I just wanted to take a moment to wish all our readers a Happy New Year and to say thank you for all your support over the last year.
Mooney on Theatre continued to grow in 2011 with the goal of bringing even more coverage of theatre playing in Toronto to our readers and I wanted to thank you for following along with us, and for those of you who are new, for joining in.
The sorplusi method masterclass with d’bi young was an amazing, but intense class. So intense in fact that I had to sit with it for a long time before I could write about it.
Although it’s a method about creating art, I think it’s the kind of thing that is useful for everything, for just living life in general. This would be as useful for a lawyer as it is for a playwright I think. If I were to sum up what the two-day class was for me, I’d say it was a two-day session on rooting myself and starting to figure out what it means to me to live my life with integrity.
So, “what is a dramaturg” is a question I get asked a lot. It’s also a question I fumble with. Part of the problem is that there are different kinds of dramaturgs, and even within those types dramaturgs perform different roles.
Let’s start with that briefly then shall we? And I do mean briefly. I think it would be possible to write a master’s thesis on the differing roles of dramaturgy. So, for the sake of ease, what I think I got out of the class with Nina Lee-Aquino is that there are fundamentally two types of dramaturgs. And, please please feel free to chime in with comments about how misguided I am here, because really, I don’t know, this is my impression, but I am not an expert. The first kind, the kind I imagine is getting rarer and rarer in these days of diminishing budgets, is a company / production dramaturg. The second is a script dramaturg.
In case you missed it, my write-up of day one is here.
In day two we had to write a monologue inspired by something in the news, from the point of view of a character affected by that news piece. I found it far more difficult to write than writing based on a story from one of my colleagues in the room. I wonder if that’s because there is something deeper that comes from having the story told to you by someone who has a stake in it, rather than just reading the words on a page. There’s an interesting lesson about performance hiding in there somewhere I think.
Today was the first day of the two day masterclass “Say it, Shout it, Move it” taught by Judith Thompson offered as part of the New Groundswell Festival Industry Series.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this playwrighting class (even though Judith is a former prof of mine from university days). I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be easy, and I was pretty sure I’d like it. But beyond that, I wasn’t sure.