Becoming a Reader for Bearing Your Arts
Being a reader of the new plays coming through is a great way to become an active player in new Oz theatre.  If you’re interested in becoming a reader/ assessor we’d love to hear from you – you can take whatever time you need to read and respond. We’re not looking for exhaustive critiques.   We’ll send out a batch of about ten (most will be short plays unless you only want to read longer ones). All that we ask is that you give us some feedback on half of them –  which could be even just a mark out of ten. Simple!

Every now and then you’ll uncover a real gem – and when you do you can state your interest in becoming involved in a production of same.  From our experience some great partnerships have developed between writers and performers. Writers tend to be very faithful to the actors and directors that ‘dig’ their work often writing plays specifically with these people in mind.

Walking Into Bars, the production arm of Bearing Your Arts, was set up with the purpose of encouraging, and producing or co-producing, such collaborations. We’ve actually produced or co-produced 20 different shows since June last year as well as producing the monthly show ‘Crash Test Drama’ at Dante’s. But of course if you like a play, you’re more than welcome to contact the writer directly and arrange production completely separately from us. We just want to support new quality work no matter who produces it.

If you’re interested you can either email cath@bearingyourarts.com or phone Harry 0401 072 527

Monthly Variety Show for Adults
Although this won ’t kick off until after the Comedyfest, we’re looking for content from writers (including songwriters) and performers.  Performers can either write their own pieces or find a tasty treat from Script Squirrel.  There will be a special segment for sub six minute serials.  Three serials will be performed each month.  The audience will decide which two they’d like to see the next episode of in the following month’s show.  One drops out and is replaced by a new contender. More info from harry@bearingyourarts.com

Monthly Variety Show for Kids
David Gannon and Nyssa Lock will be presenting a monthly Saturday afternoon show for upper primary aged children. They ’ll be looking for both content from writers as well as character performers.  Shows will start after the Comedyfest (April, 2008). Send scripts or expressions of interest to... david: grommy_69@hotmail.com

Stage YOBS (Stage Your Own Bloody Show)
We know how hard and frustrating it can be to have a brilliant idea for a show but not a clear understanding of how to go about making it happen (without mortgaging your first-born and losing your sanity in the process).   As part of our Stage YOBS program, we want to help you make it happen.  Bearing Your Arts is all about promoting and improving opportunities for local writers and performers.  By using our existing networks and contacts we can assist you in getting your work out there. 

In 2007, Stage YOBS helped individuals and groups to get together to put their work on in a collaborative enterprise that became the highly successful 2007 El Dante’s Minnie Fiesta, a fantastic theatrical festival with 13 fringe-length shows running over six-weeks.

So if you have ideas a-plenty and want to find like-minded people and investigate economical ways of getting your ideas off the ground, contact us.

PROJECTS
We are always toying with new ideas and projects so it ’s well worth your while to check this section out regularly to see if there is something we are working on that you feel that you’d just love to be a part of.  If you have ideas of your own, we’d like to hear about them too.  At the moment, we are working on the following ideas.

Playwriting DVD
We want to put together an instructional ‘how-to’ guide to playwriting that doesn’t put you to sleep in the first five seconds!  We want new, exciting ways of teaching the art of playwriting using the primary premise of ‘show don’t tell’. It has been our experience that there is little out there that is interesting or inspiring in regards to teaching playwriting particularly with independent theatre in mind.  We’d be happy to look at segments, scripts, ideas or whatever you may have about how to show particular aspects of playwriting such as dramatisation, characterisation, staging, plot, structure, dramatic devices and so on in new innovative ways.  Put your thinking caps on.