OVERVIEW:
A workshop to help participants grasp what it takes to write a play,
and how dramatic writing can be applied to other uses. It will be
interactive and conducted over two days during which participants are
expected to take part in writing exercises and discussions. At the end
of it, they would have written at least a 10-minute play. They will also
experience the sensation of having their plays read out in class.
Participants are encouraged to come with an appetite for fun, sharing
and learning.
LEARNING OUTCOMES: By the end of this course, you’d be able to:
* Read and understand plays better
* Write short sketches and longer plays
* Employ the techniques of playwriting not just for writing plays but
for any other purposes that make use of drama to communicate, e.g. event
launches, radio advertisements
TRAINING OBJECTIVES: Gain understanding of what goes into the writing of a play:
* Grasp the basic ingredients of a play
* Appreciate plays through reading them
* Learn that the basis of drama is conflict
* Learn about crisis, complications, rising action, inciting incident, point of attack, climax, resolution, denouement
* Learn how to plot a play
* Learn how to construct characters
* Learn how to write dialogue
* Learn how to write a 10-minute play
* How do you sell your play?
* Find out the uses of drama and its applications in everyday life and work
WHO SHOULD ATTEND:
* Students who want to learn more about plays and playwriting
* Professionals in the creative industry who use drama in the course of their work, e.g. advertising copywriters
* Those who aspire to become professional writers
* Those who have ambitions of becoming playwrights
* Arts lovers
TRAINER’S BIODATA: As a playwright, Kee Thuan Chye is best known for
1984 Here and Now and We Could **** You, Mr Birch. The former is
included in the international anthology Postcolonial Plays published by
Routledge UK. We Could **** You, Mr Birch is a text studied in Malaysian
universities.
Another play, The Big Purge, was featured in Typhoon 4, a playreading
festival in London held in 2005. All three plays are published by
Marshall Cavendish.
Another play, The Swordfish, Then the Concubine, came out among the top 5
in the International Playwriting Festival 2006, organised by Warehouse
Theatre, UK.
It premiered on stage in 2008 as the opening play of the Singapore
Theatre Festival, directed by leading Singapore stage director Ivan
Heng. In January 2011, it was restaged in Singapore by Young ’n’ Wild.
Kee has also written numerous radio plays many of which were broadcast on RTM in the 1970s.
He has also directed about a dozen plays for the theatre.
As an actor, his acting credits over the last 30 years include speaking
roles in the films Entrapment and Anna and the King. Other international
productions he has acted in include the Hallmark TV-movie Marco Polo
and Secrets of the Forbidden City for the BBC and the History Channel.
He played Tan Cheng Lock in Shuhaimi Baba’s film 1957 Hati Malaya, and
was in the main cast of the film Sell Out!, directed by Yeo Joon Han,
which won an award at the 2008 Venice Film Festival (Critics’ Week).
On Malaysian TV, he was the regular character Han Lee in the
long-running series City of the Rich. He has also appeared in guest
roles in the series Kopitiam, Each Other, Impian Ilyana, Realiti, Gol
& Gincu II and Bilik No. 13. His latest role is as the villain in
the TV series 10 (Sepuluh).
He has also appeared in numerous TV series and TV-movies in Singapore,
including Phua Chu Kang, Perceptions and Sense of Home: Kampung Kid.
KEE THUAN CHYE’S APPROACH
He tells it like it is. He will point out your mistakes, and suggest
remedies. He doesn’t mince his words or try to give you a false sense of
security.
He treats everyone the same, be they royalty or peasant. He has no time for titles.
He encourages everyone to speak freely on any subject. And also to
challenge him on whatever he says. He only expects you to be honest.
COURSE OUTLINE
This outline is subject to change according to the trainer’s discretion.
These issues will be addressed, accompanied by writing and other exercises:
Types of plays and staging styles.
What is a play made of?
The basis of drama is Conflict.
The playwright’s vision.
How to write believable characters.
How to write snappy dialogue.
How to tap your imagination for ideas.
The 3-Act Structure.
How to write a 10-minute play.
How to write a sketch.
How to write a 30-second radio advertisement.
Please email
Kee Thuan Chye directly for more information and registration.
News: The novel dies again
Neil Cross says in his Soap Box story: what is the point of the novel?
He starts, "All the important things I know, I learned from novels. I
learned about hate and love, about poverty and wealth, about idleness
and about the workplace. I learned about the infinities of space and
about ugly, windswept houses on Yorkshire moors. I learned what it was
like to work in a blacking factory, to fight in the Korean War, to be
part of a race gang in pre-war Brighton and to be a spy in Cold War
London. I earned how to trick my friends into whitewashing a fence."
So have we, so have we. But I get confused when he says, "... To a
contemporary teenager, a world without Facebook is like a world without
running water." What? Is King Lear less relevant because his three
daughters didn't have access to Facebook? I don't get it. He says that
Jonathan Franzen's Corrections was published before the (now) ubiquitous
iPod and how, "... the world has always been in flux, but the rate of
change
has become such that novelists are struggling to keep up ..." and "...
Suddenly, all novels are historical novels." Is keeping up with
technology the only preoccupation of the novelist?
But when he says, "'The only reason for the existence of a novel is that
it does attempt to represent life,' said Henry James. I don’t believe
he was right; I believe he was talking about what became known as the
‘literary novel’, a tyrannically illustrious genre in the process of
becoming redundant." Ah, so that's the beast Neil Cross wants to slay.
At this point, I am thinking, 'Yes, that is an unruly monster that one
doesn't quite now weather to love or hate, a moster created and nurtured
by the Anglophone world and dwells almost entirely in it.' I cannot
disagree with what "... Walter Scott called ‘the land of fiction’ – the
artistic conventions of storytelling and the creation of myth ..." It is
something that has facinates me -- storytelling and the creation of
myths, which is the basis of Silverfish publishing. Niel Cross
concludes, "Scott’s ‘land of fiction’ may represent both the novel’s
deepest, truest form, and the shape of its future ... I kind of hope
so."
Read the entire story here:
http://alturl.com/t422c
News: Collateral damage
A Telegraph report says, "Heavy discounting by supermarkets, the rise of
internet retailers and the growing popularity of e-readers such as the
Kindle have forced nearly 2,000 bookshops to close since 2005 ... There
were 2,178 high street bookshops left in Britain in July, according to
research carried out by Experian, the data company, compared with 4,000
in 2005. A total of 580 towns do not have a single bookshop."
Bookstore chain Borders closed its Parkway Parade
branch, the last remaining outlet in Singapore, at 9pm on Monday,
26th September, according to The Straits Times.
Says Larry McMurtry in Business Week, “Neatness
doesn’t count: Customers prefer stacks on the floor to books on the
shelf.” Really? This has made me think of what I’d like in a
bookshop. 
When you walk into a person’s house for the first
time and see a plasma TV, you know what the conversation is not
going to be about: Milan Kundera’s latest book of essays. When you
see a bookshelf in a corner or a stack of books under the glass of
the coffee table, you would sneak a peek at the spines before picking a
topic, or not. A room full of books, a proper library would
establish the class by itself.
A story in 
