First CINCINNATI ONE-MINUTE PLAY FESTIVAL Set for This Weekend

The One-Minute Play Festival and Know Theatre Company have created a dynamic partnership for The 1st Cincinnati One-minute Play Festival with part of the proceeds to benefit new play development at Know Theatre.

"I'm thrilled for the opportunity to bring our process and the work to the Cincinnati community for the first time", says 1MPF founder and producing artistic director, Dominic D'Andrea. "Know Theatre is the perfect partner for the work that we do, as they are growing to become a national hub for new work and ideas in the region."

Known as being a social barometer project, 1MPF invited writers living and working in the Cincinnati region to submit moments via their specific playmaking process. The writers were given a prompt that asked them to consider the world around them, their community, and all the ways in which they view and engage with the world, and to write and submit moments that could only happen at this time and in this place. Once the moments were submitted, the 1MPF team identified the themes, ideas, styles, trends, and connections that bubbled up to the surface in the zeitgeist, highlighted those things, and reflected them back in "clumps" of several plays. "We are survey artists", said D'Andrea. "This is our version of performing a community mind-map, or kind of like sticking a core sample into the earth and examining a cross-section of themes and ideas that exist in the dirt."

Part community-convening, part social action, and part play festival, 1MPF aims to investigate the questions who are we? What is our relationship to each other? To our community? To our work? To our activism? Through a series of 60 pulses of storytelling, 60 heartbeats that say something about who we are, where we are, and where we might be going as a community.

The 1st Cincinnati One-Minute Play Festival will be presented today, July 11th at 8pm, and Sunday, July 12th at 8pm at Know Theatre (1120 Jackson St.). Tickets are $20 and available for purchase at knowtheatre.com or by calling 513.300.5669.