Dramaturg Driven Grant Recipients Announced

The Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) is pleased to announce the recipients of the Fall 2010 round of Dramaturg Driven Grants: Laurel Green, Sarah Lunnie and Katalin Trencsenyi. This round of grants saw eleven applications, and the selection process was overseen by the Chair of LMDA’s Committee on Programs, Stephen Colella, along with committee members Joanna Falck and Diane Brewer. 

Dramaturg Laurel Green will work with award-winning designers Ben Chaisson and Beth Kates to create Untangled Headphones. Using the Distillery District in Toronto as a venue for an intimate performance between three people, they will explore the past, present and future of the area, arming participants with a pair of wireless headphones and a wireless microphone before setting them loose in this part-tourist trap/part-historical landmark. Turning alleyways into time warps and cobblestones into dance floors, the group will create directions that encourage discreet acts of collaboration towards an unwitting performance -- finding moments of serendipity between three individuals in transit. Laurel brings a fascination with ‘walkman theatre’ to Untangled Headphones, and she will gain valuable mentorship in sound design while discovering whimsical, spontaneous and clever ways to activate audiences in this rambunctious and highly interactive project.   

Dramaturg Sarah Lunnie will use the grant as seed money for projects developed by the Telephonic Literary Union, a company based in Louisville, Kentucky, and consisting of Lunnie, Zach Chotzen-Freund, Stowe Nelson and Rachel Paul. The Telephonic Literary Union devises phone-based storytelling experiences for (very) small audiences. Their initiative consists of two parallel projects. The first, Story Hour, is a series of live, site-specific storytelling events. The second, Storyline, will be a phone-based literary hotline, featuring a constantly evolving repertoire of short fiction and radio plays. Their goal is to create unique theatrical experiences that are disarming, intimate, ephemeral and cheap. They will connect to a broad and diverse local audience, and provide a venue for writers to share their work in a fresh format. The funds from the Dramaturg Driven grant will be provide commissioning dollars for the spring Story Hour events and contribute to the purchase of a custom phone-answering system for Storyline.   

UK-based dramaturg Katalin Trencsenyi will use Dramaturg Driven funds to continue her research project “Dramaturgy in the Making,” mapping contemporary dramaturgical practices in Europe, the United States and Canada, and creating a user’s guide for theatre practitioners. Writes Trencsenyi: “During the course of their career dramaturgs develop their own ‘dramaturgical toolbox’, which they use when working. These ‘toolboxes’ are worth for examining – much can be learned from them, and perhaps borrowed for our own dramaturgical toolbox. And this is the aim of my research – to map contemporary dramaturgical practices (within the European, American and Canadian context), discuss them, compare them, juxtapose them, put them into a theoretical framework, and offer them in a user's guide format to the reader for further examination, inspiration and perhaps for some practical use.”  

For more information about any of these projects or about the Dramaturg Driven Grants, contact LMDA's president, Danielle Mages Amato or Administrative Director Danielle Carroll.