Currently running at Cane Grower’s Indian
Hall at ML Sultan Campus until May 21 is this year’s New Writer’s Festival.
The festival sees third year students of
the University of Technology presenting their first scripts or script extracts.
Each student is given 20-30 minutes with 5-10 minutes in the ‘hot seat’
fielding questions/responses from the audience.
Co-ordinator and Artistic Director,
Professor Debbie Lutge, founded the New Director’s Festival Phase I & II in
2001. “Seeing the enormous strides this has undergone, I’m delighted by the
prospect of a fifth year of The New Playwright’s Festival – a platform for new
works by young unpublished playwrights.
“In this festival actors carry scripts and
read these manuscripts, sans costumes and elaborate sets, frequently merely
seated, with the writer reading the stage directions,” Lutge continues. “The
audience is expected to visualize and therefore participate. It is the written
text rather than the performance text, design elements or direction that holds
the key. This forum aims to encourage new works by the youth and allows new
South African works a voice. The plays are short 15 min. pieces with the option
to grow these plays to full one act plays in the future.”
The New Playwright’s Festival runs until May
21 nightly from 18h30 to 20h30. Entrance is free. The change of venue is due to
the delay of the reconstruction of DUT’s Courtyard Theatre.
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