OnStage: If you aren’t from the Kansas City area, you might not think of Kansas City as being an artistic community, but as Dominic D'Andrea has recently learned, it is.
D’Andrea is the Founder and Producing Artistic Director of the One Minute Play Festival. The One Minute Play Festival is a monumental, nation-wide theatre project. It includes 10 festivals a year, and Incorporates 25 cities, 13,000 playwrights of all backgrounds, as well as countless artists of all capacities.
4 comments:
I think it's so interesting that sometimes the most unassuming cities are the ones with the most dynamic cultural climate, especially when it comes to the arts. Even though I have quite a few friends from Kansas City, I never realized what a big part live theater played in the community. This is great for the city itself as well, because I'm sure the festival will bring increased tourism and publicity for the area itself as well.
Besides the fact that it's in a less flashy city than LA or New York, I think the idea of a One-Minute play festival is intriguing but not exactly appealing or unappealing to me. I think it would be fun at first, but by the end I'd probably want more character development and plot than what can be gained in just a 60-second exchange. While I think a skilled 60-second-playwright could probably create characters with a lot of depth and a compelling story, it would also require phenomenal actors and actresses to pull off. I'd love to see one in action.
I had never really herd of a One Minute Play Festival before this week. I think the idea is really interesting. My first thought was, "how can someone get an entire point across in one-minute?" but I also thought that it would be a great challenge and very interesting to create and watch. I love hearing about places where people assume there is no theatre community because it proves that theatre exist really everywhere and everyone from anywhere can be interested in it. The idea that it will help bring a more divers range of actors is really awesome. I wonder if this is a result to the new trend of one minute plays, meaning that there is more diversity seen because it is newer work that is being preformed. It is also great to learn that the creative team was so willing to take on the new challenges that something like this creates. Overall, I think this is a great example of where theatre is going in the future, coming from anywhere, diversifying, and challenging us all to create something new.
This was really interesting because the idea of a One Minute Play seems uninteresting to me. However, this week in my Foundations of Drama class we read a few One Minute Plays, and not just the scene or excerpt from a longer text, and I was throughly impressed. Their is a lot you can gather from a One Minute Play in the story that it can tell. Although I think that the majority are going to be very interpretational as their is little time to explain in detail. I think that this is such a good idea to have a festival like this not only for the play writes but for the performers and designers as well. It is a great way to get a lot of people involved in a smaller time commitment than a full length play. I think that it is even better that it is taking place in a small town like Kansas because those small towns could always use some theater.
The very essence of this festival seems to make light of the fact that something doesn't have to be big or established or popular to make an impact. This is a very new thing in (as the article states) a lesser known location made up of a bunch of smaller very new things- but based off of the response so far it's already having an impact and that's incredible. The scope of the festival's reach is already far exceeding its physical size by numbers, and it hasn't even opened for the first time yet. This is a reminder to anyone who makes theatre for the scale of it that how we measure that scale is all relative, and that something doesn't have to be on everyone's Broadway bucket list, last three hours, and cost $3,000 to be relevant. If a not yet open and never before established one minute play festival in Kansas City can attract such a huge pool of participants, it ought to be considered just as influential as anything.
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