FundIt for Salt and 30 others...

The Collaborations 13 festival's Fundit Account has just gone LIVE! http://www.fundit.ie/project/jb-collaborations-2013.

The festival will run from Feb 22nd - March 9th next year (hence the '13' in the title!) and will feature one of my own plays, SALT ON OUR SKIN, my first staged production since the Focus (Trade Me A Dream) in 1997, so it's really exciting.

The target overall is €6000 in six weeks but with the number of people involved and if each of us has a few (maybe 10?) friends - yeah, it can be doubtful! - who donate a fiver, then apparently we will make it.

The festival, which is organised by the Jack Burdell Experience theatre company, will feature 31 shows of all sorts, shapes, sizes and moods... There are full length plays but also recurring one hour shows featuring three short plays, one of which will include my own, directed by Antoinette Duffy.

I really REALLY hope you can make it along!

You can read more about the details of the festival on the FundIt site. (http://www.fundit.ie/project/jb-collaborations-2013)

SALT ON OUR SKIN... What it's about...

Eve needs to tell her lover something he really doesn’t want to hear. But how do you make someone understand what it means to be losing your eyesight gradually? To know that soon, even if she still dreams in colour, she will wake up to a black and white world? She decides to take him behind her eyes so that he will understand how it feels and she does this with a lyrical epiphany of a letter – to her lover, to life and to colour. The play was written for, inspired by and is dedicated to a friend, Tanvir Bushe.

SALT ON OUR SKIN/ Collaborations 13

My play, Salt on Our Skin, will be on as part of the Collaborations 13 Festival organised by the Jack Burdell Experience theatre company which will run from Feb 22 - March 9. It's a great festival with 31 shows of all sorts but you can read more about it here at the festival's FundIt site. (http://www.fundit.ie/project/jb-collaborations-2013)

There are full length plays but also recurring one hour shows featuring three (or even more, depending on their length) short plays, one of which will include my own, directed by Antoinette Duffy.

I really REALLY hope you can make it along! It will be nearly 14 years since I last had a play performed!

SALT ON OUR SKIN... What it's about...

Eve needs to tell her lover something he really doesn’t want to hear. But how do you make someone understand what it means to be losing your eyesight gradually? To know that soon, even if she still dreams in colour, she will wake up to a black and white world? She decides to take him behind her eyes so that he will understand how it feels and she does this with a lyrical epiphany of a letter – to her lover, to life and to colour. The play was inspired by and is dedicated to a friend, Tanvir Bushe.

The Festival's Fundit Account has just gone LIVE! The target overall is €6000 in six weeks but with the number of people involved and if each of us has a few friends - yeah, it can be doubtful! - who donate a fiver, then apparently we will make it. Here's the link below;

http://www.fundit.ie/project/jb-collaborations-2013

Tasty Morsels had a tasty reading!

A big THANK YOU to the cast (Gail Brady, Patrick Bridgeman, Diana O'Connor, Noel Aungier, Rob Harrington, John Smyth and Joe McKinney) who put so much effort and talent into bringing my play Tasty Morsels alive at the reading in the Attic Studio last Tuesday night.

It was a great experience and exactly what I needed to work out what was working (the characters, phew) and what didn't and then to have the benefit of all the feedback from cast and audience alike --

I have options now to play with that I might not have thought of on my own, ideas to consider which are already sparking other ideas, a clearer idea of what my brain meant when it told me something wasn't working

The Last CAN event of the year

Another great night last night - the final gathering of the Creatives in Animation Network (CAN) for 2012. I thought numbers would be tiny - so many cancellations and all of them with good cause on the day - but then several arrived that I wasn't expecting so it was another interesting mix of 15 people from all areas of our two spheres.

So five meetings in, we have about 60 on the mailing list and nearly 70 on the LinkedIn group from all over the globe; there have been collaborations and other exciting ones are brewing away. Every one of the gatherings has been stimulating and no two were the same because the mix was always different; the only standard was that everyone had lots of experience in their field and a genuine interesting in collaboration at some stage.

There was mention last night of putting together a list for members of the group of all the websites/ blogs/ facebook pages/ LinkedIn groups that might have news about upcoming shows/ features/ animation projects in which there might be work either for writers or animators...

I thought if everyone could make suggestions I can put it together. All I could think of was Pegbar, the Irish Film Board's announcements of grants to animation, possibly Media's though all of these might be too late for writers. I haven't had time yet to dig around so any suggestions you can make would be fantastic.

Also, if any of you can think of ways to make this network more effective, I'd love to hear your ideas. The Writers Guild (ie the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters' Guild) have offered us their space any evening if we we want to meet in smaller groups - possibly aimed at bringing people together with specific interests in terms of collaborations etc - for example.

Anyway, let me know...

Salt on Our Skin has a director!

Antoinette Duffy has come on board as director of my short play, Salt on Our Skin! Thrilled to be working with her. We're hoping to run auditions for the one-woman show soon, hopefully during the week of 17th December if anyone's interested.

Eve is mid 20s, trying to explain to her lover that she is losing her sight. It's a love letter, evocative, lyrical, very visual... Let me know and I can send you some sample pages to see if it would be something you'd like to do.

Salt on our Skin will be on during the Collaborations 13 Festival in March 25-Feb 9th 2013 in The Boys School, Smock Alley; a festival organised by the Jack Burdell Experience theatre company.

Wildernuts

Started a writing gig on a lovely new series with Kavaleer, called Wildernuts. Five bucaneers, adventuring through nature, uncovering how magical the natural world really is... Had a fantastic writers' room on Monday last; ideas flying around the room like explosive pretzels...

The start of a new adventure!

http://kavaleer.com/tv-series/wildernuts/

Tasty Morsels

Really excited/ nervous about the reading of my play Tasty Morsels in The Attic next Tuesday, Dec 11th. Every reading they've done has been so useful; constructive feedback is like gold dust to a writer!