Help The Upper New with Scriptwriting Conversion(s) for The Ecotheater Initiative!

Based on what we’ve published in The Upper New Review, we currently have a series of written works manuscripts that are ready to be converted into scripts that can be used in our Ecotheater Initiative.

The task for this volunteer position is to take these prose manuscripts and convert/adapt one or more of them into standalone scripts that we can use to produce Readers’ Theater - both live performances and professional “radio show” performances that can serve as podcasts or standalone “audiobooks”.

Qualifications for this opportunity are, essentially, demonstrated experience writing high quality scripts (original works or adaptations) ready for professional production. We’ll ask for samples of completed works.

The volunteer may use whatever scriptwriting tools they feel most comfortable with (WriterDuet, Celtx, Studiobinder, ArcStudio, Final Draft) - use your tool of choice, just make sure the end result is an industry standard script that can be produced as Readers’ Theater, and eventually converted into screenplay (by other creatives) ready for production as an animated or live-action film.

As a bonus, part of the volunteer opportunity is the option to submit your own script to us internally, without going through our normal public submission systems for The Ecotheater Initiative. Following the completion of any single script conversion, each volunteer may then submit a single script they have written, and we will consider it for production in the Ecotheater Initiative.

Whenever we publish written works at The Upper New Review, we ask all published creators if they are willing to have their works used in the Ecotheater Initiative. To date, nearly ALL accepted authors have enthusiastically agreed to have their works converted/adapted for such use. This means we have approximately one dozen manuscripts ready for conversion/adaptation.

Throughout the Upper New and neighboring basins, we are connected with several community theatre groups who are ready to rehearse and perform these stories once they have been adapted for the performance format. We have several performance venues available to schedule for inaugural performances. We have an integrated audio production studio ready for recording and production.

Our Ecotheater website is just waiting for content to share, so we can add more pages and ramp up the website to enable continued iterative performance cycles!

We use POINT to manage all volunteers, which makes tracking hours and access to materials quite seamless.

The mission of The Upper New is to seek out and foster place-based work in the watersheds of the world as an avenue for humans’ continued individual and collective growth toward ecological literacy and increased practice of ecological stewardship in bioregional communities across the biosphere.

Upon release, these “dialogue and narration” podcast episodes could be remixed, in a sense, by our global audience of creators. These iterations would include the addition of sound effects (SFX), music, visuals (motion stills), animation, performance art, and short films. We would host a submission process for each iteration cycle, curating these auditory and audiovisual productions for publication through the Ecotheater website as podcasts or streaming videos.

The primary goals for the Ecotheater initiative are focused on creative innovation, collaboration, and learning. We believe the foundation of iterative collaboration and interpretation through multimodal accretion of each theater piece over time is the most unique and innovative technical and procedural element of the Ecotheater initiative. As a learning focused organization, The Upper New is launching the Ecotheater project as an extensible multimodal learning experience associated with ecologically themed narratives presented as theater. We hope the examples we create and the calls for submissions we provide will elucidate ecologically critical creative expression that helps us foster systems thinking, systems wisdom, and ecological literacy within our audience communities. Similarly, we wish for the artifacts and processes of the Ecotheater initiative to serve as a model of the iterative production process (and progression of complex creative/critical interpretation through accretion of modalities) for other individuals and groups to emulate across various topic areas. In short, we believe we are launching a new format of longitudinal creative expressive interpretive learning experiences.