New York Innovative Theatre Awards: Honorary Awards Nominations

Here’s an item you may have already seen, but just in case. It’s from our friends at the New York Innovative Theatre Awards:

The New York Innovative Theatre Foundation, the organization dedicated to celebrating Off-Off-Broadway, is pleased to announce that the 2011 Honorary Award applications are now available online at www.nyitawards.com.

The applications for the 2011 Honorary Awards are available online and are due by 6pm on May 2, 2011.

Last year’s 2010 Caffe Cino Fellowship Award was presented to the New York Neo-Futurists, recognizing their commitment to the community and for consistently producing outstanding work. “We were ecstatic about receiving the Caffe Cino Fellowship Award. We are honored to be in such groundbreaking company as the previous recipients. The IT Awards are so affirming and celebratory for the independent theater community that we are a part of,” said Rob Neill, Managing Director of the New York Neo-Futurists. “We love going to the events and they are some of the few times during the year where we can see and connect with so many of our fellow artists. I feel that recognition of the quality of work from the IT Awards is invaluable for all of the theater companies like the New York Neo-Futurists.”

The Honorary Awards are selected by a committee, which is comprised of people deeply grounded in the Off-Off-Broadway community. A complete list of committee members is available on the IT Awards website at: www.nyitawards.com/aboutus/hac.asp.

Over the past six years, the IT Awards has honored over 1,000 individual artists, over 350 productions, and 250 theatre companies.

The Honorary Awards are:
* The Artistic Achievement Award, presented to an individual who has made a significant artistic contribution to the Off-Off-Broadway community;

* The Stewardship Award, presented to an individual or organization demonstrating a significant contribution to the Off-Off-Broadway community through service, support and leadership;

* The Caffe Cino Fellowship Award, presented to an Off-Off-Broadway theatre company that consistently produces outstanding work. This award also includes a grant ($1,000-$5,000) to be used toward an Off-Off-Broadway production.

Previous recipients include:

2005
Artistic Achievement – Basil Twist
Stewardship Award – Ellen Stewart, LaMaMa, ETC.
Caffe Cino Fellowship – Inverse Theater Company

2006
Artistic Achievement – Tom O’Horgan
Stewardship Award – The Field
Caffe Cino Fellowship – Vampire Cowboys

2007
Artistic Achievement – Doric Wilson
Stewardship Award – Alliance of Resident Theatres/NY
Caffe Cino Fellowship – Rising Phoenix Repertory

2008
Artistic Achievement – Judith Malina
Stewardship Award – Martin & Rochelle Denton, New York Theatre Experience
Caffe Cino Fellowship – Boomerang Theatre Company

2009
Artistic Achievement – Maria Irene Fornes
Stewardship Award – Materials for the Arts
Caffe Cino Fellowship – The Brick Theater, Inc.

2010
Artistic Achievement – Lanford Wilson
Stewardship Award – Dixon Place
Caffe Cino Fellowship – The New York Neo-Futurists

The New York Innovative Theatre Foundation is a not-for-profit organization recognizing the great work of New York City’s Off-Off-Broadway, honoring its artistic heritage, and providing a meeting ground for this extensive and richly varied community. The organization advocates for Off-Off-Broadway and recognizes the unique and essential role it plays in contributing to American and global culture. They believe that publicly recognizing excellence in Off-Off-Broadway will expand audience awareness and foster greater appreciation of the New York theatre experience.

Martin Denton on “People You Should Know”

Zack Calhoon, author of the VISIBLE SOUL blog, has just interviewed me for his ongoing series of “People You Should Know.” Thanks, Zack! I think the interview came out very well:

http://zackcalhoon.blogspot.com/2011/02/people-you-should-know-martin-denton.html

 

Follow nytheatre.com on Twitter

We just added something new to every page on nytheatre.com!

It looks like this:

I’m excited about the possibilities of Twitter as a way to get the word out about the reviews, listings, and feature articles and podcasts we publish on nytheatre.com.

