Educators teaching Unit 4 VCE Drama and/or Theatre Studies this year are reminded a web forum for your students exists.
Some years ago I established a forum just for students of Units 3 & 4 Drama and Theatre Studies. Each year, a small but dedicated number of students post messages on the forum about their developing performance exams.
Unit 4 Drama students find the forum particularly useful, because it is the only place they can discuss with students from other schools choices people are making with the performance examination characters. A great way to help others out and share ideas.
Unit 4 Theatre Studies students also use the forum to discuss decisions being made with their monologue performance exams.
Each year, I wipe the forum board clean. Currently there are “threads” (topics) set up on the message board for each of the performance exam characters in both Drama and Theatre Studies. While a number of students have registered for the forum in recent months, no one as yet has posted anything!
If you think any of your current Unit 4 students may be interested, please get them to follow the link below for free board registration and to post messages on the board.
If I don’t see any activity on the board in the next few weeks, sadly, I’ll just delete the board.
Please note, this forum is just for students. It is moderated by myself to ensure everything is nice and happy in forum-land…
VCE Drama and Theatre Studies Student Forum
Simon Phillips
Yesterday, the second resignation of a prominent theatre director in Melbourne’s performing arts community was announced.
While Malthouse Theatre’s artistic director Michael Kantor will hand over the reigns to Marion Potts next year, his Melbourne Theatre Company counterpart, Simon Phillips, yesterday revealed he will leave the company in late 2011.
Phillips will be remembered among other things for his hugely successful productions of Richard III this year and Tracey Letts’ masterpiece August: Osage County in 2009. The MTC will now embark on an international search for a replacement.
Meanwhile, Phillips will move on to freelance directing, including commitments with the stage musical Priscilla Queen of the Desert, currently showing at London’s Palace Theatre and due to move to Toronto this October, then Broadway in the Spring of 2011.
In the age of the iPad and Kindle, I wonder how many people know there are oodles of copyright-free drama books out there on the Internet? More and more people have heard of Project Gutenberg these days and for some years now I have had a page of links on my other website, Justin’s Theatre Links, to various electronic text archives. Today, these repositories are goldmines for eBooks, ready to be transferred over to eReaders of many descriptions.
In the first of several posts on The Drama Teacher for places to find free drama/theatre eBooks on the Net, this post features the website ManyBooks. In the English language alone, there are currently 627 free drama/theatre eBooks at ManyBooks! But if English isn’t your style, then try one of the other 35 language translations! Most of them are out-of-copyright plays ranging from ancient Greek and Shakespearean works to Medieval and Restoration plays. But there are also dozens of eBooks on the theatre itself.
What makes ManyBooks fantastic is that the website’s collection is categorised. When one considers drama plays are a fairly niche area on the web, the drama section at ManyBooks is quite prolific. The next best thing about this website is the range of eBook types available. You can download drama plays and theatre books in the any of the following 26 file types:
- Books.app (zip)
- ePub (.epub)
- eReader (.pdb)
- FictionBook 2 (.fb20
- HTML – custom (.zip)
- iPod Notes (.zip0
- iSilo (.pdb)
- Kindle (.azw)
- Mobipocket (.mobi0
- Mobipocket (.prc)
- MS lit (slow) (.lit)
- Newton (.pkg)
- PalmDOC (.pdb)
- PDF (.pdf)
- PDf – custom (.pdf)
- PDF – Large Print (.pdf)
- Plain text (.txt)
- Plucker (.pdb)
- Rocketbook (.rb)
- RTF (.rtf)
- Sony Reader.lrf (.lrf)
- TCR (.tcr)
- zTXT (.pdb)
- JAR file
- Project Gutenberg
- Audiobook
Keeping everything in perspective, all the eBooks at ManyBooks are legally out of US copyright, so plays of recent decades will not be there to download. But the good news is that every single book or play that is at ManyBooks, is absolutely free and instantly downloadable to your PC or Mac for transfer to your eReader.
Here’s the link: ManyBooks Drama Category. Don’t forget to choose your language once you get there. Enjoy!
Let me know by commenting below if you found this post useful and would like more posts on the Drama Teacher in the future about free drama/theatre eBooks on the Net.
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