Co-presidents’ May Message
Welcome all Plotters Past and Present,
Our February AGM started off with a bit of a downpour of rain, much like yesterday’s showers. Our clothes were soggy but our spirits were high! We are very excited to take PLoT Theatre Society into 2016, so excited that we forgot to introduce ourselves before starting to making our ideas happen.
So before we divulge our plans, here’s a little rundown on us, Bella Young and Emma Skalicky, the Co-presidents of PLoT 2016. We met last year during PLoT’s production of Twelfth Night as Viola and Feste. This comedic duo continues as we went on to produce an original play at Onefest. We love performing, writing, dancing, teaching and chatting about anything remotely artistic. So, as you can guess, we decided to take our collective passion for performing and share it with the wider community.
Bella is a bright and bouncy tweety bird who divides her time between juggling, impulse-dancing to avante garde music, reading nerdy acting books, and ruminating on the way of the world (wang). She is perpetually living a high-octane adventure in homage to her mother, Lara Croft, and was almost certainly a beat poet in her past life. She is the embodiment of the cycling emoji and if Thom Yorke is reading this, please call her.
Conversely, Emma is a beautiful, poetic, pink-haired, half elven rabbit; who spends her days discussing the intricacies of feminine archetypes in literature, drinking chai lattes and swaying in the wind as an amalgamation of Laura Palmer, Ophelia and all three Bronte Sisters. Her aesthetic is always perfect, as is her knowledge of Lord of the Rings Trivia and VSCO camera filters.
(Please note: we wrote each other’s introductions.)
It would be arrogant of us not to also introduce our full exec, without whom we cannot function; Cameron Van Der Steege, James Osler, Jess Davenport-Hortle, Marcus Johnson, Morgan Read, Taylor Lidstone, Tim Hurd, and Tom Hogan guarantee that PLoT remains in dedicated hands. They are all brimming with expertise, support and enthusiasm, and we love them for it! Also, a special thanks and fond farewell goes out to the recent past presidents Tai Gardner and CJ Bowers (seen above in our cheeky PLoT takeover photoshoot), without whom PLoT wouldn’t exist today.
We have many big and exciting ideas for PLoT. We believe the society should welcome all art forms and aim to incorporate and explore mixed media in 2016, utilising student expertise from other university faculties and work alongside the English Department, Tasmanian College of the Arts, Conservatorium of Music, and more. In all of these ways, PLoT can expand and broaden our student base. We want to invite new people into the society and offer opportunities for students to learn and express themselves through theatre without professional or experiential boundaries.
Consequently, we have founded three key objectives to guide and inform us into the future:
1) The body of our work is for student by students – we want to bring PLoT back to its roots, producing theatre that caters for the university.
2) We want to support artistic endeavours – providing a stepping-stone for emerging artists and use PLoT as a platform for performing new, interesting and unique local/national work.
3) And most importantly, we want to have fun doing it!
In the last two months we have been busying ourselves with a myriad of activities. O-Week saw us host a revival of the old variety night format, inviting a host of local poets, musicians, and comedians to share their work with students in the Uni Bar. This was met with a wildly enthusiastic reception – many thanks to the staff for all their help on the evening. We’ve also been very active in collaborating with the English Department, having done choreographed readings for two of their assigned texts – Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good – and have been delighted to find new members through these performances.
Next up, we’re thrilled to have just cast our first full length production for the year. Directed by Bella, Ben Ellis’ Falling Petals will be performed in early August at the Backspace Theatre.
Falling Petals explores the misconception and vilification of disposable student culture in a violent clash with elitism in rural Australia. The play highlights the social, financial and cultural pressures and barriers students face by those around them, stagnating in the dusty claustrophobia of a drought-ridden country town. Being students we believe Falling Petals will be particularly relevant to us as a university society.
We would like to finish this message by remembering the wonderful contribution and support David Quinn offered us as a university society, our condolences go out to his family and friends.
Warm Wishes, Bella Young and Emma Skalicky (Co-presidents, PLoT Theatre Society) :--)
