You are invited to:
Rumour it abroad.


Welcome to the nascent Talk to Strangers Campaign, and thanks for visiting!  Please keep an eye out for updates to this site in late 2009/early 2010.  Meanwhile, if you're intrigued, visit the Talk to Strangers Campaign blog, and be sure to "follow" it to receive any updates!

Calling for Consumer Awareness, Independent Voices, and Cross-Discipline Collaboration in Film, Print, and Performance.

Stories teach us how to survive, how to think, what to value.  Bedtime stories placate us, horror flicks give us nightmares, blogs provide us with (the illusion of?) connection, and a well-crafted play may push us to the point of catharsis.  Stories are our escape and our consolation, as well as our call to action.

But, while we have learned to decipher the labels on food products and the jargon in advertisements, most of us consume stories indiscriminently.  Today, we have a surfeit of stories.  In this embarrassment of riches, it falls to the individual to choose what will nourish him, what will give her a strong imaginative, mental, and spiritual life.

But the task of matching tale with audience also falls to the storytellers. Media conglomerates - which are responsible for the dissemination of the bulk of stories in modern American culture - are, we believe, no more a trustworthy source of Story than our modern banking system is a trustworthy guardian of a healthy economy. But if writers, performers, and other artists who are passionate about storytelling band together, learn from each other, and challenge each other, we may be part of the most exciting story yet told.


The Inciting Incident

In the last 100 years, the delivery of stories has changed drastically. Personal, live storytelling like theatre and oral storytelling has been largely replaced by TV, film, and internet. Reading is arguably in the process of moving from the printed page to the computer screen. Stories are no longer told to us by someone who we can shake hands with and look in they eye, but by people far off in LA or New York.

With things changing so quickly, it's hard to predict how storytelling will evolve. Will theatre become relegated to the realm of high culture? Will we have to eke out our stories from the muddled plots of reality TV shows? Will it become an act of nostalgia to flip through the pages of a book?

The Moment of Choice

Here at TTSC, we regard live, quality storytelling as vital to humans on a very basic level. And so we believe that now is the time for a resurgence in live & local storytelling.

We recognize that you, as a consumer, have a choice: Just as you can choose to nourish your body with locally grown produce instead of a TV dinner, you can choose to nourish your cultural and imaginative life with college theater instead of reality TV, with indie films instead of formulaic Hollywood productions, and with conversation instead of celebrity scandals. Consider yourself challenged to choose.