Open call and appointment of Curator and Producer
The Irish Society of Stage and Screen Designers (ISSSD) is delighted to announce the appointment of Tom Creed as Curator and Maura O’Keeffe with Once Off Productions as Creative Producer for the Irish presentation at PQ 2023 and the subsequent National Tour, with their proposal entitled The Next Four Years.
The Next Four Years will be a speculative retrospective of Irish performance design and scenography in the years 2023-2027, which challenges the designers of today to imagine the theatre of tomorrow. Rather than presenting the past, it will deploy new approaches to design to speak to the PQ 2023 theme of RARE, which asks “what the world and theatre could look like in the post-pandemic future” and calls on designers “to imagine, visualize, and even create rare visions of the future”.
If performance design and scenography could offer a vision for Irish theatre after the pandemic, what might a retrospective of the next four years look like? What new shapes, spaces, aesthetics, materials, formats, structures, hierarchies might we look back on? How might an exhibition of design change the system rather than just revisiting it?
ISSSD and the PQ team now invite performance designers from all disciplines, including set, costume, lighting, sound, video, hair, make-up, puppetry, special effects etc to respond to the question: what could the next four years of performance design look like? Submissions should be in the form of a short biography of up to 200 words as well as any of the following: a short text of up to 200 words, a short audio or video clip of up to two minutes, and/or 1-3 still images in any medium. Irish and Irish-based designers, as well as designers with a demonstrable track record of working in Ireland, are all eligible to apply.
Please send your submissions to PQ@onceoffproductions.com by 5pm on September 30th 2022.
Following the open call, a number of designers will be invited to contribute directly to creating the presentation at PQ 2023, with a wider selection of submissions incorporated into the exhibition presentation and publication. A series of workshops and discussions will also take place over the coming months to create a space for the Irish performance design community to explore the topic and inform the final presentation.
An online briefing will take place via Zoom on 19th September at 6pm, register here. Curator Tom Creed will also attend Coffee Spills at the Irish Theatre Institute on 21st September and will be available to discuss the project and process.