THIS IS MY PROJECT.

This is the help I’m looking for

 

I’m an acting/impro teacher and theatre director turned playwright and I’m now 71. Despite a lifetime of experience teaching and directing professionally, I still experience near paralyzing fear and reluctance around my writing, especially around getting it into the marketplace. My inner obstacles seem to rear their heads even more when I'm trying to connect something I’ve written with the world – find collaborators, create a workshop to develop it or find an agent, publisher or producing theatre. Phelim suggested "why don't you do a session on that"? So, I convened this session for myself and anybody else who wanted practical help to move a project forward. 

Although my own challenge is marketing/development, I didn’t want to limit the discussion to that. You could bring any kind of creative project, including your career (which is a kind of life project). It could be at any stage of development and the help could be of any kind. The point was to give you a chance to focus your thoughts about the next step and discover or at least articulate the help you need.

There were eight or 10 people who joined in over the course of the session. The rules were simple: Put your name and the name of your project on the big paper along with your contact email. Take a few minutes to describe your project to the group and ask for the help you want. Then write it into a blurb of a few hundred words after the session, send it to me and I will post it in this report.

As of today, Feb 7th, I’ve only received one other detailed submission from one of the other participants, Sophie Steel. You’ll find it along with my own below. I’ve listed all the other projects discussed in the session by title and creator – but without detail or email address (to comply with recent UK data protection legislation). If anyone who listed a project wants to add a detailed proposal and or contact details, you can do it and include your email by adding it as a comment to this report. Anyone who didn’t attend but wants to add a project please use the comment section to do so. Good luck to all!

 The Projects

 

1)    “Freud’s Golem: A Scientific Fairytale” 

Andy Harmon - [email protected]

Freud’s Golem is a play that has taken me over 25 years to write. It’s had two public readings, one in London and one in LA and innumerable re-writes. The play is complex, almost novelistic in places. Finding a shape/structure for the piece has been difficult and even now I’m not certain I’ve solved all the problems I set for myself.

I want to find a theatre or group of actors to work with me to help me solve those problems by workshopping the piece. For this I need a space, three actors - one male, two female - and 5 or more days of workshop time. Please email [email protected] if you have a way to help. Here’s a synopsis of the play:

Once upon a time, over half a century after the death of Sigmund Freud, a young woman stumbles upon an ancient artifact in the dark vaults under the Freud Museum in London. A voice within the relic whispers, ‘Touch Me!’ She obeys. Within days, Psychoanalysts everywhere begin to granulate into piles of sand. Freud’s last living pupil, the renegade analyst Rudolf Kepler returns from exile to stop the horror and save Freud’s legacy from obliteration. Using all the therapeutic cunning in his possession, he persuades the young woman to undergo a rarely used and dangerous form of ‘talking cure’ that leads them down into the very Unconscious of Psychoanalysis itself. What they discover gives the lie to a century of Freudian science, and confronts each of them with the question: ‘How can you be cured of who you really are?’ Inspired by Freud’s famous case studies of The Ratman and The Wolfman, this play imagines the case that Freud never wanted to see the light of day: The Psychoanalysis of a Vampire and the forbidden cure that haunted the great physician to his grave – and beyond.

 

2)    “Childfree Women”

Sophie Steel - [email protected]

I am wanting to create a show about women who are childfree by choice, the reasons behind their decisions and the attitude of society towards them. There are several directions I have thought this could go in including a piece exploring the archetypes of hard-nosed career woman, crazy cat lady and wicked witch in the woods.

 

I am an actor who has written and self-produced in the past, with others on a number of theatre pieces and on my own for a solo cabaret show. For this project I am looking for people who might be interested in collaborating: directors, writers, dramaturgs, performers. I also would love to hear from any people who would be willing to give some time for research and development or just share their personal stories via email or over a hot beverage.

 

I can be contacted at [email protected]

 

Here are the rest of the projects discussed in the session.

 

3)    “Silent Opera”

Li-E Chen 

 

4)    “FOODBANK: AS IT IS”

Lawrence O’Connor 

 

5)    “Afrofuturistic Dance Theatre”

Latisha Cesar 

 

6)    “90’s Nostalgia / mental illness in millennials”

Steven Laverty 

 

7)    “Pitch and Cologne 19^th Century Trans/mixed-race Comedy”

Nemo Martin 

 

8)    Director Looking for a Project

Danäe Cambrook 

 

9)    Designer – With Connections

Grace Smart