Our Courses
We are offering 8-week courses and workshops for our community, free of charge and with all resources included. We found that our creatives were keen to commit to something more structured to stay focused through this lockdown on theatre.
Below are the courses and workshops we currently have on offer. As explained in our ‘about’ section, we are always looking to grow and expand, sharing our platform with emerging theatre-makers.
So please come to us with any ideas for running courses or workshops and we will work to facilitate your ideas.
Get in touch to join, even if sessions have already started, we will still welcome you.
8-WEEK COURSES:
Playwriting and Reading Club
with Nancy Netherwood and Ollie Clark
8-week course with weekly zooms.
Write a short play, read and discuss new writing with emerging playwrights.
Tips & advice along the way.
Great Stories: back to basics
with Tori Zdovc
Greek myths, festivals, tragedies, adaptations & reclaiming the role of women.
Let’s look back to move forward!
WORKSHOP SERIES:
Working with your Brain: Neurodivergent Playwriting Workshops
with Morgan Noll
Starting Monday July 6th, email us to join.
Are you Neurodivergent? Ever want to write a play but struggle with how to approach it? This lecture/workshop series from theatre-maker Morgan Noll helps shed some light on her process as a maker with ADHD and being gentle with the neurodivergent brain. This playwriting series will take you through ways to approach starting a project, crafting a narrative, crafting characters, working with other people, and effective ways to approach the unique challenges we face as divergent makers. This is not a series that will teach you how to 'pass' as a neurotypical writer, but rather a series that will teach you how to best use your differences to create stories that work for you.
Session 1: Getting Started with Neurodivergent Brains: ‘The Sitting Down and Doing it’ One
Topic: Ok. So you want to write a play/gig show/opera/performance art piece? Nice. Lets talk about some of the challenges neurodivergent brains face with writing and some tips that work with our brains to help us actually sit down to do it! We’ll cover finding motivation, transition times + rituals, getting around ‘the wall of awful’, working with time blindness, and being gentle with blank page anxiety.
Session 2: ‘I HAVE TO TELL YOU EVERYTHING ABOUT MY IDEA RIGHT NOW!!’: ‘The Using Hyperfocus to Find a Topic’ For Your Show One
Topic: So now we know how to get started! That’s great!....but what are we getting started on? Lets talk about how we can use our brain’s unique abilities to find a good topic for performance, how to be a ‘novice expert’, how to work with ‘the research hole’, using Discord for field research, forms that might work best for our brains, and using pattern-making to our advantage.
Session 3: ‘Hero’s Journey? Ugh. Boring. OH! what about this instead!?’ The Learning different types of story structures and creating Characters’ One
Topic: Know about Story Circles? Kinda bored with good guy vs bad guy? Or with the ‘quirky opening, then serious stuff then hopeful ending’ one person fringe show? Cool me too. Let’s talk about different ways we can think about a character’s journey, examples of the neurodivergent character’s in media/what those shows might look like through their perspectives instead, using your brain to find niches/ ‘story gaps’, and telling nonlinear stories.
Session 4: ‘I was doing fine! But then…!.’ The one about Self Doubt, Productivity cycles, and getting overwhelmed in the process of writing
Topic: I was getting started, I had my central questions, I created some really cool characters! And then….I got bored/busy/anxious/self-conscious. ‘I feel like a failure, i must just be not good enough. I must just be lazy’. Sound like you? It’s okay. It happens to me too. So this session lets take a non-linear approach because for us? Progress isn’t always going to go to a 4th new topic right away. This session lets talk about deadline avoidance, how redrafting might not work for us, shame, being gentle with bad working memory, managing our projects, taking breaks, understanding our perfectionism, and how we can pick stories back up again and help each other untangle them when we get lost in our own heads.
Session 5: You’re in this with me’ The one about Working and Writing with Other and Keeping the Audience in Mind’
Topic: Okay we’re back at it! We’re crafting something beautiful! But we have to remember, theatre is a community medium which means other people might be involved in the process and we’re making this for live performance which means someone will be in the room with it. So how do we best work with neurotypicals? Other divergents? And how do we consider the audience in our work? Let's talk about strategies for working with a team, getting an ‘accountability mentor’ bringing other people into your projects and how to navigate that relationship, working with different types of audience members in mind, ways to bring neurotypicals into our world, how we can begin to work with change, unpredictability, improvisation, and liveness in our stories even if they might be scary for us. All finishing off with a Q +A and networking session.