Shanghai, Beirut, Buenos Aires, Rotterdam. New Awards announced! More HERE.
2012 ACT Festival “Globe Teana-Theatre Observation Award”
The celebrated playwright and Music Theatre Committee board member Nick Rongjun Yu has confirmed that one small-scale Production will be invited to Shanghai China. The “Shanghai International Contemporary Theatre Festival” (ACT Festival), hosted annually by the Shanghai Drama Art Centre, celebrates the best of contemporary theatre works around the globe. The festival has become a vital channel through which the city of Shanghai informs Chinese and international audience and theatre festival organizers about the latest theatre works of excellence, as well as offering an invaluable platform for professional and amateur theatre participants to showcase their talent and unique voice.
In their announcement they wrote: “With theatre forms getting ever more hybrid nowadays, music has become an increasingly indispensible aspect in the theatre performance. As music gets integrated creatively into the dramatic structure, assumes a principal role of importance, and librates the theatrical expression from the boundaries previously set by verbal text, the world of theatre anticipates with eagerness the resulting innovative storytelling that will undoubtedly enrich the stage through the mélange and juxtaposition between text, music, and movement.”
The ACT Festival “Globe Teana-Theatre Observation Award”, to be inaugurated at the ACT Festival 2013, represents the joint effort between Shanghai Drama Art Centre and the ITI Music Theatre Committee in acknowledging music theatre works that display such brilliance of seamlessly weaving music into the dramatic structure and innovating the method of storytelling on stage.
TACEC PRIZE
Jury member Martin Bauer of Buenos Aires has confirmed that the Experimental Center of the Teatro Argentina de la Plata – TACEC – will give a prize to a composer of a new work. This artist will be invited to Buenos Aires to oversse a new production of the work, to be created by a team and cast of Argentinian artists. This prize will be given to an exemplary experimental work.
In addition board member Guy Coolen has confirmed that he will award the Rotterdam Opera Days prize to one work. The production presented at the Music Theatre NOW meeting will be invited for performances at the Rotterdam Opera Days in the Spring of 2014.
ITI member Christina Merhan Chammas of Beirut , Lebanon has announced a new invitation for a work for children. This work will be invited to be presented at the Scenez Drama & Arts Academy in their new theatre. Christina Chammas attended the Music Theatre NOW 2008 meeting. She feels that new work will speak more directly to Lebanese children, rather than adaptations of classical works of Western European music such as a “Magic Flute” for children. “Those works are not part of our children’s culture. We feel that new works will speak to them more directly.”