Half A World Theater

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.” – Tom Stoppard

McTavish Academy of Art (MAOA), in association with Half a World Theatre, offers those aged 15 to 25 and beyond another exciting opportunity to make drama and to experience theatre.

No prior knowledge is required for this term’s 9 week theatre workshop, which offers participants the opportunity to discover how a play script is developed into a live theatrical performance.

A range of techniques from physical and devised theatre backgrounds will be utilised to enable potential performers to map plays, to examine characters through their journeys, to workshop scenes through exploration of the text and to start learning how to shape a production. Extracts from contrasting play scripts will be examined with each segment of the course culminating in a rehearsed reading of one of the pieces.

“An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.” –George Jean Nathan

Date: Stay tuned for future dates!
Time: 6:30 – 8:30pm
Experience: Beginner to Advanced
Age Range: 15+
Investment: $135 for 9 weeks
Supply List: No supplies required

Tags: adult, youth

Instructor Bio:

Andy Dawson Reid retired to the Saanich peninsula in 2015 from a forty year career in academia and secondary education in the United Kingdom.

While working for more than two decades for the University of London, Andy also helped to run one of South East England’s leading youth theatres (catering to 15 – 21 year-olds) as a director, workshop leader, musician, musical director, composer and writer. During that time he wrote six musicals, four of which were taken by the company to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Moving to the independent schools sector Andy worked for eight years at Eton College and then until retirement at St Paul’s School in London. At both schools he worked closely with the drama departments, writing and directing house and school productions and – for eight years at St Paul’s – teaching Grade 9 drama. Two of his plays were performed in the Festival of New Writing at Eton and another – a complex promenade adaptation of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s lyric poem, “Parzifal” – was presented as a school production at both Eton and St Paul’s.

Since arriving in Canada in 2015 Andy has occupied himself running after-school drama sessions for the District of Saanich and is in his first term on the board of directors for Intrepid Theatre.