Short and Sweet...

Bit behind in my blogs and feel the urge to do an update even if late but I will keep them short and sweet. NO - perhaps not sweet :)

I recently completed a weekend workshop with the Short + Sweet Theatre company in Brisbane with tutor and world renowned playwright Alex Broun.

The course rocked. I have always been interested in theatre and cinema as a visual means to tell a story and I thoroughly enjoyed this experience. The constructs of the course were as follows:

Friday Night: 

• Craft of writing for theatre


• Elements required for a good ten minute play


• What makes a play different from film or television

 Saturday:

• Pitch ideas


• Story structure


• How to dramatise your story


• Good beginning, middle and end


• Styles and genres of theatre


• Rehearsing and participating by performing a short moved reading


• Development of ‘page to stage’


• Explore rhythm, dialogue and use of language in theatre


• Staying one step ahead of the audience.

So my idea was hatched after taking all of the above into account. That night I put pen to paper (almost pulled an all-nighter to get it finished) but managed 3 hours sleep before it all began again the next day.

Sunday:

• Workshop scripts


• Work with actors and explore how text works on stage

Morning was spent casting and directing said play and then handing it over to the actors and letting go! (Huge learning curve for me, since I’m a control freak) It was good for me - well at least I tell myself this :)

To see your (or in this case) my play brought to life by the wonderful actors who volunteered their entire Sunday was fun, exuberant, and exciting. More importantly it was a collaboration between actor and writer as we nutted out the inconsistencies, modified the script for visual effect, and just plain had a good time in the process. I was very proud of my actors: Sharna Barker and Nathan Wright and actor/writer Belinda Small.

And after all that, I found the courage to enter my ten minute play into the Short + Sweet festival and will be keeping my fingers crossed to see if it makes the short list.

I met some wonderful writers, actors, and dramatists over this exhilarating and inspiring weekend. Learned so much from Alex, who is a mine of wonderful information and an expert in too many things to explain in this post, so do check him out here.

Short stories, short plays and short films rock! Yes, I like things short but almost never sweet….

Midnight rambler dabbling with words…