This Is My Story Artist Call Out

What we are looking for

Pests are looking for performances to programme as part of our new season This Is My Story. This Is My Story will be season of DIY, small scale, low tech theatre performances centering round autobiographic contemporary expressions of identity. Identity is intentionally ambiguous, we’re not going to pretend that we understand all of the incredible plethora of identities amongst humans, we’re looking for a range of performances exploring any definition of identity as you see it. We are looking for full-length performances, ideally with runtimes upwards of 45 minutes. Unfortunately, we’re not able to accept works-in-progress at this time. You will perform your show once and it'll be part of a 6 show programme (taking place over a 6 month period).

What We NEed you to know

We don’t have specific dates yet for the programme. Originally, when we applied for funding, we wanted to begin in July. That could still happen, we don’t know. Our plan is to get everything in place and prepared that isn’t date specific and then, when we know when we’re allowed to schedule performances, we will discuss dates with you. We are hoping that over the course of confirming the line up, preparing marketing materials, and the other pre-season work we’ll need to do, we will know when we can start.

The performances will take place in our regular theatre space which is St Lukes Church in Winton, Bournemouth, Dorset. We are therefore have the benefits, and limits, of everything that a church space has to offer. It gives us freedom to arrange seating in many different formations however it does limit our technical set up. There is a chance, within the application, to let us know if you are able to provide any of the technical equipment you’ll need to perform the show that we can’t. If you are interested in applying, before you begin the application, we’ve written a ‘what you need to apply’ (included in the application process) so that you don’t start the application and realize that, for whatever reason, your work may not fit this season.

We are offering a fee of £500 for you to come and perform. As well as this, we are offering up to £100 in travel cost and £40 in accommodation cost.

We will be providing feedback, unless you’d prefer not to receive any or in the extreme circumstances don’t allow us to, on the first 50 applications that we receive. We have decided this because both of the people providing the feedback have previously applied for things where we’ve been told we’d receive feedback and never have. As stated our intention is to provide feedback for these first 50 but we hope to push this to 55 or 60. When you apply, we will email you to let you know whether you are inside or outside of this 50 so you will know whether to expect feedback or not.

Our application process has now closed

Our call out will be closing on Friday April 24th and we are hoping to have all feedback confirmed and sent out by the 1st of May. If we miss this date, we will communicate with you when we hope to get it to you. Our promise to you is that we will be as clear and transparent with you as possible throughout this process.

Before you apply, please have a look at our technical set up section below. It is really important that you know what we are able to provide. Once you’ve done this, if you are happy to apply based on the above information, please click on the button and go ahead. Please send us an email at pestsproduction@gmail.com if you've got any questions:

Here is the equipment we currently have available to us. We are looking to buy a couple of microphones to go with this in the coming weeks. With this we are able to give you washes of colour, an ambient wash and play music or SFX but not much more.