DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Live Theater, Live Development
The Elif Bet Residency is a pilot play development program that centers collective devising and audience involvement. The program elevates non-traditional forms of storytelling – like interactive activities and social experiences – to the same level as traditional scene-writing.​ The Residency works through the following components:
Dramaturgy Meetings
The playwright, director, and dramaturg discuss the play’s development and how to use labs to serve playwright’s goals.
Experimental Labs
The whole team, including actors, meet to read new pages, improvise around them, and devise new sequences.
Intermediary Showings
The team invites audience members to participate in the show’s interactive activities and share feedback.
ABOUT THE PLAY
sleepless – by kay kemp
The artist is working. We don’t know how long it’s been. His publicist eats takeout in the corner, blindfolded. She’s only allowed to examine his work by touch, and she insists that it—that she—is warm. In turns absurd comedy and starved romance, sleepless is an interrogation of creative obsession and mediated intimacy.
PUBLIC READING
An Inside Look
The Elif Bet Residency culminates in a final reading of sleepless. The reading will feature elements of the interactive, immersive, and social elements that were devised during the Residency.
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Join us at the Dramatist Guild Foundation for our last event of the year.l
Friday Dec 13th, 7:30PM
Dramatist Guild Foundation​
520 8th Ave Suite 2401
sleepless
written by kay kemp
developed by The Elif Collective
The Elif Bet Residency is also hosting a closed industry reading on December 12th during working hours at the Endangered Language Alliance. Please contact info@theelif.org for more information.
MORE ABOUT THE ENDANGERED LANGUAGE ALLIANCE
Founded in 2010, the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) is a New York City-based nonprofit with a mission to document endangered languages and support linguistic diversity in New York and beyond. Since its inception ELA has organized and hosted performances that bring these languages and their speakers to a wider audience. The most recent was a summer series at Little Island Park, based on Ross Perlin’s Language City and created together with Gung Ho Projects.​