June 2012
76 posts
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Lachlan Philpott: A Sense of Place
When I teach playwriting the first thing is to get to know the people I am working with. No embarrassing rhyming name games. Like many teachers, I just ask people to talk about themselves - I am Lachlan Reynault Philpott, I was born in Sydney but then we moved out west. My first memories are of the rat plague and the rats that took my baby sister from us and so on.
As traffic flows to the centre...
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Festival Special Griffringer #3: Roslyn Helper
It’s funny when you find yourself stuck in a tangle of thoughts that you know are connected but don’t yet make sense. It’s like when you pull your headphones out of your bag and it takes you so long to untangle them that you’ve arrived at your destination before you got a chance to enjoy the soundtrack that is supposed to be your life. What I mean to say is, it’s like when the wires on a...
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Women and Men: Does Creative Gender Matter?
Nicole Flint makes a fascinating argument that instead of being worried about the representation of women in theatre (we’ve all heard about the Australia Council report and its abysmal statistics) we should focus on the representation of women in theatre, within the actual plays, regardless of whether female artists produced them or not. (There’s also an interesting suggestion that...
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Festival Special Griffringer #2: Patrick Lenton
As a playwright who writes comedy, I’m constantly met with accusations about a lack of substance in my plays. The dour residents of the community who believe theatre is synonymous with sad cancer monologues tend to believe the presence of humour in a dramatic piece has some kind of arcane ability to detract any sense of meaning and pertinence. But I believe that through their craft, a...
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Money. Oh, money.
“THERE wasn’t much extra in the kitty for the arts in last month’s budget, and with recommendations from ad man Harold Mitchell about encouraging more philanthropy being considered by the federal government, the arts community is looking for new ways to raise money from private donors.
Mitchell has suggested broadening the philanthropic base, creating direct links between...
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Grassroots model to help new works take centre...
by Wendy Frew
JANE BODIE has written for the stage, radio and TV; her work has won numerous awards, including the Green Room Award for Outstanding Writing; her most recent play, This Year’s Ashes, was well received by critics and audiences.
But none of that has made the business of getting new Australian plays onto the stage any easier for the head of playwriting at the National...
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