Are you a tweeter? If so, I would love to hear from you about the kinds of information you’d like to see nytheatre.com tweet about.

The Indie Theater Companion, nytheatre.com and Why I Love Indie Theater

I just finished my week Guest Blogging for FULL OF IT, the blog of the New York Innovative Theatre Awards. I thank the good people at NYIT for letting me have that platform to reach their readers.

In case you didn’t see the blog posts, I’m linking to them here:

1. Last Monday I wrote about the newest member of NYTE’s online family, the INDIE THEATER COMPANION. I explained our vision for it and invited folks to contribute profiles of indie theater artists and companies. Read the post.
2. On Tuesday, I talked about the ways that nytheatre.com can be a useful resource to help indie theater companies and artists promote their work. This piece covers getting your show listed, reviewed, and taking advantage of other opportunities — all of them free! — to get more space for your show on nytheatre.com. Read the post.
3. Finally, on Friday I explored a topic very dear to my heart — why I love indie theater. It’s all about how the work created by this community inspires me. Read the post.

Let me know what think of what I had to say by posting a comment here.

I’m Guest Blogging at NYIT This Week

Please check out FULL OF IT, the blog of the New York Innovative Theatre Foundation. I’ll be guest blogging there all week long. My first piece is about the Indie Theater Companion, and I hope you will check out both the blogpost and the Indie Theater Companion itself!

 

Feedback, Please

As we start 2011, all of us at nytheatre.com are eager to find ways to make our website/web services as useful as they can be to our readers. So we’ve put together a brief survey (using Survey Monkey) to obtain some feedback about how you use nytheatre.com and how we can make it more valuable to you.

It’s brief (nine questions) and anonymous. If you take a few minutes to fill out it, we will be very grateful and you will be helping us a lot!

Here’s the link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5G55CZD

I’ll post something about the results in about a week.

 

Tweet, Tweet

As 2010 comes to a close, I make nytheatre.com’s final announcement of the year: We are now on Twitter.

You can find us there by following this link:

This is nytheatre.com’s Twitter account (as opposed to my own personal one) — and my plan is to use Twitter as a way to keep nytheatre.com readers/supporters/fans up to date about what we’re writing about on the website. I am emphatically interested in hearing from folks about the kinds of Tweets you’d like to get from nytheatre.com.

One more thing before I sign off:

Happy New Year!!

Looking Back at 2010 (…and ahead to 2011)

The Blizzard of 2010 feels like a fitting end to a year that’s been volatile and harsh. The economy is still badly broken; the political climate here and around the world feels dangerously partisan and unconcerned with solving the very real problems facing us; and even in the world of theatre, attention has mostly been focused of late on a multi-million dollar spectacle that more and more seems to be too big to fail.

All of it–the weather, the economy, Spiderman—makes us feel tiny and impotent. What can average people do to make a difference these days?

Well, there are ways, and making amazing art that’s available to all is one of them. This is the kind of art that the New York indie theater community makes consistently, 52 weeks a year, at hundreds of venues in all five boroughs. In 2010 I was privileged and proud to see many examples—at the many theatre festivals that dot our annual calendar nowadays, at venues hallowed and venerable like La MaMa and welcoming new spaces like The Wild Project, from artists as experienced as Judith Malina and Jean-Claude van Itallie and as new and untried as the college students who mounted Richard 3 and The Nightmare Story at FringeNYC. This work need not be overtly political in terms of theme or content, for the mere act of making theatre against the odds—and presenting it in neighborhood venues for an affordable price—is a powerful and forceful statement of individuality and freedom.

The work we do at NYTE isn’t provocative or beautiful or creative like the work we celebrate, but we think it’s vital. Our job is to nurture, to notice, to support, and to promote the extraordinary people who make theatre in NYC. On our website nytheatre.com, via our publishing program (NYTE Small Press), and through numerous outreach efforts within the broad theatre community, we make sure that these artists get plenty of visibility in alternative media even when Julie Taymor and her collaborators seem to be monopolizing the news cycle in mainstream outlets.

