Open Call: New Backstage
Deadline for application: 20 July – 17 Aug 2016
Apply here
From the organizer:
New Backstage is a platform dedicated to supporting and developing theatre and performance practices in Hanoi. Initiated by XplusX Studio in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Hanoi, the programme seeks out and selects theatre projects by individual artists and collectives working in Vietnam, providing sustained support throughout the creative process—from development and production to public presentation.
During its first edition (2024–2025), New Backstage accompanied emerging directors Bùi Thạc Phong, Duy Vũ, Tố Diệp, Hiếu Trần, alongside numerous artists, from the earliest stages of their ideas through to their first public performances. The inaugural edition welcomed a wide range of theatrical approaches—from adaptations of existing texts to experimental performance practices—and revealed a crucial insight: what the independent theatre landscape in Hanoi lacks is not talent or ambition, but an ecosystem patient enough to accompany artistic processes from conception to completion.
Building on this journey, we warmly invite theatre-makers, playwrights, directors, performers, and interdisciplinary collectives across Vietnam to submit proposals for New Backstage – Season 2 (2026–2027).
What distinguishes Season 2?
First, the programme places long-term artistic mentorship at its core. Each selected project will be accompanied throughout three interconnected phases: pre-production, rehearsal and creation, and post-production, offering sustained dialogue rather than one-off support.
Second, Season 2 focuses specifically on original ideas and original scripts. Rather than reinterpreting an existing dramatic text, we seek projects that emerge from artists’ own creative urgencies in response to the realities of contemporary life.
Every artistic impulse, every desire to tell a story, begins somewhere: within a particular landscape or ecosystem; on a street undergoing transformation; in a family memory that has never found its language; in a headline that briefly flashes across a screen before settling quietly in the mind; in questions of belonging; or in the sense of responsibility we carry amid changes that no longer belong to a single city or nation alone.
New Backstage – Season 2 (2026–2027) invites emerging theatre practitioners to enter this space of resonance once again—this time with greater attention to where those echoes first arise:
… observations that have yet to be named;
… reflections suspended between the personal and the collective;
questions concerning place, environment, memory, and transformation;
… theatrical forms that have not yet found the structures capable of containing them;
… scripts that remain unwritten.
The programme continues to seek the artistic process behind theatrical presence: a space where personal research and careful observation of the contemporary world are allowed to remain unfinished, uncertain, and exploratory—where artists are free to discover forms of their own rather than borrowing established ones.
Season 2 particularly encourages original concepts and original playwriting—works whose foundations do not lie in staging pre-existing texts, but in an artist’s own creative urgency in response to the local and the global, the intimate and the collective: realities that may appear separate, yet continually resonate within one another.
For further information and support, please contact XplusX Studio via: [email protected] or send us a message via trang Facebook.
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