Umbria 2022: International Playwright Retreat
16th Annual La MaMa Umbria International Playwright Retreat
During the 10-day Program, playwrights will participate in workshops with a Master Playwright, have time to work on their own writing and share with other participants. Playwrights may visit Spoleto and other Umbrian cultural sites.
Accomodation, meals and local transport are included in the fee.
Teaching Artist: Todd London
Playwriting as Presence, Gift, and Repair
For information about Todd London and a description of his approach to the Workshop, please click CREDITS above.
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT RETREAT
Playwrights are welcome to spend their summer with La MaMa Umbria International in beautiful Spoleto, Italy. The selected group of playwrights will participate in writing workshops led by an award-winning playwright while enjoying the peaceful surroundings of the Italian countryside. Past workshop leaders include Branden Jacob-Jenkins and Mac Wellman.
The Symposium and Retreat are fully accredited programs of Sarah Lawrence College (2 credits for one session of the Symposium and 1 credit for the Retreat) For more information about Sarah Lawrence College, please visit www.slc.edu.
CREDIT: The Symposium and Retreat are fully accredited programs of Sarah Lawrence College (2 credits for one session of the Symposium and 1 credit for the Retreat) For more information about Sarah Lawrence College, please visit www.slc.edu.
FEE: The fee is $2,400. Fee includes workshop, housing and meals for 10 days, ground transportation from the Rome airport to and from La MaMa Umbria, and excursions by bus, van or car.
APPLICATION PROCESS: Playwrights who wish to participate in the retreat will fill out the Application Form and send in their $1,000 deposit. You will be notified about your acceptance into the program shortly. Participants will be selected based on their commitment to the process and the case they make on the application as to how this program will help them with their creative process. Subject matter of the plays developed will NOT be a criterion for acceptance, nor will theatrical style, number of characters, nationality, perceived ethnicity, race or gender.
If you are not accepted into the Retreat, your deposit will be returned in FULL. If you are accepted and choose not to attend, you will receive a refund of all but a $100 registration fee, provided you notify us by May 15th. After that date, we cannot provide a refund of your payment.
TODD LONDON
Playwriting as Presence, Gift, and Repair
An experimental playwriting intensive focused on sources of inspiration, specifically love, place, memory, other people, and the act of bringing work into the world as an offering. In addition to writing for and in the beautiful spaces of La Mama Umbria, we will explore numerous forms of dramatic expression: Song, Scene, Monologue, Choral Ode, Poem, Prayer, Joke/Lazzi. We will work together in silence and out loud, sharing learning, leadership, and inspiration. For those who have spent much of the past two years in partial isolation, the workshop is intended as a way to repair from the difficulties of that solitude, to move towards others, and to reconnect to the living presence that defines the theater.
Todd London was the first recipient of Theatre Communications Group’s Visionary Leadership Award for “an individual who has gone above and beyond the call of duty to advance the theatre field as a whole….” He spent eighteen seasons as Artistic Director of New York's New Dramatists, the nation's oldest laboratory theatre for playwrights, where he worked closely with more than a hundred and fifty of America’s leading playwrights and advocated nationally and internationally for hundreds more. At New Dramatists he established and led new play labs and retreats, collaboration workshops, and exchanges with writers from England, Australia, Serbia, Hungary, Germany, and the Czech Republic, among others. From 2014-18 he was the Executive Director of the University of Washington's School of Drama, where he held the Floyd U. Jones Family Endowed Chair in Drama. Until recently, he was Consulting Director of Field Learning and Theater Relations for the Dramatists Guild of America and head of the MFA playwriting program at the New School, where he still teaches. Todd has written two novels and numerous books about the theater, including This Is Not My Memoir (with Andre Gregory); An Ideal Theater; Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play; 15 Actors, 20 Years; and The Importance of Staying Earnest. Todd is the founding director of The Third Bohemia, a national, interdisciplinary retreat for artists. www.toddlondon.net
La MaMa Umbria International
La MaMa Umbria International provides artists from around the world with residency programs and intensive workshops. For over 25, La MaMa Umbria has fostered cross-cultural and international exchanges and creative collaborations. Hundreds of artists have found Umbria to be a space that is beautiful, spiritually enriching, welcoming, and open to bold artistic experiments.