2010 has been a difficult yet fulfilling year for NYTE. Funding from all sources is down, but gratifyingly we were one of three nonprofits that won a national competition sponsored by Microsoft, who awarded us a large software grant. This software directly fed much change behind the scenes at NYTE, enabling us to upgrade to the most current and robust versions of data base, systems development, and web development software; and this in turn meant that we ended 2010 by launching a brand new version of nytheatre.com. I am glad to report that nytheatre.com 3.0 has received mostly glowing reviews. We’ll be working on continuing to enhance and improve nytheatre.com, as well as ensuring that it remains accessible to all users, whatever their abilities and whatever type of device they choose to view it on, throughout 2011.

We’re also working hard to make sure that nytheatre.com content is unencumbered by what are increasingly becoming the standard annoyances of web browsing. I can’t stand it when I can’t see something online because a huge multimedia ad has opened up in front of it, making me wait 30 seconds before I can read what I came to read. I can’t stand noisy audio and video clips that start playing when I accidentally move my mouse over something on a page. I can’t stand having to page through screen after screen to read an article, solely because a website’s revenue is tied to the number of “page hits” it receives.

NYTE’s mission is not to sell advertising or to make people click on lots of extraneous screens. Our mission is to inform audiences about the amazing work happening on NYC stages. To that end, we promise never to let ads overshadow or drown out the content you came for on nytheatre.com.

We recently began a content partnership with Community Media (publishers of Downtown Express, the East Villager, the Villager, and Chelsea News, free local papers in Manhattan). We’re excited that this will provide us with another way for our reviews and articles to reach a larger audience.

We rolled out the Indie Theater Companion this year, after several years of planning and development. I’m very proud of this resource, which has the potential, I think, to both unite the indie theater community and to really help define it for a broad international audience. We partnered with the folks at 50/50 in 2020, a grass roots organization dedicated to achieving parity between women and men playwrights in terms of numbers of productions, to create dozens of profiles of women playwrights on the Indie Theater Companion. Theatre people of all kinds—including well-known artists like Jeffrey Jones and Austin Pendleton—volunteered to contribute profiles of colleagues and peers about whom they feel passionate. These have been augmented with biographies of playwrights, profiles of performance artists, and profiles of indie theater companies, and now the Indie Theater Companion is really starting to take shape as a valuable, dynamic, interesting resource that will help theatregoers and theatre practitioners learn about the work of artists who do most of their work under the radar. We’re planning to partner with other groups in 2011 to expand the Indie Theater Companion in multiple directions.

NYTE Small Press had an exciting year, starting with the publication of our very first e-book (an expanded edition of Plays and Playwrights for the New Millennium), which came out in the Kindle format in February. Since then, we’ve added Nook and Kobo versions as well, so that our first e-book is now available in all three of the major online e-bookstores (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders). More e-books are planned for the upcoming months. And we are looking to explore the technology underlying e-books to discover other ways that it can be used to benefit the emerging playwrights and theatre artists whom we serve.

We also published our 11^th annual anthology of new works from indie theater, Plays and Playwrights 2010. We’re grateful, as we look back on the year, to the authors and other creative people who helped make this volume possible, and also to the fine folks at Dixon Place, who hosted a fun and enormously successful launch party for this book. Watch for an announcement of the titles that will be included in Plays and Playwrights 2011, coming very soon!

NYTE is a theatre service organization and also a technology/new media company, and we’re seeing significant changes in both of these areas. Trying to map a course for our organization in 2011 and beyond is very challenging. What’s the place of theatre reviewing in a world of bloggers and paywalls? How do we best help theatre companies and artists get the word out about the work they’re doing on a Web increasingly dominated by Facebook, Google, Apple, and other monolithic corporations? How do we ensure that independent voices get heard above the din, on stage and online?

