Chalkboard Theatre Project (CTP). A chalkboard is a big, beautiful, empty canvas. It’s open. It's wide enough to hold everyone’s ideas on an equal level. It's adaptable. It can be erased, doodled on, scribbled over, edited and reedited until a final product is created. Like our process, it invites and even encourages revision, discovery, and surprise.
We are also a project; we’re built around exploring the depths of a single artistic hypothesis: intense collaboration builds lifelong artistic partnerships and cultivates a theatrical experiences that are greater than the sum of their parts. Our shows are experiments. Each one involves some shifted variables, some consistent controls, and the application of some pressure and heat to mix and meld our participants brilliant ideas. It's our goal to test how far the collaborative process can take people and to nurture and measure the results born out of it.
At CTP we are all about the business of inviting artists together in a room for a structured, frenetic 24 hour period, peppering them with obstacles to navigate and hurdles to jump, and watching them come together and collaboratively spin straw into gold.
The majority of the theatre we see on the stage today is product-oriented, focused from casting calls to final rehearsal, to the staged show. CTP takes a different approach to theatre. Our Experiments are built around cultivating a process-oriented experience for our participants during the 24 hours they’re placed into a room together. From start to finish, our artists have creative ownership over the whole lifecycle of new play development: writing, directing, honing, and ultimately performing a completely new play.
These plays, though thrown together in a coffee-fueled, 24-hour romp, have gone on to incubate some of our artists’ most surprising and creative work. More than that though, they’ve opened our participants up to bold new ways of approaching their craft and led to lifelong collaborative partnerships.
We believe that ….
1. Theatre is, first and foremost, a collaborative art form.
2. The process of collaboration in theatre-making can be its own sort of artistic experience, leading to growth, change, catharsis and all of the other good things art does to its characters and audience.
3. When artists are arranged together in a space and are given license to be creative together, a sort of alchemy happens.
4. Everyone has something to add to the conversation and a role to play in the room.
5.Hats, black-ties, spurs, coats, guests, +1s, dance cards, punch cards, and sleep should always be optional. Coffee is, of course, required.
