XMA Cross Media Awards 2012
Special projects
   
  The Irish Times: The Tiny Plays project, Dublin
(The Irish Times Ltd, Ireland).


 
 
 
  Project name  
  The Tiny Plays
 
  General Publication Info  
  The Irish Times is an Irish broadsheet newspaper with a circulation of approximately 100,000. Its website irishtimes.com was one of the first newspaper websites in Britain or Ireland, and has approximately 3.5 million users per month and 36 million page views per month.
 
  Idea and Implementation of your special project  
  The Irish Times and theatre company Fishamble decided to invite members of the Irish public to submit short plays, in order to capture glimpses of the extraordinary times we are living through in this country, and to hear what the citizens of Ireland wanted to express on stage. The Irish Times published plays by established playwrights as commissioned by Fishamble commissioned along with a major, double spread article to announce the scheme. At the same time, the competition was publicised using Twitter and Facebook – both through the accounts of each brand and individual journalists.
 
  Project results and results monitoring  
  This open call for submissions resulted in over 1,700 entries – an extraordinary number. The word count of all the plays received amounted to more than double that of War and Peace. Plays were received about birth, life, death, sex, travel, love, loss, landscape, travel, grief, climbing, falling, losing, winning, spirituality, carnality, fishing and everything in between. Plays were submitted from every county on the island of Ireland, as well as from Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Mosambique, Norway, Scotland, Switzerland, the Philippines, USA and Wales. The youngest playwright was 7 years of age, the oldest 81. Two separate productions were then planned. One production of 25 tiny plays took place in the Project Arts Centre from 15 - 31 March and another production of a different 25 plays will happen at the start of 2013. There was also a series of free pre-show, post-show discussions and readings right through the run. The speakers and participants were drawn from people with connections to both Fishamble and the Irish Times. To reflect the amazing interest in the call for submissions by young people, Fishamble presented Young People's Tiny Plays for Ireland, a selected reading of 11 plays by young people during the run in March 2012.
 
  Additional comments  
  The collaboration was based on a desire to attract submissions from as many people throughout Ireland as possible, and to get people writing original drama throughout the country, and by the Irish Times to celebrate its commitment to the arts in general, and theatre specifically, and to generate creativity and provide top-quality dramatic writing for its readers.
 
  LINKS  
  http://fishamble.com/tinyplaysforireland
http://projectartscentre.ie/programme/whats-on/146 ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMPZ-zXZGck&feature ...
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2012/ ...
http://www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Reviews/Current ...
 
Uploads:
Tinyplays1.pdf  (1276 KB)   
Masthead.JPG  (40 KB)   
Tinyplays2.JPG  (255 KB)   
Tinyplays2.pdf  (677 KB)   
Tinyplays3.pdf  (692 KB)   
Tinyplays4.pdf  (916 KB)   
Tinyplays5.pdf  (552 KB)   
  General contact and feedback address:

Ms. Raquel Meikle
Programme Manager Events
WAN-IFRA
Darmstadt, Germany

Phone: +49-6151-733.927
E-Mail: raquel.meikle@wan-ifra.org
 
   
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