L-EST/European Performing Arts and Transmedia Lab - Open Call for artistic research Grants

The 2016-17 grants are intended for interdisciplinary artistic teams (actors, writers, choreographers, developers, researchers, etc.) working in theatre, dance, site-specific arts, music, digital arts and circus or various hybrid forms. The artistic research process will take the form of an experimentation phase or a writing and conceptualisation phase granted to three companies. This phase will take place between June and November 2017, at the end of which the artistic teams will have either produced an initial model/project, or have advanced in the production of a project that was already underway.

The purpose of this grant is to give artists an opportunity to explore, experiment and subvert the various possibilities offered by the contemporary stage through the prism of transmedia.

Launched by L-EST/European Performing Arts and Transmedia Lab in 2013, the call for artistic research grants has already enabled six European artistic teams to explore and create various transmedial performing art forms. Supporting artistic teams and allowing them to experiment and develop these forms is one of the foundations of the European Centre for artistic creation L-EST whose main activities are intensifying since last season, notably with a new event dedicated to the performing arts and transmedia creation: The #TransFiction Meeting. Last but not least, in the course of the project development each of the L-EST organisations can pledge to support a project in its own name (co-production; presentation/show).

Various approaches can be developed (non-exhaustive list): stage/media combinations (web, interactive interfaces, parallel fictions, narrative world(s), social medias,…); temporal, narrative, formal/conceptual and/or media extensions; audience involvement (co-actor, co-creator, participant, etc.) and spillover into the public space; interpenetration of real and/or virtual and the stage, and so on.

Specifically, L-EST is interested in processes developing:

• Open and Interactive writing that involves audience participation, notably through its contribution to the deployment of the narrative, based on the understanding that transmedia seeks to create new fictional territories within the same sphere/global narration that people can appropriate, use and experiment with;
• A multi-platform dramaturgy, staging or performance operating a convergence between “traditional” stage writing (theatre, choreography, music/sound, audio-visual, book, journalism, etc.) and interactive writing (designer, interactive designer, film maker, designer of web architecture, social media expert, community moderator, etc.);
• Furthermore, L-EST will carefully and particularly considerate the applications developing a performing arts and transmedia project rooted in the territory of Belfort-Montbéliard.

The deadline to apply is 15 January 2017.

More details and info on how to apply here.