Sarah Davey & I believe there are four main tasks to focus on right now:

• rewrite the script (June 2012 - my job - see the entry below)
• line up exciting readers who can read the news script after June and provide endorsements
• build links with potential festival and venue partners for an autumn 2013 tour 
• make the next round of funding applications

 If you can think of any exciting readers - well known actors or writers for instance - let us know.

If you have a relationship with potential festival and venue partners make an introduction - we will be making funding applications in August & November 2012 and March 2013; it will be important to have partners on board.

On the 19th of February, Sarah Davey and I organised a reading of the draft in London - a brilliant opportunity for any writer. Feedback is: one more rewrite will see the play ready for casting.  I will be heading back to Annaghmakerrig June 18-25th, 2012 to write the final draft.

For those of you in the know: all your ideas about Adam's death bore fruit, and Benny is a much more interesting character!  Jin is fully three-dimensional and living in 2060 - but perhaps Sam still needs work....

If anyone would like to read the current draft, or wants to see the work after June, just get in touch.

The excitement was heady, the sums at stake were huge, and it was challenging to find out in late summer 2011 that we didn't make the final cut.  Terra Nova Productions have been encouraged to apply again in the future with other projects, and praised for "our passion and commitment to the project" and for getting so far on our first attempt.

A huge thank you goes out from me, and the Board, to everyone who helped out! 

• the references peppered throughout to reduced agricultural yields and draughts = reduction in carrying capacity
• the fact that this debate is taking place in the USA, the country most commonly used as the example of unstainable per capita energy use.

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/13/resource-wars-david-king

King concludes by saying: "Consumerism has been a wonderful model for growing up economies in the 20th century. Is that model fit for purpose in the 21st century, when resource shortage is our biggest challenge?"

I think it a wise choice that the "exit ceremony" features in our projected future world, and I'm looking forward to the challenging debate we're going to have around how we deal with links between our "dystopia" and current practice right now.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specialreports/2009/07/090701_discoverydocinfo.shtml

As the population grows and technology develops, the world we live in is changing sonically too. Something most people don't really think about.

These documentaries examine the impact of sound on people's lives, and question whether some noises, from street markets to bells and street hawkers, are actually at risk of disappearing. Some of which are distinct sounds connecting a city to its heritage and people

Raoul Brand

You can see the clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwRLcfwq2CM

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/audioslideshow/2011/may/25/as-the-world-tipped-audio-slideshow