Thursday 10 June 2010

How to make Canadians swear...

My 3-Minute Play was performed yesterday evening.

The day was a good one, not knowing whether or not to rain or be sunny...wait, wait scrap that. Okay my main interpretation of Canadians comes from a well beloved Tv-show of mine called 'Due South'. Staring the Mountie, Benton Fraiser, and his dog/wolf, Diefenbaker - with an American Police Officer (okay, cop for all you Americans), Ray Vecchio, tagging along on most of the episodes. The show is great go check it out. But one thing the show did like to make a point of was the Canadians way of life. Their good humour, their polite behaviour, and their all around fondness of picking litter up and putting it in a bin. So, as you might have imagined, it came as a shock to hear said Canadians swearing, aloud, as they were forced to read out other people's work.

This is where I came in...

The Ffrinj Festival is a Creative Arts festival, this one held specifically in Carmarthen. Tonight was the student showcase. It was sold to us, that if we wrote something for the Ffinj then it would be performed on stage with practiced actors. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Today the Union, so lovingly, also held the Annual Summer Ball. Which, of course meant, all the actors would prefer getting pissed in a wet field and listen to Florence and the Machine, than sit in a well-lit and dry room performing something I had written.

Instead, the producers of the student showcase tried, in their haste I presume, to summon new actors from out of nowhere. But this failed. In the absence of rehearsed scripts, they turned to the recently arrived Canadian students from, believe it or not, Canada. I don't know how they forced them, perhaps through fear of being deported, but they did it. And, for the most part, the Canadians read wonderfully. Though there were certain things, certain pieces, inside the event itself which needed a British voice. So the performance turned into a 'rehearsed reading' and, despite the timing errors on my piece (due to the lack of rehearsal, I think - don't blame the writing, don't blame the writing...), everyone told me that it was very good, and that if they didn't know it was my piece they would have supposed it was my piece. Even an acquaintance of mine, and indeed most of the BA Business of Writing Class, Mr Anthony Jones described my piece as Milton-like. Good I thought. And indeed leaving the event I was met by many hands waiting to be shaken and congratulate me on my piece of work, though that could just be normal Canadian courtesy.

Subsequently, Mr Anthony Jones, and the rest of the MA Creative Arts Class have a book out - it's called 'Shadow Plays' and you should buy it - I have - BUY IT HERE.

The my piece itself was actually recorded. From two different angles, and Tag has said that the video will be available shortly (Hi Tag - no pressure now).

But where do the swearing Canadians fit in, well mainly the length and the content of the other pieces of work. Okay, the content I had no qualm with, but the language used was, in most cases, just swearing. Now I don't know about you, but I think swearing is only appropriate at the right moments not almost all the way through certain pieces of writing.

*note on length: this is a note on the length of the pieces, nothing else guys. In the advert for the Ffrinj, it said that plays and the like had to be between 3 and 5 minutes long. It appears that I (and Anthony) was the only person to conform to that rule, and had one of the shortest pieces in this showcase because of it. I don't know whether that was embarrassing or not...

But that's me, until next time bloggers...

P.S. Last time I posted a question - mainly to Cherrybelly. The question was, if you were turned into a fruit, what fruit would you be? I obviously, was not thinking at this time because calling someone CHERRYbelly means that they will have an obvious answer to said question. So I retract the question and ask another one: (I know it's been done, but...) which famous person would play you in a movie about your life?

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