Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

Every year, SKETCHBOOK is reborn. For this year’s reincarnation, we have introduced the SUBMIT program. SUBMIT is geared to allow our community of artists, audience, patrons and volunteers to contribute their stories, thoughts, and ideas to the experience of the festival. We figured that this was already happening in regards to choosing the plays, directors and actors, so why not just open it up, all the way. To be more specific, this year we received over 400 submissions of short world premiere plays (of under 7 minutes in length), 100 director applicants and 600 actors in building our 14 world premiere short plays. In our eyes, each audience member is also “submitting” their most precious asset, their time, to SKETCHBOOK. Without it (our audiences time), there would be no SKETCHBOOK. So, why not open a portal for everyone to share what’s in their minds and find a way to integrate it into the experience…. And SUBMIT was born.

We started by coming up with 13 core queries about life.

1. What is your first memory as a child?
2. Tell us about the most memorable moment with one of your parents.
3. Have you ever experienced love-at-first sight? If so, please share.
4. Tell us about your biggest fear.
5. How has the internet played a role in your sexual relationships?
6. Who has the power?
7. How do you feel about the American economy?
8. What was something you said to your spouse or loved one that you didn’t mean or regret saying?
9. How do you support the American soldier?
10. Define Yourself.
11. What’s the best birthday present you ever got?
12. Tell us about any near death experiences you have had.
13. What do you believe is life after death?

Then we created different ways for the audience to use technology to easily get their answers to us

• Submit by phone. Call 206-337-0678 and leave a voice mail response.
• Submit now with our audio recorder.
• Email audio submission (MP3 files only preferably at 128 kbs/s) to audiosubmit@collaboraction.org.
• Email video submissions to videosubmit@collaboraction.org CLICK HERE to learn more about video submissions.
• Submit written responses to textsubmit@collaboraction.org.
• Email photo or image submissions to imagesubmit@collaboraction.org.

And bam, people started sending stuff in (click here to hear one of my favorites entitled “when i was 16 I fell in love with this guy”.)

And now, with 9 days until the SKETCHBOOK opens I am working furiously with the design team and a core group of 5 talented actors, to create artful and transcendent moments from our favorite submissions that will take the audience from one play to the next. Oh boy, you say? Me too!

When all is said and done, we will have received over 5000 submissions of different kinds (including the live audience format), and hopefully, along the way we’ll get a glimpse of what it means to be alive today, leveraging technology to enhance the medium that makes us feel most alive and in the moment….. live theatre.

To view some of the submissions and learn more about how to submit. Go to www.collaboraction.org

This entry was posted by Anthony Moseley on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 9:51 am and is filed under Sketchbook (08). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.