SL Shakespeare Company’s Twelfth Night, Act 1 Photography Contest on Koinup

Shakespeare, Second Life and Brescia, Italy: The SL Shakespeare Company joins forces with Koinup to launch the world’s first major photography contest featuring a professional theatrical production based entirely in the virtual world of Second Life. Starting March 1, the contest invites participants to attend the SL Shakespeare Company’s open-ended run of Twelfth Night, Act 1 and take photos. Over L$100,000 in prizes will be awarded to the winners.

Enjoy the Contest

The contest consists of a main contest whose final submissions deadline is June 15, 2009. Several mini-contests with weekly or bi-monthly deadlines and prizes will be held starting in April. These mini-contests will be held in conjunction with several “Variations” on the open-ended run, where, for example, an all-female or switched-genders cast interpretation is tried.
To give all participants a chance, the contest introduces a special “Unedited SL Photography” category with its own exclusive prize.
The contest also has a special Avatar Photography category for photography that focus particularly on actor avatars. To help facilitate this specialized component, the SL Shakespeare Company will be holding special actor avatar photography sessions starting in April.

In efforts to recognize photography based not only on artistic merit but also on their appeal to different people, the contest will be judged by a panel of well-known Second Life residents from several different arenas. Judges include AM Radio, Ananda Valeeva, Beyers Sellers, Dana Vanmoer, Eshi Otawara, Frolic Mills, Ina Centaur, Jaymes Kjeller, Prad Prathivi, Rightasrain Rimbaud, Saffia Widdershins, Sarah Nerd, Tara05 Oh, Vint Falken, Verde Otaared, and others.

Shows occur weekly on Sundays at 1 PM PST and Tuesdays at 6 PM PST at the SL Globe Theatre. Performances are free except for shows on the last Tuesday and Sunday of each month. Donations are gratefully accepted.


About Twelfth Night, Act 1
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is the story of a shipwrecked girl named Viola, who chooses to go incognito as a boy eunuch. Act 1 establishes the love triangle that Viola, Duke Orsino, and Olivia become entangled in, and also introduces some of Shakespeare’s most memorable characters—Malvolio and Feste. Unlike the Bard’s other plays, Twelfth Night exists only in the folio editions.



About the SL Shakespeare Company
The SL Shakespeare Company (SLSC) is a resident-funded and resident-supported professional theatre company that embraces the best of what Second Life (SL) has to offer. While it is primarily known to provide quality live Shakespearean theatre available to anyone in anywhere in the world, SLSC is also the curator of Second Life’s most historically accurate theatres and architecture relating to William Shakespeare.



About Koinup
Koinup is a media-based social networking platform geared specifically for virtual worlds. Koinup users submit and share photography and machinima to share their stories and art outside their virtual world. The Koinup website features many tools to help users present and syndicate their work, and is also a center for some of the most exciting photography contests in virtual worlds. Koinup currently helps share the following virtual worlds: Second Life, The Sims, World of Warcraft, IMVU, OpenSim, Lively, vSide, Kaneva, There, and Other Worlds.

Press release by
Lora Constantine