Creative Branding

This week, I started my class at The ESPA school at Primary Stages, which is an amazing resource for NYC based theater artists, be they writers, directors, or actors. This semester I am studying Marketing and Production for Playwrights with the always impressive Chris Burney and Don-Scott Cooper of NYC's Second Stage. If you are interested in every taking one of the classes at ESPA, check it out here:

http://primarystages.org/ESPA

The topic we were discussing this week was self-branding and marketing. One of the things that came up was the non-traditional ways needed in this ever changing market to expose your work and get your work out into the world. Query letters are a thing of the past, and who reads unsolicited submissions anymore? I spent the past couple days contemplating, and inspired by my friend Joe (http://joeredhead.tumblr.com/) who is constantly fascinated by the effective use of social media and the internet to create business solutions and exposure, I thought, "what can I do to use modern social media to promote my business, that is, the business of me, as a writer?"

What I came up with was sort of fun.

My short play, VIOLA, was produced last year as part of a short play lab at the Payan Theatre at Roy Arias Studios in midtown (http://royariasstudios.com/). So I put together my backstage footage, and the footage of the performance, and put it all on youtube. The goal here is to share that link around on this blog, on twitter, and on facebook, to get people seeing my work. This is a project that I want to expand on, filming other short plays, and starting a community of work that is accesible to everyone, and is free.

Right now, for an otherwise unexposed playwright, self-promotion, self-production, and exposure is key. This is just a start, and look forward to much much more from this project. I hope to develop and expand it, and get the links into the hands of a lot of people.

It may not work. Who knows. But hey, gotta at least put it out there.

Here is the link to VIOLA. Share it with your family and friends. Especially if your family and friends are producers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVJ7xoDpmQI