Book Reviews

Dramatic Shorts

by Emma Bishop, President – Drama New Zealand

http://www.wowogallery.com/y2ba7uyfu1qThere’s nothing like receiving a package in the mail that’s not a bill or a reminder! Opening my package from User Friendly Resources was a little bit like Christmas, as out dropped four shiny new books: Dramatic Shorts 1 and Dramatic Shorts 2 along with their accompanying resource books.

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https://www.chat-quiberon.com/2024/01/18/084kgs837t7 Dramatic Shorts 1: An Anthology of Plays by Susan Battye (User Friendly Resources, New Zealand 2020)
ISBN 978-0-9951350-3-1 Paperback

Dramatic Shorts 2: An Anthology of Plays by Susan Battye (User Friendly Resources, New Zealand 2020)
ISBN 978-0-9951350-5-5 Paperback

Dramatic Shorts 1: An Anthology of Plays: Drama Resource by Susan Battye (User Friendly Resources, New Zealand 2020)
ISBN 978-0-9951350-4-8 Paperback

Dramatic Shorts 2: An Anthology of Plays: Drama Resource by Susan Battye (User Friendly Resources, New Zealand 2020)
ISBN 978-0-9951350-7-9 Paperback

2 Soma 350Mg My first thoughts were that I loved the size of the Anthology of Plays books.  Perfect for holding to read from and act with without being bulky or too big, with the layout of the scripts, including font size, being superb for the page to stage! I appreciated the way in which each play is introduced with a brief outline and description of themes and content.

The scripts themselves are a perfect mix of relevant, topical and humorous, which I feel are best suited to senior primary, intermediate and junior secondary. I could see these used in a number of ways, including being short scripts to use when focusing on applying drama techniques or understanding drama elements, as they are easy to read whilst having some depth of content good for cross-curricular teaching with social studies or health.

https://www.ngoc.org.uk/uncategorized/future-events/zwyim6l The accompanying resource books are also fabulous with content that would be extremely helpful for new teachers or for those quick six- to ten-week taster programmes we often see in middle schools. They are again well laid out and user friendly. My only comment would be that I would have liked to have seen a bit more new content in the second resource book. 

https://www.justoffbase.co.uk/uncategorized/8mvi1xmx0 Well done Susan and User Friendly for creating this new pack.  I would highly recommend these for teachers of drama to have in their toolbox of resources!

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Dramatic Shorts

https://manabernardes.com/2024/621dhik https://gungrove.com/uqadeo4s3 By Judy Norton, Head of Speech and Drama – Saint Kentigern Girls’ School and the Primary Representative for Drama New Zealand

Susan Battye states in her opening to Dramatic Shorts 1 that she wants young actors to ‘dive in’ and cast a play, to read through the text and present some preliminary work to their peers for feedback, all within an hour. This is definitely possible with these short offerings. “

https://space1026.com/2024/01/po6no7c Dramatic Shorts 1: An Anthology of Plays
ISBN 978-0-9951350-3-1 Paperback

https://equinlab.com/2024/01/18/9pp4wjhlx Dramatic Shorts 2: An Anthology of Plays
ISBN 978-0-9951350-5-5 Paperback

Buy Soma Next Day Delivery Dramatic Shorts 1: An Anthology of Plays: Drama Resource
ISBN 978-0-9951350-4-8 Paperback

Dramatic Shorts 2: An Anthology of Plays: Drama Resource
ISBN 978-0-9951350-7-9 Paperback

https://serenityspaonline.com/nqm2ht4t2 They are of a flexible length and can be explored in a few lessons. They can be delved into more deeply when using the accompanying resources. She offers material for performance. The notes at the beginning of each play provide guidance to the students about theme, performance techniques, and considerations when rehearsing.

https://www.chat-quiberon.com/2024/01/18/38c5h9g The plays are written in a New Zealand context and make use of local idioms. It has important significance in providing an available local resource for students with language and subject matter which are meaningful and familiar. The plays vary in themes and address a range of issues relevant to teenagers. These could be used not just in a drama context, but for the health curriculum, when exploring issues such as peer pressure, self-image, relationships. Students would have opportunities to discuss and reflect on the situations and tensions presented.  

Order Valium The accompanying resource provides excellent support for any teacher, with or without, knowledge of drama pedagogy. Intermediate teachers could easily pick these up and use them within their classroom programme. Susan includes detailed explanations of drama techniques, conventions, and dramatic terms. They are described in terms students can easily understand and implement. 

It is written in a systematic way which shows how plays can be unpacked to probe deeper into character, themes, subtext and conventions. Students could work independently through the rehearsal process using this text. It would provide them the opportunities to provoke and stimulate thinking, collaboration, and creativity.

