"Oh, she bit her dog, eh?"*

I went to the Dramatist Guild day long event at Hyde Park Theatre and to the Caridad Svich workshop at ACC Eastview.

The Dramatist Guild event was interesting only in the people I met.  I enjoyed the lunch conversation.  If I was a playwright having regular productions, I might have found this more enlightening, but as a struggling playwright, it didn't offer much to attract me.  I get far more from my local playwright's organization, ScriptWorks, and for a much lower price.

Caridad Svich's workshop was much more interesting.  Most of the workshop was sort of a guided writing meditation that I found interesting.  For me, one most interesting part of this was how she helped me look at my thoughts/scenes from varying perspectives, turning it this way and that.

Ms. Svich also talk about plays being a time based art form.  I had read something similar to this (although for the life of me I cannot remember where.)  She talked about a play as choreography which matched one of the epiphanies I had had when Sharon Sparlin did such a magnificent job of directing my ten-minute play during Out of Ink last June.  She created a sort of dance with my characters that I had never dreamed of and I thought and still think it was sheer genius.  Ms. Svich talked about Emotional Fields moving on stage, about the Juxtaposition of Structures orbiting and colliding.

I loved it.

She talked about movies and television as horizontal story-telling, starting at the beginning and moving like an arrow to the end.  She talked about plays as vertical story-telling.  A whirlpool or a tornado spinning and sucking things up or down.  Yay!  Love that image!

I look back at so much of my work and realize that I wanted to create whirlpools and tornadoes, but had been trained to shoot arrows.


*The Wizard of Oz, Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Woolf (adapted from the novel of the same name written by L. Frank Baum)