Call: LMDA seeks short essays (500-1000 words) that boldly inspire, provoke, and explore theatre’s potential to transform through global crisis.

Eligibility: Dues-paid LMDA members (to renew or join, click here)

Deadline: April 30, 2020

Prompt: Around the world, theatre and the millions of people who create and experience it are on indefinite hiatus in order to save lives. During the month of April, LMDA challenges its members staying at home to imagine ways in which our art form might emerge from this crisis changed for the better. 

Although theatre has persisted for millennia through countless threats to its very existence, what will it look like this time? When we resume and reconnect, how might we do so more profoundly? What big ideas will transform theatre and its institutions for the next era? Which assumptions and habits will we be free to leave behind? 

During this fallow period, let’s imagine the “radical dramaturgy” that will lead theatre and performance into the next year, decade, and century. What ideal theatre-making will heal the communities, nations, and the globe during the long recovery ahead? How can dramaturgical imagination and practices shape the theatrical phoenix that will rise?

Target: LMDA wants to put its members’ incomparable brains and innovative impulses to work for the benefit of our community and the many others we touch. With authors’ permission, essays will be collected, pitched, posted, promoted, published, and/or disseminated via various outlets (e.g. www.lmda.org, LMDA Review, HowlRound, conference sessions, American Theatre, etc.) to showcase dramaturgy’s vital capacity to contextualize and articulate the possibilities of where we go from here and what it might mean. 
Email: Save your essay as Name.Title.pdf and email to freelance@lmda.org by April 30, 2020.