Free-Range Drama Farm

As promised, I’m here to tell you more about the Drama Farm Pilot Program that we’re planning for the Summer of 2008. We’re pretty excited about it - hopefully you will be too!

So what’s this pilot program all about, anyway?

Well, anyone who’s been following along for the past year or so knows that we’ve got some pretty big ideas for what we want the Drama Farm to be. Up ’till now, though, that’s all they’ve been: Ideas.

Now we want to put some of those ideas to the test. We want to gather a group of students and advisors and do a sort of mini-version of the Drama Farm’s program, to see how things work and get some feedback from people involved in the process.

To that end, we’re planning on renting some studio space here in Alameda for a couple of months, and hopefully making a deal with our local performing arts center to use their theater. It’ll be a very low-budget program, but we’re hoping to raise enough that we can cover our costs without charging the students admission.

Who’s going to be involved?

Right now we’re primarily looking for students who are interested in coming and helping us build the program from the ground up. We’ve got some ideas on how to structure things, but we’re really looking for adventurous, innovative theatre students who want to be a part of creating this program and helping to improve it for the students who come after them.

We’re also looking for local theatre artists (designers, technicians, actors) who are interested in acting as advisors for the summer program. While the ultimate goal is to have full-time advisors at the Drama Farm, the pilot program will be structured so that advisors are available primarily by phone to give the students advice and support. Advisors will also have pre-arranged times to drop in and see how things are going, and to work with the students in person should they need it (sort of like office hours in a college setting).

And what exactly will we be doing?

Basically, we’re planning a two-month program for the months of June and July 2008 (exact dates TBA). The first week will be a moving-in and getting to know each other week - we’ll probably schedule a few get-togethers/meetings towards the end of the week, but the bulk of the week will be free for exploring and getting settled.

Weeks 2 through 5 will be work weeks - time for rehearsals, production meetings, design, build, and general collaboration. The basis of the Drama Farm idea is that the students are in charge, so this will be their time to work, along with their professional director, in whatever manner they see fit.

Weeks 6 and 7 will be in the theater. The tech/performance schedule will be determined by the students, and they’ll be responsible for advertising the performances as well. If they want to tech for a week and do one weekend of performances, they can; if they’d rather tech for a day, open the show and then hold daytime rehearsals between shows, that’s their prerogative.

Week 8 will be a sort of post-mortem for the project - we’ll get together to discuss how things went, what everyone liked, what could have been improved, and what other ideas we could incorporated into the program.

This is just a rough structure that we’ve worked out so far; as more collaborators get involved, we’re open to shuffling things around and adding new elements based on their ideas.

We’re also planning to throw in some additional goodies that we want to test out, like having roundtable discussions with the students and advisors once a week, and holding occasional workshops and seminars for the students.

It’s really about experimentation - we don’t know what’s going to happen or how it’s going to work out, but we’ll have fun trying, and hopefully get some good feedback in the process!

How do I get involved?

If you’re interested in being a part of the pilot program, whether as a student, advisor, or just a helpful hand or contributor, we’d love to have you! You can check out the How You Can Help page on our website for more information on ways to get involved.

You can also subscribe to this blog to recieve updates on the program, and join our forum to introduce yourself and join in the discussion as we build the program.

Finally, if you can spare a few dollars for the cause, we’d really appreciate your contributions! You can click on the “Make a Donation” button in the sidebar, or check out our General Store to buy some cool Drama Farm stuff and support us at the same time!

If you’re interested in what we’re doing, please let us know! We want to get as many people involved as we can - the more creative folks we have working on this, the better it will be!

UPDATE: Due to some exciting new developments, the pilot program has been postponed until the summer of 2009. You can get all the details here!