What is Rouge Salon?
Rouge Salon is a community of speakers, researchers, and enthusiastic nerds brought together by a shared love of discovery. We welcome new minds interested in taking the stage and speaking passionately about obscure things for 10 minutes in front of a crowd of mildly intoxicated strangers. Join us!
If you’ve never spoken for Rouge Salon but are interested in potentially joining up with us for a future talk, join our announcements email list, and we’ll loop you into brainstorming sessions, calls for submission, and announcements about upcoming salons.
Announcements list: Rouge Salon Email List
Want to submit a specific idea for our curator’s consideration? Send it in any time via the form below, and we’ll make sure our curators see it.
Pitch submission form
Speakers FAQ
How does all this work?
We produce live salon evenings in New York City and Westchester, featuring several 10 minute talks drawn from history, science, and adventure. We welcome both subject experts and enthusiastic amateurs to join our salons. If you are excited about getting up on stage to share an obscure and fascinating true story, we’d love to hear from you. Speakers are selected by the evening’s curator between 30–60 days out from a salon. You can, however, submit a story idea at any time via our story submissions form.
What is the selection process like?
Rouge Salon producers review all pitches to curate a common theme for our curious and engaged attendees. Speakers will be selected from the submitted pitches. Everyone who submits a pitch will receive a response indicating whether they were selected for the next salon. While not all pitched talks may work with a particular evening's curation, they may fit perfectly with a future salon. So do pitch early and often.
What kinds of stories?
Our primary areas of enthusiasm are history, science, and adventure. We are looking for non-fiction stories that tell obscure corners of history that, chances are, the audience has never heard before.
We love stories of unexpected connections and unintended consequences, projects gone awry and surprising successes, tales of people and ideas out of place in their time. We love the unexpected back story behind a famous work of art, literature, or architecture, plans that did not turn out as intended, and the characters who changed the world whose names are scarcely known. We love characters and con artists, eccentrics and experimenters, scientists gone mad, and ideas gone bad. We concentrate our stories outside of living memory: usually before WWII.
To better cultivate the arts of research and storytelling, we encourage speakers to explore stories outside their usual areas of expertise. More than a great topic, we are looking for a great story and a compelling angle, so we ask you not just to tell us what you want to talk about, but how you want to approach it.
What’s not appropriate for the Rouge Salon stage?
Rouge Salon is not a forum for personal narrative storytelling. Rouge Salon also is not the stage for promoting personal projects or contemporary issues. We also steer clear of overt advocacy at Rouge Salon, so talks promoting any specific ideology, personal philosophy, or political ideology are unlikely to make their way to a salon.
What should I expect as a first time speaker?
If you are selected to speak, we’ll send you all the info you will need to get you started, and loop you into conversations with a mentor who can help set you up for success. Your mentor will help get you oriented, and show you the ropes.
- Talks are 10 minutes
- You should plan on providing your own slideshow (we use Keynote, PowerPoint and Google Slides)
- You’ll most likely have about 1–2 months to prepare
- We do have training resources available to new speakers