These are questions that we are striving to solve. I will be in touch with you about these topics and much more throughout the coming year. Your input is vital to helping us figure out the answers.

If you’ve read all the way down to here, thanks very much! I am closing with a request for help. NYTE is committed to providing comprehensive, accurate, and fair coverage of the NYC theatre scene, unencumbered by commercial concerns and not beholden to anyone except our audience. If you believe, like us, that theatre is vital to the functioning of democratic society and that a diverse, broad spectrum of voices is vital to the creation of excellent theatre, then I hope you’ll support NYTE as we carry out our mission in 2011 to provide a home online to the New York theatre scene on nytheatre.com and a haven for new unpublished playwrights at NYTE Small Press.

Here’s what you can do to help us.

(1)     Spread the word. When you like a review or article on nytheatre.com, email it to your friends; post it to your social network; tweet about it on Twitter. Remind others of the quality and breadth of our work by talking about us in press releases, blog posts, articles, and advertising. We count on word of mouth to help us prosper, just like all of the shows we cover and write about.

(2)    Volunteer to contribute content to nytheatre.com and the Indie Theater Companion. We pride ourselves on having built a community of contributors—hundreds of them over the past decade—who write about what they are passionate about for the benefit of all our readers. If you’re an indie theater artist, we want you to be part of this ever-expanding community. If you want to work with us, email me now.

(3)     Finally, if you can, please make a monetary donation to NYTE. We remain, as we have always been, a lean organization. We’re liberal in every way except fiscally; we work hard to make a little go a very long way. Nevertheless, we need financial support. We are proud to count the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Foundation for Fairer Capitalism among our funders, as well as dozens of audience members and theatre artists. Please give what you can. (And if you have already made a contribution this year, thank you!) We are a 501(c) (3) nonprofit corporation, and donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. Click here to donate, or you can send a check to NYTE at this address:

The New York Theatre Experience, Inc.
P.O. Box 1606
Murray Hill Station
New York, NY 10156

Thanks for hearing me out. Thanks for reading nytheatre.com and for supporting the other projects of NYTE. Let’s hope the blizzard that ended 2010 will be followed by warmth, cooperation, peace, and prosperity in 2011.

FringeNYC Opening Ceremonies: A Great Morning

Mother Nature cooperated big time with the New York International Fringe Festival this year, giving us a glorious morning for the Opening Ceremonies, which I hosted today at The FringeNYC Stage at Summer Streets in Soho from 10am until 12:30pm.

Tracey Lee, Kevin Free, and Martin Denton

What an amazing lineup of artists we had! I was hoping to break all known records for the most FringeNYC shows appearing in a single space, and I think we may have done just that. I welcomed to the stage artists from all of the following shows this morning:

• (UN)Natural Disaster
• Alligator Summer
• Bagabones
• Banshee of Bainbridge
• The Beatitudes
• Burning in China
• Classically Trained, Practically Broke
• Driving the Saudis
• Eternity in an Hour
• Faster Than the Speed of White
• For Kingdom and Fatherland
• Garage
• Getting Even with Shakespeare
• Hamlet Shut Up
• Hamlettes
• The Height of the Eiffel Tower
• Heron & Crane
• In Loco Parentis
• Insurmountable Simplicities
• Interfaith Understanding with The Rev. Bill & Betty
• Letters to Clio–Part II, Margarita
• Love in the Time of Swine Flu
• Miss Kim
• Miss Magnolia Beaumont Goes to Provincetown
• Missionary Position
• Monetizing Emma
• My Broken Brain
• Open Heart
• Picture Incomplete
• The Pig, The Farmer, and The Artist
• Playing By Air
• Protected
• Questions My Mother Can’t Answer
• A Raisin in the Salad: Black Plays for White People
• Richard 3
• South Pathetic
• Standing Up: Bathroom Talk & Other Stuff We Learn From Dad
• Strange Love in Outer Space
• Stripes: The Mystery Circus
• T-O-T-A-L-L-Y!
• Trick Boxing
• Viva La Evolucion!
• West Lethargy

Yes, that’s 43 shows sampled in about two hours. If that ain’t the FringeNYC experience, I don’t know what is!

