Angels in America POSTER SUBMISSIONS
Absurd Reality Theatre is inviting local artists to submit designs for a poster contest for our June production of Angels in America Part 1: Millennium Approaches. Ten final designs will be chosen to represent Seattle's artistic community. Angels in America is a play about change, about the coming together of a community, about dealing with death. How can these ideas be best expressed in art? That's for you to show us.
DEADLINE DATE
Completed poster designs must be submitted to Absurd Reality Theatre (ART) via email to shane@absurdreality.com before midnight, May 1, 2008, or via snail mail to:
Absurd Reality Theatre c/o Shane Regan
1515 E. Spruce St. #A
Seattle, WA 98122
Snail mail submissions must be postmarked for May 1, 2008. Please do not send your only copy, as ART is unable to return entries.
POSTER SPECIFICATIONS
Completed poster size must be 18” x 18”, and may be in any medium. Above and below the poster design, a standard template will be used that includes information about the play, including its title —submissions need not incorporate the title or any other information. Poster art will not be modified except for technical reasons, and in that case not without permission.
Electronic submissions may be in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop format, or in a jpg. To ensure quality, please make sure your image is 300 dpi.
Upon submission the artist agrees that ART will have the right for a one-time use of the image for promotional purposes of the production of Angels in America, as well as retaining archival rights to display the poster image on our website or future press materials. The artist will retain all other rights to the image.
Poster designs may not incorporate any copyrighted characters (i.e., comic and/or television characters), photographs, and magazine or newspaper illustrations. Poster themes must be original, correct in safety concept and the exclusive work of the artist entering the contest in idea, design and execution.
COMPENSATION
It is ART’s intention to showcase the Seattle artistic community in collaboration with our production, and to that end will choose up to ten different images (unified by our template) to print and distribute. Each poster will feature the artist’s name and website, and will be featured in a lobby display during the production with an artists’ bio and statement.
In addition, should the artist choose, the original print can be placed for sale at ART’s silent auction (to be held in May), with the proceeds of its sale going to either the artist or a non-profit organization of their choice.
POSTER THEMES
A Very Brief Statement on Angels in America: Millennium Approaches
Angels in America is full of drive and passion. The spiritual, religious, sexual, and political webbing of the storyline make it applicable as a social tool for change on numerous levels, but never more so than now.
“The question I am trying to ask is how broad is a community’s embrace. How wide does it reach?”
-Tony Kushner
The instability of the world at large (most obviously the Iraq War, the genocide in Darfur, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, immigration standoffs and steel walls along our borders) points now more than ever to the need to address Kushner’s question. In the United States today more of us are losing faith in our leader, and we are losing our identity in false ideas of Americanism, Patriotism, and Freedom. As Americans, too often we have forgotten where we come from, and glossed over the history of migration to this continent.
Angels in America is about destruction and rebirth. Kushner’s vision for rebuilding our shattered sense of community as vividly painted in the breaking down of physical and spiritual bonds. As the old Mormon Mother describes Harper:
“God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.”
ART’s artistic vision of Angles in America: Millennium Approaches reinforces this constant state of change and metamorphosis; the set design calls for a stage is in a constant state of change, destruction, disassembly and rebuilding.
Stasis and Change are constantly repeated in Angels. In a state of despair and uncertainty, human impulse lights a desire to halt change and preserve the past or ignore the future, especially here in the United States, where our entire identity and foundation is built on change, on immigration, on migration, on the merging and melding of culture.
Summary: Your design can be about a scene, a theme, even simply the title. Whatever inspires you about this production of Angels in America.