Archives for LGBTQ drama

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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What we’ve learned from … Todd Haynes

When theatre-maker Vicky Olusanya led the latest session of our online drama club for older LGBTQ+ people, she brought this short scene from Todd Haynes’s 2015 drama Carol to get everyone thinking about how characters express themselves through status. This is what we learned from watching it together and thinking about what we’d seen. 1 In any dramatic scene, the players can be distinguished by their status. In the meet-cute near the beginning of the film, Carol (Cate Blanchett) herself displays her high status in myriad ways. She wears an expensive mink coat in the winter; speaks in a patrician

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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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What we’ve learned from … Frances Bingham

In our weekly online digital drama club with older LGBTQ + people, we’ve been using work by queer dramatists to help us all boost our life-writing and performance skills. The Blue Hour of Natalie Barney by Frances Bingham premiered at The Arcola in the autumn of 2017. It’s a one-woman show, in which the lesbian pioneer Natalie Barney reflects on her life and art one afternoon in 1950s Nice. This extract is from early in the piece, when Natalie, on her way back from lunch with her long-term lover (the painter Romaine Brooks – that’s her portrait of Natalie, left),

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What we’ve learned from … Tony Kushner

In our weekly online digital drama club with older LGBTQ + people, we have been using work by queer dramatists to help us all boost our life-writing and performance skills.  Prior’s speech to Louis about the ship’s captain he’s discovered way back in his family tree from Millennium Approaches (Act I Scene 8) is a supreme piece of story-telling by Tony Kushner (left). Here are nine things we learned by working on it together.  1 Like many good stories (indeed, many good dramas), Prior’s tale is told in three short ‘acts’. 2 Every story needs some exposition. In this case it’s one

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