ABOUT THE ELIF COLLECTIVE
Our Mission
The Elif Collective is a theater company that aims to deformalize the theatrical experience. We create warm, accessible, and saturated live performance spaces where audiences and artists can commune. We develop new plays that test the boundaries between audience and actor communication, while remaining committed to dramatic storytelling.
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To that end, we run:
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Playwrights’ workshops and readings where we pair writers with actors, directors, and other creatives in the earliest stage of development. Playwrights and directors have the freedom to structure their rehearsal time around a playwright’s writing goals; and actors become intimate collaborators and experts in their assigned roles. We center the voice and body to provide new perspectives to the playwright, and to envision and engage with a live audience as soon as possible.
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Education programs for K-12 students that mirror our developmental programs to prepare young artists to not only be actors, writers, and directors, but also to create new work in a collaborative setting.
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Live theater productions that experiment with, and reinforce, the connection between the actors and the viewers. We encourage alternative seating arrangements that create community between viewers and actors; audience participation; communication between the actors and the audience before and after the play; and relationship building between audience members.
Our Values
Warmth
You feel warm when you’re at home. The Elif is committed to making our spaces a home for queer people and people of the Global Majority. This commitment includes not only outreach and involvement of queer and BIPOC community members, but also supporting the development of their stories in new plays.
Accessibility
It’s impossible to investigate and expand live theater’s power to build community without opening the doors to everyone. The Elif is committed to providing low-cost or free access to all our programming for community members in need.
Saturation
Our work explores the ramifications of growing up in an oversaturated digital landscape and fraying ecological world. We play at the connection between rich and highly sensory digital lives and a physical world rearing from ecological and political crises. How can we overstimulate and sensorily deprive audiences at the same time? How can we inject tropes and themes and techniques from several genres into one piece of theater? These are the questions we ask ourselves when constructing and interpreting work.
The brilliant team behind our Timon of Athens workshop.
Our Origin
The Elif Collective debuted under the name Pale Fire Theater in November 2022 with a production of Waiting for Godot. We were, admittedly, operating on far more enthusiasm than experience. We had no stage manager. A life-size tree was out of the question. And our fundraising experience was near zero. But we had gathered a team of artists we loved. We made time to move together in random classrooms and put up our first show.
In the end, we sold out all three nights of Waiting for Godot. We found our strength in working as a collective, but it would take us another few months to discover our purpose: producing new work.
Jennie and Jules, our incredible stage manager and lighting designer for Godot.
Why The "Elif" Collective?
Elif is a starting point, a beginning. Elif is the first letter of the Semitic writing systems used for languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Phoenician, but also Persian, Swahili, and Ladino. It is a unique character that in most languages, lacks its own inherent sound. Diacritic markings on top or below the Elif modify the letter’s pronunciation.
We’ve adopted the Elif as a metaphor for our collaborative practice. To us, an original project–a story, a dance, a melody–is an Elif. Only through collaboration does that project come to life.