The Metaverse Shakespeare’s long-awaited open-ended run of Twelfth Night: Act 2 opens on Tuesday, March 2. The performances will occur Sundays at 1 PM SLT (PT) and Tuesdays at 6 PM SLT (PT). To help sponsor the event, and to invite you to take part in this historic event, we are offering advertisement space in our play program!This is your chance to grab an ad or special message space in our programme booklet to be distributed both at the show, to various inworld groups, and also on our blog and website! Below is an example of a web-based programme booklet:

OEP1: Twelfth Night, Act 1 - 2009 Open Ended Run (pdf 5 MB) or Issuu

Our four-sim venue with 3-sim audience seating is generally packed with ~300 avatars for each show in our main Shakespearean repertoire. The SL Globe Theatre is in Showcases/popular places and receives a fair amount of natural traffic on non-event days. Our website receives hundreds of thousands of views per month. We’re #1 on a Google search on several keywords for our main repertoire - here are just some examples: Twelfth Night open ended run, Twelfth Night director’s interpretation, Twelfth Night props, private performances, .

Please click here for more details on ordering an ad–or that ultimate message to that special someone!

Our past programme booklets are posted at http://programmes.mshakespeare.com

The SL Shakespeare Company is presenting LIVE - and in the flesh - at SL Convention (SLCC) 2009 in San Francisco, CA.

Sponsorship (both discreet and advertisement-based) opportunities to help support us at this seminal RL event are now available.

Any amount accepted for discreet sponsorships.

Because this is an RL event with RL printing costs, advertisement-based sponsorship start at L$11,000 (USD$50)/3″x5″-page ad to be displayed on a sponsorship poster at our presentation(s). (6″x10″ ads are at a discounted rate of L$50,000 or USD$150.) Ads must be submitted at 300 dpi or higher; inhouse design options are also available.

We are currently scheduled for a 90-minute Edu Track presentation on August 15 at 10 AM PDT at the SL Convention event located at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, CA. We are also participating in the Fashion and Music/Performance Tracks, and if space allows, your ad will receive additional exposure (pro bono!) at these avant garde performance events.

Printing Deadline: August 5. SLCC starts August 14!

Please pay at our SLSC @ SLCC Terminal at the SL Globe Theatre or Blackfriars Theatre.

Help us show the SLSC magic at SLCC! - Sponsor us!

Please contact Ina Centaur at ina.centaur @ gmail.com directly for questions or further info.

For purposes of transparency, we have released a public Transparency subsite that accounts for all SLSC public funds. Rest assured that your dollars are spent right, and that you’re kept in the know on these matters.  http://transparency.SLshakespeare.com

Please note that though we are currently supported completely via inworld means, our actual production costs far exceed what we have raised. Artistic quality has been the bane of the SLSC’s existence; you should know better than to judge us based our funds listed.

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I’ve hesitated from doing this in the past because there was always a subset of people who would put us in the slushpile primarily because of this lack of funds. But, speaking from the point of view of an artist — someone who starts with just a blank canvas and art utensils obtained at based pricing and, after brooding for several years, creates a masterpiece that later sells for thousands of times the initial cost — I have to say that SLSC is worth far more than the tier paid. I and others who have actually seen what we’ve done know that any SLSC (canon) event far overdoes your typical big-org event that receives all the RL media. I guess cynics will always be cynics…

It’s true! We’re holding grand opening events this weekend, March 21st… and later today, the Blackfriars Theatre will be on SL search–and a new theatre will be officially open to the public!

Lora Constantine’s PR is here.

The SL Shakespeare Company’s long-awaited open-ended run of Twelfth Night: Act 1 opens in about a week and a half on Sunday, March 1. The performances will occur Sundays at 1 PM SLT (GMT-8) and Tuesdays at 6 PM SLT (GMT-8). To help sponsor the event, and to invite you to take part in this historic event, we are offering advertisement space in our play program!

This is your chance to grab an ad or special message space in our programme booklet to be distributed both at the show, to various inworld groups, and also on our blog and website! Below is an example of a web-based programme booklet:

AP1: Twelfth Night, Act 1 (pdf 3 MB) or Issuu

Get your own - Open publication

Our four-sim venue with 3-sim audience seating is generally packed with ~300 avatars for each show in our main Shakespearean repertoire. The SL Globe Theatre is in Showcases/popular places and receives a fair amount of natural traffic on non-event days. Our website receives hundreds of thousands of views per month. We’re #1 on a Google search on several keywords for our main repertoire - here are just some examples: Twelfth Night open ended run, Twelfth Night director’s interpretation, Twelfth Night playscripts, Twelfth Night scansion, Twelfth Night credits.

Please click here for more details on ordering an ad–or that ultimate message to that special someone!

Ladies and Gents… Can you believe we’ve broken and exceeded the L$1 million mark in our SOS Campaign? We are at 75.1% of our mark—that’s right, we have less than 25% more to go to meet our Campaign goal! A few short weeks ago, when we broke our 50% mark, we had raised enough to sustain tier for three sims for six months. Our Campaign date was extended in hopes that we might meet our 100% mark—and we are so close to it!

I’m going to extend the deadline one last time—because we are so close, and because it would mean so much to us… When we reach the 100% mark, we would be able to sustain tier for three island sims for an entire year. This would allow us to plan for things in the long term. In the past, we’ve struggled with our fundraisers to make tier, but we have never come so close to making it. I think the difference would be tremendous. Just think about all we’ve done in the past year even with the onerous number of tier looming over us—and all the time lost, when we had to go off a tangent to fundraise. So much more could be possible without the necessity to break our creativity to raise the remaining needed for tier for an entire year!

