keep up with the antics of the new music renegades, and composer John Cage, who's premiering two new works. For the first, which would later become known as "Water Music," pianist David Tudor, a lifelong Cage collaborator, plays prepared piano, a duck call and a transistor radio. For the second, the provisionally entitled "Four Pieces," Tudor starts a stopwatch, sits down in front of the piano, closes the lid and begins a performance in which he never plays a note.
After 30 seconds of silence, Tudor resets the stopwatch and times another two minutes, 23 seconds of silence, then another one minute, 40 seconds of silence. But is it silence?
More...
https://www.npr.org/2000/05/08/1073885/4-33
***
In 1916, a young Romanian artist called Marcel Janco produced a painting depicting an evening in a Zurich nightclub. Now lost, but known through a photographic reproduction on a postcard, the picture presents a riotous scene in the fractured style of early Cubism.
A group of performers, centre-stage, make strange, unnaturally angular shapes with their bodies. They seem to be responding to the music of a nearby pianist, who tips back his chair, while remaining hunched over his keyboard. The audience, meanwhile, is a raucous, drunken mob. Sitting at tables scattered around the auditorium, they laugh, yell, point, and jabber. Above them, over the stage, an ominous, skull-like visage – a mask possibly inspired by African tribal art – keeps watch. Next to it, like a banner placed prominently above the pianist, a single word – “Dada” – is legible in the gloom.
This, of course, is the name of the revolutionary cultural movement that electrified Europe a century ago. And it all began in this cramped nightclub, which hosted an ‘entertainment’ that lent its name to Janco’s painting – the Cabaret Voltaire.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160719-cabaret-voltaire-a-night-out-at-historys-wildest-nightclub
A group of performers, centre-stage, make strange, unnaturally angular shapes with their bodies. They seem to be responding to the music of a nearby pianist, who tips back his chair, while remaining hunched over his keyboard. The audience, meanwhile, is a raucous, drunken mob. Sitting at tables scattered around the auditorium, they laugh, yell, point, and jabber. Above them, over the stage, an ominous, skull-like visage – a mask possibly inspired by African tribal art – keeps watch. Next to it, like a banner placed prominently above the pianist, a single word – “Dada” – is legible in the gloom.
This, of course, is the name of the revolutionary cultural movement that electrified Europe a century ago. And it all began in this cramped nightclub, which hosted an ‘entertainment’ that lent its name to Janco’s painting – the Cabaret Voltaire.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160719-cabaret-voltaire-a-night-out-at-historys-wildest-nightclub
***
IN THE medieval town hall of the small Westphalian city of Münster, Alexandra Pirici, a young Romanian artist, prepares to tell a story. Word has gone out that she has something special to say; people have been queuing for hours to get in. As things get under way, her six performers give short occasional statements: how long since the shooting of a man crossing the Berlin Wall, how far to the edge of our galaxy. The actors use their bodies to create shapes reminiscent of collapsing monuments, commemorative sculptures and famous posters, moving among the rooms of the Rathaus, singing all the while. The audience is mesmerised. This is a piece of performance art at Skulptur Projekte Münster (SPM), a festival that takes place once a decade, designed to present cutting-edge contemporary sculpture, though this is not sculpture in the conventional sense. The artist describes the performers as “human search engines”.
This year SPM coincides with a series of other events that together provide a unique snapshot of contemporary art. Documenta, considered by many to be the critical centre of the contemporary-art world, takes place in Kassel every five years (this year it presented an early version in Athens in April). In 2017 art-lovers have also had the choice of the Venice Biennale as well as Art Basel in Switzerland, the most important modern and contemporary-art fair. All five shows this year are placing an emphasis on performance.
Performance art is over 100 years old. Until recently, though, it was a niche activity. In the early decades of the 20th century, the Italian Futurists saw their work as a way to reach a mass audience directly. The Dadaists borrowed heavily from popular culture, including cabaret and music-hall.
More...
https://archive.ph/6vH3F#selection-891.0-905.296
This year SPM coincides with a series of other events that together provide a unique snapshot of contemporary art. Documenta, considered by many to be the critical centre of the contemporary-art world, takes place in Kassel every five years (this year it presented an early version in Athens in April). In 2017 art-lovers have also had the choice of the Venice Biennale as well as Art Basel in Switzerland, the most important modern and contemporary-art fair. All five shows this year are placing an emphasis on performance.
Performance art is over 100 years old. Until recently, though, it was a niche activity. In the early decades of the 20th century, the Italian Futurists saw their work as a way to reach a mass audience directly. The Dadaists borrowed heavily from popular culture, including cabaret and music-hall.
More...
https://archive.ph/6vH3F#selection-891.0-905.296
***
The handwritten instructions for Dream Piece specifies that to perform it, one needs “an Indian headdress, a candle (tealight), matches, a duck on wheels, a cassette (on which a Beethoven Lied is recorded), a cassette player (for) playback, a chair, and a small table.” The audience is invited to stand in front of the table, on which all the elements are arranged. Then, “the performer enters, sits down, puts on the Indian headdress, prepares the player, lights the candle and places the duck on the player. Then he turns on the player. He listens to the lied while looking quite calm and contemplative at the duck. When the Lied is finished, he puts the duck away (flat), takes off the headdress, places it on the table, and extinguishes the candle. He gets up and leaves. The piece is finished.” The score ends with a series of technical instructions for the proper formal execution of the entire piece. No information is provided about the potential “content” of the work, as indicated by its title, namely, the dream to which it refers.
More...
https://activatingfluxus.com/2023/09/04/episode-6-dream-piece-1976-by-john-armleder/
More...
https://activatingfluxus.com/2023/09/04/episode-6-dream-piece-1976-by-john-armleder/
***
Curator, Christophe Cherix: In Cut Piece, members of the audience were invited to approach and cut away pieces of Ono’s clothing, as she knelt silently on a stage.
Yoko Ono: When I do the Cut Piece, I get into a trance, and so I don't feel too frightened. There's several layers of meanings. So of course I was saying, hey, you're doing this to women, you know? We're all in it. But also, at the time, it's much better to just go with it. And that thought of letting women know that, you know, we're all going through this, but don't fight, let it happen. By not fighting, we show them that there's a whole world, which could exist by being peaceful.
We usually give something with a purpose of ours. But I wanted to see what they would take. Also, I realized that when somebody's cutting you – geometrically, it's a line. But our body is a curve. And they're trying to cut the curve with a line, which is very strange. And that's what they do in life.
There was a long silence between one person coming up and the next person coming up. And I said it's a fantastic, beautiful music, you know? Ba-ba-ba, cut! Ba-ba-ba, cut! Beautiful poetry, actually.
More...
https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/15/373
More...
https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/15/373
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