Drama Australia Conference Workshop

Several members of the Drama Victoria committee of management (myself included) recently presented a workshop at the annual Drama Australia conference, held at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney.

The worskhop was based on playbuilding, adhering to the conference theme Turning The Tides, and threw in a bit of recent technology (blogging) for good measure. Conference sub-themes included

• Precious water - drama as essential learning
• Into the sea of discovery - new ideas and landscapes
• Reflections on practice... tales of lifesavers, adventurers and drought busters
• Against the tide - changing patterns, currents and practices through drama
• Surfing the imagination in digital seas - drama and immersion
• Safe harbours - strengthening communities through dramatic processes

The workshop involved participants creating a ship using the technique of silent negotiation. Then some of the challenges the ship and its crew faced were brainstormed. Still images of these challenges (eg. storm, mutiny) were then created by group members using the technique overheard conversations. A vocal collage of various characters' experiences on the ship were then created (with background music). Finally, scenes were developed and then performed together at the end of the workshop:

Departure (in the style of a documentary)
Voyage (using movement and sound)
End of journey (surreal/dream-like)

While all this was happening, at 20 minute intervals during the first hour, one-third of the group was taken out of the workshop room at a time and introduced to the value of blogging performance-making experiences in the Drama classroom on the Vineblogs website. Blogs on the web can be a fantastic reflective tool in Drama and in many cases can replace the traditional classroom journal in this subject.

The workshop structure can be found on this blog and is a worthwhile activity to undertake with your own Drama students. Check out the Vineblogs website while your there by perusing some of the other performance-making blogs. The site is only in its infancy and is already a friendly drama community of teachers and students at al levels of eduction, mostly from around Melbourne, Australia. We'd love some more teachers and their Drama/Theatre students to join the site with new blogs from other parts of Australia and the world. It's all free, easy to use and you can be blogging in only a couple of minutes! Blog on and tell us where you're from!

Top Class & Top Acts Drama DVDs

As many of you in Victoria may know, the 2006 Top Class and Top Acts Drama DVDs are now available for sale.

I can highly recommend these for your Year 11 and 12 Drama students in 2007. Seeing other students' excellent performances is a wonderful way to inspire your students in Drama (and occasioanlly scare them, too!) and more importantly, an opportunity for the class to sit down with the previous year's solo performance exam structures and analyse exactly where students on the DVD met various criteria, plot dot points, dramatic elements and theatrical conventions.

This year (I believe for the first time) one of the three Top Class Drama sessions is also available on DVD. This is particularly useful, as in the past, we could only view the three or four Drama solos in amongst the music and dance on the Top Acts video (the final stage). But this time, you can view 11 Drama solo performances on the Top Class video as a separate purchase.

The Top Class DVD is full of very strong performances, as evidenced by 3 of the 11 solos in this session being chosen as 3 of the 4 solos for Top Acts. So, you could say, perhaps it may be more beneficial to just purchase the Top Class DVD.

On the Top Acts DVD you will see:

• The Security Guard
• The Beauty Queen (Helena Rubenstein)
• The Enemy Alien
• The Shakespearean Characer

On the Top Class DVD you will see:

• 2 x The Shakespearean Character
• 2 x Pride
• The Country Women's Association Member
• The Beauty Queen (Helena Rubenstein)*
• Precious Ramotswe
• The Enemey Alien*
• The Security Guard*
• Asahino Daigo
• The Resident

* denotes also on Top Acts DVD

Each DVD is worth $33 including GST and p&h, or a package deal of $60 for both the Top Class and Top Acts DVDs. Order forms can be found here (p.12).

My review of the Top Class session filmed for the DVD is here.

My review of Top Acts is here.