Archives for Tarell Alvin McCraney

What we’ve learned from … Tarell Alvin McCraney

In our digital drama club with older LGBTQ + people, we often look at work by queer dramatists to help us all boost our writing and performance skills. This is what we learned when we looked at a speech from The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney. 1 When the lights come up at the beginning of The Brothers Size, there are three Black men in the space. Throughout this opening invocation, one is grunting with the effort of work; one is in the grip of a bad dream; the third is singing in gospel tones about the roughness of

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What we’ve learned from … Moonlight

In the latest session of our online drama club for older LGBTQ+ people, we looked at this short extract from the final act of Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winning film Moonlight (2016), which he developed from a screenplay by the Black queer dramatist Tarell Alvin McCraney (Wig Out!, The Brothers Size). Here are a few of the things we learned from watching the scene together and talking about the different ways the two characters try to control the outcome – before putting some of these ideas into action in a series of improv games. 1 When characters enter a potentially explosive scene,

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Amplifying Black voices

We welcomed our first guest artists to Inside Out, our digital drama club for older LGBTQ+ people last Friday: Actors Jahvel Hall and Oseloka Obi and theatre-maker Vicky Olusanya (who was sitting in ahead of joining a session in a few weeks’ time). We’d been planning to start introducing our guest artists later this ‘term’ but the urgency of the Black Lives Matter protests led to a change of plan. So we asked Jahvel and Oseloka to bring texts to perform by Black writers that connected with them and talk about why. Jahvel performed a speech from Paul Boakye’s Boy

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