Woo Hoo, Donna!!!!

7-ONs wonderful year just got a bit more wonderful. Our Donna won the Griffin Prize 2013, with her play, Jump For Jordan. Of course not all of us could be there to cheer her on – if we can just nail a 7 in Brisbane and Perth we’ll have the country covered! – but we hear from Our Vanessa (also on the shortlist for the Prize) that Donna delivered a corker of a thank-you speech.

And, when perused, it is…so here it is for the rest of you. Some really great points, well-made.

"Jump For Jordan is inspired by a real experience which excited my abiding interest in themes of migration, displacement, exile, and clashing cultural expectations. However, I was equally curious about the anxiety and paranoia that gripped my friend, and how assumptions, internalised racism and moral panic could eclipse actual events. For this reason, Jump For Jordan is also set within the main characters’s fluctuating levels of consciousness: memory, reconstructed family history, paranoid fantasies, and insomnia-induced conversations with the dead. 

The main character is a would-be archaeologist. But her dream of unearthing antiquities in the Middle East has been derailed by the disturbance caused by anxiety and family conflict. In Jump For Jordan, I wanted to explore dramaturgically this idea of disturbance by embedding it within the form, so I structured the play as if it was a disturbed archaeological dig site; strata of occupation collapse in on each other; that is, scenes are constructed from layered fragments, from non-sequential story shards that intrude upon others and that span a period of thirty years. There are a hundred story shards in this play - that’s a lot of plot - but Jump For Jordan is primarily a language-based play, using associative and dialogic structures to create comedy, dramatic irony, connective comment between and within the scenes, and to unify the fragments into a poetic whole. It is also a bi-lingual play written almost entirely in English, with Mara’s wilful mistranslations causing further disturbance as the narartive unfolds. 

Why did I write the play like this? Because of my passion for treating form as content, as important as content, as invested with values and force. When content is woven into the form of a play, I believe that such plays can support greater complexity and work viscerally upon an audience. 

I wanted to tell you all that because I want to repeat a remark that David Berthold rmade in his blog this week and say that playwrights are not merely content providers. I’m paraphrasing Peter Craven now by saying that one can ask two questions: what can the play do? or, what can I do to the play? I love his first question - what can the play do? - because it understands that a play is an open system... working hard, on many levels, with many strategies, in different ways, in different productions. And to throw my own comment in here about the adaptation debate, I just want to say that for me, the difference between an original work, and an adaptation, is terror. Adaptations don’t scare me. New works do. And I applaud Griffin for supporting me and so many other playwrights, supporting our ambitions and our lurch into the unknown to come back with a play born of this place and time. " Donna Abela

p.s. and while we're about it, check out Donna's article in The Guardian Australia .

June's Linky Love

Last week 7-ON added to the debate on adaptations with this (also links to the original articles that sparked the discussion)...

…which a lot of people read and commented on via facebook. And even, madly, via face(!)

So, further to all this, here is another article-this time from artshub. This debate is stimulating such a lot of thinking which is great. As Fiona Hall says, it's great that we should issue challenges to each other and ask for intellectual rigour. And as we say, it isn't - or shouldn't - be personal. It's about the work. 

As you can tell from reading our previous post, we have different thoughts and opinions on the idea of whether, say, plays in script form are ‘literature’ or whether writing an adaptation of some other person's work is more valuable to the Australian theatrical canon than say a new work. 

But one thing we and a lot of people agree on is this: no new plays, no future classics.

Speaking of classics, here is a rather interesting article on ageism. (seamless segue or what?!) 

Because it seems there’s been a little undercurrent shall we say of anti –playwrights-over the-age-of-30. Or even (sharp intake of breath) 40! Which would be totally nuts wouldn’t it? Who on earth would think that the only interesting and relevant stories are those that come from just one age group? No…Perhaps it’s just sensitive old us. Anyhoo, one of us found this

It's about composers, but so much of what he writes is true of playwrights as well. Sadly.

Honestly I don’t know why our linkage direction is moving this way but it is…Stage manager writes application letter to become Artistic Director!

She is brilliance herself. Plus funny in a very dry SM sort of way. I’d give her the job.

If you’ve got this far than good on you and here’s a wee treat about collaboration and meeting of artistic minds and what was probably rather a lot of wine and drugs. 

I think this would have been a better story if Bowie and Mercury and the rest of the gang had got by on say a pack of sour snakes and lashings of ginger beer but never mind there it is. I love this song and so I am putting it in, also I really like these lyrics..

Love’s such an old fashioned word

and love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night

Which brings us from luvvies to love in a post about Linky Love really rather neatly we should think…

xxxxxxx