Announcing the Project Footlight Festival Winter 2009

What: Musical Theater Festival
When: 1/30/09-2/7/09
Where: Dixon Place Theater at 161 Chrystie Street in downtown NYC
How: Submit application (fill-in PDF) by 1/5/09

How do you beat those inevitable winter blues that will settle in shortly after the inauguration?  Don't pin your hopes for entertainment on the New York Times's coverage of Obama's first 100 days; join Dixon Place for our annual musical theater festival, now called Project Footlight.  This year we will pair eighteen musical theater writers – nine composers and nine librettists – give them a theme and a week to brainstorm, write, rewrite, cast, rehearse, and produce a single ninety-minute musical in our brand-new, sparkly theater on Chrystie Street.  Jump into this wild experiment, this bubbling cauldron of ideas, for seven days of hair-raising, mad-cap adventure that could only happen at Dixon Place.

The Project Footlight festival is a camp for emerging musical theater writers that focuses on the developmental process and the art of collaboration. The festival asks participating artists how we unify a work across a collection of different artistic perspectives while always keeping the audience in mind.  We especially encourage those composers or writers from other genres and those pushing the boundaries of musical theater to apply. In keeping with the laboratory environment of Dixon Place, Project Footlight seeks to attract and cultivate new voices in musical theater while sponsoring a unique work of art.

Project Footlight will begin on Friday, January 30 and will end with two shows, one on Friday, February 6 and the other on Saturday, February 7 in the new Dixon Place state-of-the art theater located at 161 Chrystie Street.  The festival will provide directors, actors, a pianist, rehearsal space, and of course, the performance venue.  New York City metro area artists, either composers or lyricists/bookwriters, interested in applying should submit the completed one-page application by January 5, 2009.  We will announce acceptance into the festival the following week.

Dixon Place, founded in Ellie Covan's living room in 1986, is dedicated to supporting the creative process by presenting original works of theatre, dance, and literature at all stages of development. An artistic laboratory with an audience, we serve as a safety net, enabling artists to make challenging and questioning work that pushes the limits of artistic expression.  Dixon Place is a local haven for creativity, as well as an international model for the open exploration of the process of creation.  We are now holding performances in our new theater, which the New York Times recently called “astonishing.”  2009 is an exciting year to be a part of Dixon Place, the new Project Footlight festival, and the downtown theater scene.