Students showcase work of female playwrights from Queensland
Published on 03 September, 2009
CQUniversity Rockhampton students will showcase the work of 2 female playwrights from Queensland, as the core of their Production Series '09...
The Bachelor of Performing Arts Student Company follows its success in previous years with major musical productions by staging Margery Forde's Snapshots from Home and Sue Rider's Bumpy Angels, alongside experimental theatre works The Cage Birds and A Memory of Lizzie. LINK to Peta keen to chalk up experience
The series demonstrates the 'triple threat' training of our students and their multiple performance skills.
CQUniversity's Bachelor of Performing Arts
‘Triple Bill' Production Series '09 runs from September 18-October 3
at the Bencke Studio (Building 4) Rockhampton Campus.
For details, tickets or season passes call 49 309 532.
Brisbane-based playwright Margery Forde's Snapshots from Home opens the Production Series '09 season on September 18.
Snapshots was commissioned by the Queensland Performing Arts Trust's Prime of Life Program in celebration of Australia Remembers 1945-1995, commemorating the end of the War in the Pacific.
Snapshots from Home actors Justin Sharrock and Peta Carolan
The play began its life as an oral history project with 24 people from Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast sharing their memories of life on the home front during World War II.
Margery Forde cleverly combined their original interview transcripts into what she described as a ‘collage of memories', transforming their stories into a unique piece of theatre consisting of many short individual scenes pulled together by the overriding chronology of World War II.
Theirs are the stories of ordinary people in extraordinary times, getting on with their lives with courage, humour and forbearance. Many of the scenes morph into each other or are bridged by popular tunes of the era.
This very touching, often sad, tragic, heartbreaking and hilariously funny piece of contemporary theatre will be staged in the Bencke Drama Studio (Building 4) on Rockhampton Campus from 7.30pm on September 18-19.
Production Series '09 continues with ‘An Evening of Experimental Theatre' featuring 2 enthralling and intellectually challenging plays.
A Memory of Lizzie takes the audience into the world of the infamous murderess Lizzie Bordon. Borrowing from the traditions of the absurd, hers is the surreal world of the girl who ‘Gave Her Father Forty Whacks'.
The Cage Birds is the second experimental theatre piece, exploring those obsessions that protect us from our fear of change and shelter us from the unknown. In this play the birds seem to represent facets of human characteristics. However, in challenging the audience to consider the themes of indoctrination, freedom of speech and oppression, fundamental questions are posed: ‘are we looking at 5 birds, or are we looking at ourselves?' ‘what is that something that you cling to?' ‘what is it that keeps you in your place?', ‘what is it that prevents you from stretching your wings to fly?'
Alongside A Memory of Lizzie, these questions will be considered from 7.30pm on September 25-26 at the Bencke Drama Studio (Building 4) on Rockhampton Campus.
Concluding the Bachelor of Performing Arts Student Company's Production Series '09 triple bill is a very special production of Sue Rider's Bumpy Angels.
This play won widespread acclaim in its portrayal of aspects of life in post-War Australian society in the 1950s, a time of inexorable and far-reaching change.
Bumpy Angels takes us into the world of pregnant and wayward girls living in a home for unmarried mothers somewhere in Australia in February 1954. These young women are coming to terms with being hidden away because of the shame of having broken what were then society's unassailable taboos. Having little in common except their condition, the women work in the laundry, singing, arguing and laughing together under the supervision of the Sisters of Mercy. When a young Italian migrant woman arrives, tensions and prejudices surface and finally erupt just as the young Queen Elizabeth II passes by on her Royal Visit. The audience is welcomed to enter the world of these ‘Bumpy Angels' and to be there to rejoice, empathise and sympathise with these powerful women as they embark on, and in some cases conclude, their journey in a world of misunderstandings.
This final production within Production Series '09 takes to the stage at 7.30pm on October 2-3 in the Bencke Drama Studio (Building 4) on Rockhampton Campus.