Fertile Ground Festival Of New Work Is Curated And Virtual For 2021

Fertile Ground Festival of New Works, a program of the Portland Area Theatre Alliance (PATA), will offer 40 projects for the 12th annual festival. Virtual and free, Fertile Ground Festival 2021 marks the first time in the festival's history that participant "acts of creation" are curated. The GROW PANEL, a diverse community panel of artists and arts administrators, selected 31 projects for this year's festival, nine of which received a GROW AWARD. Festival productions will stream on Facebook and YouTube channels from Thursday, January 28 through Sunday, February 7, 2021.

"At this time, in our local and national landscape, our community needs artists' voices more than ever," said Dre Slaman, Fertile Ground Managing Director. "This re-imagined virtual Fertile Ground is about innovation, inclusion, and, most of all, the resilience of our local artistic community."

"This year's festival will host an astounding array of artists whose voices, story subjects and project designs run the gamut," said Nicole Lane, Fertile Ground Festival Director. "I believe we took a pivotal opportunity to meaningfully invite new artistic voices into the festival while also challenging all artists to innovate their work for this new normal world of streamed performance. At-home audiences certainly see a festival overflowing with diverse 'acts of creation' from a host of local artists who are emphatically representational of our community."

Fertile Ground's virtual festival will present pre-recorded "acts of creation," submitted by producing organizations and artist-producers. Recorded premieres will be live-dropped at scheduled intervals over the course of the 11-day festival, and streamed on Fertile Ground's Facebook and YouTube channels. The show time slot for each project premiere was randomly assigned to ensure equity of placement. After a project premieres, most will be accessible for on-demand viewing until February 15, 2021.

As all festival events are free, audiences are encouraged to make donations to Fertile Ground between now and the start of the festival in lieu of the typical $50 Festival Pass. Audiences will also be asked to make donations to the artists and producers upon viewing the projects to support their work directly.