Emerging Artist Unconference

Opening the 21st Paprika Festival this year is the digital Emerging Artist Unconference, co-facilitated by daniel jelani ellis from the Paprika Festival, and Amanda Lin from Nightwood Theatre. Inspired by Nightwood Theatre’s Feminist Unconference, this Unconference uses the theme of this year’s festival (re)imagining process as a launch pad into idea generation, collaboration, and collective design for the future of theatre. Young and emerging artists across Turtle Island are invited to listen, lead and dive deep at this hierarchy-smashing, participatory, collaborative and participant-driven unconference. We want to gather from the new and next generation of artists what folks want, need, and are able to offer, in order to plan for the future of live performance in a covid-present and post-covid world. Your contributions from this Unconference will be shared with arts organizations across the country. Let’s (re)imagine process together.

Details on the unconference format from Wikipedia:

“An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term ‘unconference’ has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid hierarchical aspects of a conventional conference, such as sponsored presentations and top-down organization….Typically at an unconference, the agenda is created by the attendees at the beginning of the meeting. Anyone who wants to initiate a discussion on a topic can claim a time and a space.”

What to expect at the unconference:

This is a 2-hour event that will take place over Zoom. The unconference format works best when participants are energized and empowered to co-lead the discussions, so expect to engage in conversations with other participants and contribute to the discussion in breakout rooms. However, we encourage participants to engage with the event in whatever way is comfortable to them, and participants are welcome to have their cameras and microphones on or off throughout the event. If you need to come and go throughout the event, take a break, arrive late, or leave early, feel free to do so.