Plus we were warmly welcomed by Elena K. Holy, Producing Artistic Director of the festival; and we were treated to a special Fringe Al Fresco performance of Not My Problem.

And I chatted offstage with artists who had stopped by to be supportive of their fellow FringeNYC participants: Stephen Padilla of Picking Palin (which I’ve already reviewed on nytheatre.com), Dustin Olson and Esther Barlow of The Swearing Jar, Ramon Sanchez of Energy Man, and Leila Arias of Omarys Concepcion Lopez Perez Goes to Israel.

I enjoyed every minute of the Opening Ceremonies, and I think the crowd (which was pretty massive for most of the morning) really did too! It included at least a couple of firsts for me: the first time I ever met a contortionist (the astonishing Jonathan Nosan of Bagabones) and the first time I interviewed an opera singer dressed as a bull in a pink tutu (from David Chesky’s The Pig, The Farmer, and The Artist).

James M. Kryshak (as Harvey the Bull in "The Pig, The Farmer, & The Artist" with Martin Denton

Major thanks to all of the artists who came out today — what a great showing and what a great show, indicative of the breadth and energy of FringeNYC.

And major major kudos to Julie Congress, Ryan Emmons, Rochelle Denton, the FringeNYC Interns, and sound engineers Bill and Gabe for making sure that our event went off without a single hitch.

Now, time to see some FringeNYC shows!

FringeNYC Opening Ceremonies: Please Come

On Saturday, August 14, I will be hosting the 14th annual New York International Fringe Festival’s Opening Ceremonies. We begin at 10AM and the event lasts until 12:30pm — it’s at The FringeNYC Stage at SUMMER STREETS, at Spring Street & Lafayette Street. It is, of course, free. And it’s one of the very best ways for you to get a taste of FringeNYC.

That’s because, in about 150 minutes, we’ll be presenting short excerpts from about a dozen shows, as well as mini-interviews with artists from dozens more. The lineup of participants is changing/expanding constantly at this point, but as of right now I am expecting to welcome artists from the following FringeNYC shows during the Opening Ceremonies:

• Bagabones
• Banshee of Bainbridge
• Burning in China
• Classically Trained, Practically Broke
• Driving the Saudis
• Eternity in an Hour
• For Kingdom and Fatherland
• Getting Even with Shakespeare
• Hamlet Shut Up
• Heron & Crane
• In Loco Parentis
• Interfaith Understanding with the Rev. Bill & Betty
• Love in the Time of Swine Flu
• Miss Kim
• Miss Magnolia Beaumont Goes to Provincetown
• Monetizing Emma
  
• My Broken Brain
• Picture Incomplete
• Playing By Air
• Questions My Mother Can’t Answer
• Richard 3
• South Pathetic
• Standing Up: Bathroom Talk & Other Stuff We Learn from Dad
• Stripes: The Mystery Circus
• The Beatitudes
• The Height of the Eiffel Tower
• The Pig, The Farmer, And The Artist
• The Princes of Persuasion
• T-O-T-A-L-L-Y!
• Trick Boxing
• West Lethargy

And it wouldn’t surprise if we are joined by many others on Saturday!

The goal is to have as many FringeNYC artists on hand as we possibly can, to let the audience know about their work. And the other goal is to put a fantastic show!

I am very excited about doing this event, and I hope we meet lots of new people there as well as see many, many familiar faces! Please stop by between 10am and 12:30pm to kick off FringeNYC in style!

(And we will be giving away a FringeNYC VIP pass to one lucky audience member! Come early to find out about that.)