From June 12-14, 2025, Playground: Festival of New Work will feature short medium works/excerpts by emerging artists from the Waterloo Region and surrounding area.

Submissions are now being accepted from all theatre and performance creators looking to present their fresh concepts on the stage. Whether your project is performance ready or needs some shaping to come off the page and be experienced by an audience, whether it is text based or a performance experiment, Playground is a new theatre community platform where you can present your next exciting idea.

We love to work with first timers, as much as we enjoy supporting all emerging and established artists. By submitting to our festival, you will join a community of local theatre and performance makers. Our invitation extends to musicians, choreographers, designers, filmmakers, animators, and new media artists who are looking for opportunities to present in harmony with theatre and performance arts. Our festival team is looking to adapt as best as possible to your creation needs, and is willing to look for opportunities to support works outside of the traditional theatre setting. We highly encourage Racialized and Indigenous first-time playwrights, who are either emerging in their craft or their artistic careers, to be part of this Playground creation. Please join us, especially if what excites you most is the chance to workshop and produce at the region’s most popular venue: The Registry Theatre!

How To Submit

In the spirit of ‘playing’ and ‘grounding’, we are recruiting short-medium projects that deliver brevity of storytelling, and where our available resources can best complement the work. We ask that you submit a maximum 20-page excerpt or project proposal. Please note that all submissions need to be at least at the ‘first-draft’ stage, and by no means need to be polished. All works that are accepted into our festival will have access to technical and creative support from the festival team for revisions and development in the months leading up to the festival.

For those who are outlining a proposal, please give us a clear idea of what your technical and personnel needs are, as well as what kind of environment you envision your work in. The more you can describe in detail, the better. Please provide any applicable supporting materials, including: images, examples, and samples of previous work.

Deadline for submissions is October 25, 2024. Electronic submissions are highly encouraged and can be sent via email to [email protected]; please include your name and contact information with your submission.

Creators selected for further development will be invited to join a Writer's Circle that will meet 1-2 times monthly on Sunday evenings from November 2024 through February 2025 to share work, develop ideas, and become part of the production planning team. Works might be produced, read before an audience, or shared in whatever way is of most benefit to the work, and within the means of the overall project.

Our official call for directors, stage managers, designers, and performers will be released separately – please feel free to express your interest in these opportunities with your submission.

We look forward to hearing from you!

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