We have just 25% more to go to raise the funds necessary to pay tier fees to Linden Lab for three island sims for an entire year…

For the Primtings, Shakespeare, and sLiterary island sims—three islands, each with its own potential for creating what Second Life can be, and each equally pivotal in helping to sustain the premier Shakespearean theatre venue in virtual worlds—the 4-Sim SL Globe Theatre.

These are three public island sims, where all are invited to share in, to explore, to hold events in, and to help expand. We need your help to make it possible—to fund tier so, together, we can realize what dreams may come… It wouldn’t be possible without you.

Please, please continue to donate.

Let’s see if we can make full circle by Pi Day (3.14) - March 14 - our final Extended Deadline for the SOS!

Continuing our tradition in producing several plays, but focusing on just one Shakespearean play per year, to make it the *best* that it can be - this year, we hope to present a full length Twelfth Night, entertaining and educating - worth *every* minute of your time.

If you’re in the SL Shakespeare Company group inworld, check group notices archive for a HoloLight attached in the latest group notice. Or… visit the SL Globe Theatre to grab a free copy of the 2009 Edition of the SL Shakespeare Company HoloLight. Last year, we had the Ghost from Hamlet. This year, we’ve got Feste the Clown! Rez & click to find out the next show date!

Ladies and gent - fresh from http://campaign.SLshakespeare.com - we have met and surpassed our 50% goal… which means, we will be around for at least 6 more months! The Campaign is not over yet, though. We’re still going to try meeting the 100% goal. The deadline has been extended (slightly) to Feb 11. We can make it! Campaign on!

As of this moment - thanks to the support of all of you in this group and in SL and beyond - we’ve reached 51.98%! Thank you so much!

The SOS Campaign status has jumped nearly 2% in the last 24 hours. Thank you to everyone who’s contributed - and we’re getting closer to our goal, but your continued help would be greatly appreciated!

If you have seen any of our productions, you’ll see that we not only bring quality arts and culture to Second Life, we also create and utilize new technologies to expand and evolve the medium.

Below is a very brief summary of each of our main productions from 2008. In addition to supporting more productions of similar caliber for 2009, the SOS Campaign would also help support the Primtings, Shakespeare, and sLiterary sims.

• Feb 28, 2008: In our inaugural live performance of “Hamlet 1-1 Extended,” we presented the first four-island sim performance of a play in SL. Anticipating the large audience, we used a variety of preloading techniques and minimal texturing, but still showed off our trademark visual excellence—with photorealistic skins and sculpted talking faces based on the RL actor’s faces. While there was some debate on whether we should perform the entire play, we stuck with quality over quantity and showed off the scene the best we could. Care was taken in both costume and set design to create the historically-accurate Elizabethan atmosphere you saw live at the SL Globe Theatre stage. In addition, we also established standards for HUD-based multi-lingual subtitle support. (Progamme Booklet.)
• Apr 23, 2008: As part of the Shakespeare 24, international 24 hour celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday in RL, we performed the famous play within a play–”Hamlet 3-2: The Mousetrap.” We managed to rehearse and bring to the virtual stage a cast of nearly twenty actors from around the world to give life to the actor avatars, dressed in historically accurate Elizabethan attire. The performance consulted Shakespeare scholars from around the world to present what Socrates might call “an examined” interpretation of the scene. This was the first ever usage of a recorded period music segment played using SL voice, as “piped” by an avatar. Our continued usage of actor alt’s helped the audience easily find the voice sliders in SL voice to tune into the performance. (Programm Booklet.)
• Jun 20, 2008: We took a break from Hamlet to pursue a non-era specific costumed staged reading series of the full length Twelfth Night, but in bite-sized pieces, presenting roughly a scene per week in the days between June and July. Devoid of “the sound of motion,” the costumed staged reading actors were distinctly grayscale. The performance was done with a moving cast, which sometimes enlisted audience members from the last week; this was the first tag-team performance of a Shakespearean play in the world–in both RL and SL.
• Sept 12, 2008: Continuing our hiatus from the Elizabethan era, we brought to the virtual world a modern science fiction play by a published/performed playwright. One’s A Pawn of Time was our first full-length performance of a one act play. “Seamless advertisements” were woven into the set, where great care was taken to simulate a stereotypically impoverished apartment of a physics grad student’s. The box set, whose dimensions adhered to the stage’s characteristic twin pillars, did not modify the existing elements of the Globe Theatre’s thrust stage. This is one of the first plays on SL where the director controlled the audience view through real time dynamic camera controls.
• Nov 13, 2008: This November production of “Twelfth Night: Act 1” continued our tradition of performing full-length unedited first folio Shakespearean pieces. We decided to take an indefinite hiatus from Hamlet due to the costs and time required to create the many Elizabethan historically-accurate costumes. Twelfth Night was performed without era limitations; fewer custom costumes were created, which allowed for the creation of custom sets for each of Act 1’s five scenes. Memorably, we brought a real storm to the Globe Theatre thrust stage. Special care was taken to make the performance as lag-free as possible: the sets were placed without the usage of rezzors, seamlessly loaded. We continued the usage of real time dynamic camera controls. This was the first play on SL where global lighting was changed for each scene. Programme Booklet.
• Dec 21, 2008: On Winter Solstice, when many actors were safe snoozing in bed or otherwise, on the coldest day of the year, we brought to ice a cast of a baker’s dozen “self-powered” avatars controlled by scripts and bots–who zoomed around on ice skates in Shakespeare on Ice.

All of that was accomplished without the aid of any grants or external support. It is all because of you.

We can’t do this again this year without your continued help. Please donate. Every $L counts, and every dollar counts - to help bring us closer to our SOS “Save our Sims” Campaign goal!

Donations are accepted in either RL or SL currency - please help us raise our SOS Campaign goal, so that we would not have to worry about land tier fees for either 6 months (50% goal) or 1 year (100% goal).