The Australian National Playwrights' Conference at the ANU Arts Centre from Monday September 23 to Saturday night October 5, 1996. Public readings on October 3, 4 and 5: ring ANU Arts Centre 249 4787 for details.
Maybe because Canberra has real seasons, the winter wattles are harbingers of the sudden appearance above ground of theatrical annuals in September and October. The first delicate petals are the new playwrights, keeping to the mottled shade of the ANU. These are plants already well-bred but often needing further genetic engineering ready to bloom in the full sunlight in a later season.
The more raucous plants, reaching urgently for the light, appear soon afterwards in the Festival of Australian Theatre. This event is watched with avid interest by a hundred David Attenboroughs, breathily exclaiming oohs and aahs at the Australian Performing Arts Market. Plants from here are exported all over the world, to show themselves from the tropics to the northern snows.
If you want to keep in touch with all the dramatic flowershows in Australia and around the globe, you can't do better than join the International Theatre Institute (Australian Centre). For only $15 a year you get a regular newsletter with absolutely everything about conferences, festivals, workshops, opportunities for theatre work, resource material and information about what theatre people are doing. Write to 8A/245 Chalmers Street, Redfern NSW 2016.
This year's new blooms at the ANPC are nine plays: Transylvania by Richard Bladel (Tasmania); Rita's Lullaby by Merlinda Bobis (NSW); Cassandra by Daynan Brazil (Queensland); Tear from a Glass Eye by Matt Cameron (Victoria); The Governor's Family by Beatrix Christian (NSW); Blackgammon by Suzanne Ingram (ACT); Rodeo Noir by Andrea Lemon (South Australia); Kingalawuy by Allyson Mills (NT); and Into the Fire by the visiting exchange writer from New York, Deborah Baley. Floriade at the Commonwealth Gardens will have nothing on the variety and flair at the ANU Arts Centre. But of course you can see both: Floriade during the day and the public readings of the new plays on Thursday to Saturday October 3 - 5.
Since its inauguration in 1973, the Playwrights' Conference has been a major influence on the growing maturity with which plays are taken through the writing and production process. Katharine Brisbane, long time theatre critic and director of Currency Press, specialising in publishing Australian scripts, has seen the change from the days when writers were uneducated in the craft of play production.
Directors and actors often felt, justifiably, that the writer would only be in the way while they were rehearsing. At the Playwright's Conference, directors directed while writers watched, got some advice from a dramaturg, went away to rewrite, and came back to watch the director direct. Now, Brisbane says, writers are much more familiar with the dramaturgical and workshop process, and are nowadays much more drawn to the centre of the development of their scripts at the Conference. The result is not that the plays which result can be described as "better" than in the past, but certainly plays show a greater understanding of the craft of theatre. By the time they are taken up by the major companies, scripts have been filtered and shaped so that top quality productions are standard today.
But the seedplots in the greenhouse of the Playwrights' Conference not only produce better quality plants, but in recent years have been diversified to provide a wider gene pool. May-Brit Akerholt, the Artistic Director of the Australian National Playwrights' Centre which produces the Conference, is proud of four new tendrils.
Between 1993 and 1996, ten Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander playwrights have had their work developed at the Conference, with the participation of a large number of indigenous actors, directors and dramaturgs. This has encouraged the exploration of the distinct nature and character of indigenous theatre, but also assists the integration of indigenous artists into main stream theatre.
A mutual exchange has been established between the Playwrights' Centre and New Dramatists in New York. Australian new writers go there and US writers like this year's Deborah Baley come here. The international aspect of the Conference is growing, and links in with the Australian Performing Arts Market.
Then there is the Student Laboratory which brings student directors and writers from the tertiary institutions like the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) to the Conference for professional rehearsed readings and secondments to work with Conference directors and dramaturgs.
And finally there is the Delegate Program which is directed by Canberra's Carol Woodrow, involving emerging writers, drama teachers and students in workshops of delegates' scripts, observing Conference workshops, lectures, seminars and forums and generally mingling with the professionals at work.
This year there will be new development: The Centre for the Performing Arts (CPA) from Adelaide will bring third-year students to perform Stephen Sewell's musical Anger's Love and workshop a new musical by Sewell. The CPA acting students will also take part in Conference workshops and the Delegate's Program.
Directors, dramaturgs and actors, like the playwrights, come from all over Australia to imbibe the intimate, creative hothouse atmosphere of the National Playwrights' Conference - including not only Carol Woodrow but actors Mary Brown and Simon Clarke from Canberra. I asked Katharine Brisbane if "hothouse" meant self-indulgence, but she explained that the dramaturgs have the task - which requires very high level skills combining an academic understanding of dramatic structure with an ability to solve practical craft problems - of providing the objectivity which is needed to produce professional standards.
So this is the Playwrights' Conference - a hothouse, greenhouse, seminal sort of event which is encapsulated by the title of the year-round program run by the Playwrights' Centre, called Fertile Grounds. This provides Master Classes for experienced writers, so when a delicate petal has made it from the seedbeds to the garden, growth still continues. It's not like Floriade, where all those bulbs get untimely ripped out after a month of glorious show: modern Australian theatre is a professionally organised process of development - a continuing growth industry.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
No comments:
Post a Comment