What is it?
Short+Sweet is the biggest short play festival in the world.
Each year, we gather emerging and established actors, writers and directors to present seasons of the best local and international ten-minute plays in Sydney (Newtown Theatre, Seymour Centre), Melbourne (Arts Centre) and Singapore (Esplanade, Arts House, NAFA).
This year, for the first time, we had a company travelling from another country. The Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, one of Asia’s premiere theatre schools, sent a contingent of students and graduates from Singapore to take part in the Sydney festival.
In another recent first - the S+S Awards Night at the Arts Centre in Melbourne last month was videotaped by the Movie Network for airing on the Movie Extra channel in March.
The ten plays of the final will be shown, two at a time, as five 30 minute episodes with hosting by Josh Lawson and featuring commentary by Alex Dimitriades, Pia Miranda and Suzi Porter amongst others.
The Movie Network also produce Project Greenlight - which gives budding filmmakers a chance to have a feature film fully funded and produced - a pretty astounding prize. This year they tossed a substantial sum of money into a pool to be divided amongst the writers, directors and performers of the Melbourne final.
Also new for 2007 - the first Melbourne Fast+Fresh (S+S for 14-18 year olds) will be presented at St Martin’s Youth Theatre and the Fairfax Theatre (Arts Centre) in May under the guidance of Artistic Coordinator Miki Oikawa.
There’s also news for Shorter+Sweeter - the ‘Best Of’ touring version of S+S - the program was successfully presented at Long Paddock late last year and has been accepted for a three month five-state regional Australian Tour in early 2008.
Other S+S news includes the first truly international S+S festival to be presented in Singapore. The inaugural two week festival will be at held in April/May 2007 at the NAFA Black Box with the Awards Night at the Esplanade Theatres by the Bay. Alex Broun will travel to Singapore as Artistic Director to guide the local crew in their first season.
With the addition of Singapore Short+Sweet will become, to the best of our knowledge, the first ‘trans-national’ Theatre Festival in the world. Our plans for world domination (ten minutes at a time) continue apace with NZ (2007), the UK (2008) and USA (2008).
But wait there’s more… Or there will be… Stay tuned.