As a primary and Intermediate teacher I can definitely see these being useful at the Upper Primary and Intermediate school levels.

https://www.ngoc.org.uk/uncategorized/future-events/kg95urtx I commend Susan on creating an easily accessible resource that advocates for drama opportunities in the curriculum and which encourages teachers to utilise drama scripts. Thank you for creating such a wonderful resource, Susan and User-Friendly Resources.

https://masterfacilitator.com/zjm7j2p ___________________________________________________________________________

https://fireheartmusic.com/c2in2zk1 Dramatic Cuts

https://therepairstore.ca/p9kvs3y4mv Book Review: Drama Cuts and Drama Cuts Teacher’s Resource Book.

https://space1026.com/2024/01/axuisuwi5b3 Edited by Susan Battye. (Putney., Australia: Phoenix Education, 2010) https://masterfacilitator.com/jwpg4bq ISBN 978 1 921586 27 9 ISBN 978 1 921586 30 9   https://www.ngoc.org.uk/uncategorized/future-events/nhg8s9t22z  

https://sieterevueltas.net/dib59bc By David O’Donnell: Victoria University of Wellington  

https://space1026.com/2024/01/1x68daa On a rainy winter’s afternoon in 2006 I attended a performance of Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead directed by Peter Brook at the Bouffes Du Nord Theatre in Paris. In the romantically shabby-chic auditorium of this crumbling 18th century theatre, two African actors on a stage bare apart from a few simple props and a costume rack held the audience in thrall with this parable on the impossibility of maintaining one’s identity and dignity in the face of a racist political system. Although apartheid had been abolished nearly twenty years beforehand, Fugard’s drama of oppression in a racially segregated South Africa seemed just as moving and relevant as ever, earning a standing ovation from the audience.   Sizwe Bansi is Dead is one of thirteen plays featured in Drama Cuts, a new anthology of play extracts suitable for study and performance in secondary schools. Editor Susan Battye has chosen scenes from plays representing a cross-section of dramatic literature from ten Commonwealth countries, many of which deal with the legacy of European colonisation. The anthology is an efficient way for students to access a wide range of historically important plays, and the cultural diversity in the collection reflects the increasingly intercultural demographics of many 21st century schools.   An accompanying Teacher’s Resource Book supports the play collection, containing a range of discussion questions on each play, notes on performance and on the playwrights.  Clear and impressively detailed synopses of each play enable the teacher to quickly put a scene in context. The Resource Book is a substantial piece of work on its own, and I imagine will be a godsend for busy drama teachers everywhere.   The collection in Drama Cuts includes work by two Nobel prize-winners, Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott from the Caribbean. Like Sizwe Bansi, the plays all feature strong moral and/or political dilemmas. Read as a collection, this volume highlights the considerable political power and social relevance of great theatre, and illustrates that the canon of dramatic literature can stand alongside the greatest literary achievements (a fact not always acknowledged by English departments in schools and universities). Susan Battye is to be congratulated in raising the standards for drama education with this book. For New Zealand students, it is important to see the two New Zealand works, Bruce Mason’s The Pohutukawa Tree and Lynda Chanwai-Earle’s Ka Shue: Letters Home, in the context of playwriting internationally, and to recognise that New Zealand plays can stand up alongside the best of world drama.   The old colonial bogey-man, Britain, is represented by two plays written sixty years apart, J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls,with Priestley’s critique of the inequities of the British class system reflected through a feminist lens in the scene from Churchill’s play. Battye chooses an extract from the naturalistic second act of Top Girls, and I wondered if the epoch-bending feminist allegory of Act One, with the invention of a dinner party of ‘top girls’ from throughout history, would have been a more stimulating choice. Theatricality is embraced, however, in the extract from Derek Walcott’s Ti-Jean and His Brothers, a Faustian fable set during an 18th century slave rebellion. In this delightful bi-lingual mix of song, dance and allegorical action, Ti-Jean out-wits the Devil, exposing the evils of colonialism and striking a symbolic blow for freedom. Walcott’s work embraces performative variety, illustrating the potential for theatre to unleash the imagination, to fly beyond naturalism with the use of a more metaphoric and entertaining application of physicality. By contrast, Indian playwright Usha Ganguli’s Rudali is very naturalistic but equally delightful in its vivid depiction of poverty among village women. The feminist theme highlighted in this extract punctuates a tale of grim poverty, disease and survival, leavened by compelling humour based in dynamic characters which would be a brilliant challenge to bring to life in a classroom production. The dignity and power of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horsemen is represented perfectly in the chosen scene in which the wife of a British colonial officer displays outrageous cultural insensitivity by wearing a sacred garment and mask as a fancy dress costume   Many of the extracts draw parallels between the politics of families and wider themes, as in Aroha’s gut-wrenching disappointment in her children in The Pohutukawa Tree, the contrasting experiences of different generations of Chinese women in Ka Shue, and the poignant scene from Leaving Home by Canadian David French. The extract from Ugandan playwright Mercy Mirembe Ntangaare’s The Man His Son and Their Donkey has some parallels with Rudali in its depiction of a wife rebelling against her useless husband. In the husband’s use of the Bible to justify his work-avoidance, it also contains an ironic critique of Christianity. In the extract from Sizwe Banzi, however, the dignity of family is upheld in Sizwe’s letter to his wife, expressing his agonising decision to adopt the identity of a dead man, thus giving up his name and personality, in order to find work under the apartheid passbook system. While this play also contains humour, Sizwe’s realisation that his change of identity will also mean the loss of his family is heart-breaking. Battye has chosen expertly to show how in the theatre, truthful emotion and empathy are among the playwright’s most powerful tools, no matter what theme they are aiming to convey.   While the post-colonial emphasis pervades the collection, Malaysian playwright Huzir Salaiman’s  Atomic Javaalso refers to latter-day American imperialism. This hilarious satire of nuclear proliferation gains much comedy from a premise that Malaysia develops its own atomic weapons, despite the inconvenience of having no deserts or isolated atolls to test them out on. The heightened parodic style of acting required to perform this play makes an effective contrast with the naturalism of many of the other extracts.   Overall, the scenes are perceptively chosen to illustrate a diversity of world cultures, while also containing many thematic echoes between them, and a wide variety of performance possibilities. The collection serves both English and Drama curricula, by the judicious choice of extracts that are equally useful for comparative literary study and for performance. Battye rightly stresses the importance of reading the plays aloud, and encourages teachers to get the plays up on their feet to be performed in the classroom or in public. The balance of performative difficulty in the extracts is about right, with many of them being relatively easy to stage, while some, like Walcott’s play, would create more challenges. The glossary at the back is a welcome aid to comprehension and access to different languages and cultural traditions.   The accompanying guide for teachers is undoubtedly an excellent resource, clearly structured to assist the teacher through various exercises and contains a very good thematic overview of each play. There is attention to detail in both teaching and assessment, with excellent notes on how to develop a scene for performance, including templates of response sheets for both actors and audiences. However, there are a few glitches in presentation, including some typographical errors, and I would like to see the date of first production upfront in each script extract, as is the usual custom. In the ‘Notes on the Playwrights’ there is an excellent photograph of Lynda Chanwai-Earle performing Ka Shue, which draws attention to the lack of photographs of the other playwrights and plays. For consistency of style it would have been ideal to include more photographs in this section, as theatre is a visual as well as literary art-form, and visual aids would help the students’ comprehension of the effectiveness of the plays in performance.   While the international range of plays in Drama Cuts is impressive, it is unfortunate that in a collection edited in New Zealand and published in Australia, there is no representation of playwriting by indigenous writers of Aboriginal, Māori or Pacific Island descent.  The two Australian plays (Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and Cloudstreet) are concerned with white identity and may give the misleading impression that Australia is exempt from the post-colonial issues brought up in the African, Asian and Caribbean plays. The inclusion of one of the many excellent plays by Aboriginal writers would give alternative views of Australian history. Similarly, the lack of representation of Māori playwriting seems odd given the post-colonial focus of the collection, especially as inter-cultural hybrids of Polynesian and European theatre are arguably what make New Zealand theatre unique.   However, I realise that in any anthology hard choices need to be made, and the fact that this collection now exists at all is to be celebrated. The post-colonial emphasis gives unity and purpose to the collection, and I imagine the provocative stance of many of the playwrights will create heated class discussions as well as lively performance exercises.  Susan Battye has undertaken a mammoth task in assembling these extracts with all of their support material, and has done a great deal towards creating a dynamic curriculum for study that will be inspiring and indispensable for many years to come.       Buy Valium 2Mg Online Uk Biographical Note:   https://www.justoffbase.co.uk/uncategorized/eohrumeywev David O’Donnell is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Victoria University, Wellington, Aotearoa/ New Zealand. David has directed many premieres of New Zealand plays, most recently Heat by Lynda Chanwai-Earle, Te Karakia by Albert Belz, and Collapsing Creation by Arthur Meek. Other research interests include post-colonial drama, Australian and New Zealand theatre, Māori and Pacific performance, community theatre and Shakespearean performance. He co-edited Performing Aotearoa (2007) a book on contemporary New Zealand theatre and is currently editor of the Playmarket New Zealand Play Series.

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