By
Jesse Owusu Ampah, GNA
Accra, Feb. 18, GNA
– The National Theatre of Ghana has commenced a five-day playwriting workshop
for playwrights aimed at giving practical training in improving their art
in the dramatic and literary world.
The workshop, which
commenced on February 17, 2020 and would end on Saturday, February 22, 2020,
includes a theatre reading, acting and directing workshops.
Madam Amy Appiah
Frimpong, Executive Director of the National Theatre of Ghana, said the
workshop intended to refresh playwrights with existing styles and equip them
with new techniques that would enhance their plays emotionally and the
psychological development of their audience.
Ms Frimpong said the
acting workshop would take the participants through how to become a good actor,
the various styles of acting, script analyses and the relationship between
characters.
“The directing
workshop is also meant to improve the director’s position as an artiste-leader
who is responsible for the play and all the other aspects of a drama
production,” she added.
She said the event
came about from conversations between the National Theatre and the Network of
African-American and African playwrights who had been organising such
programmes in the diaspora.
Professor Femi
Osofisan, a playwright and lecturer, who was a facilitator, said plays were a
link that connected society to reality, adding that, “ in playwriting we
explore shared identity among societies.”
He said theatre had
impacted on people’s lives and was a medium for telling one’s story to the
outside world as well as portrayed one’s identity to the world.
He bemoaned the low
interest of drama by most people, particularly the youth, and called on them to
find theatre works as a platform for national identity and growth.
He expressed the
hope that the training would explore innovations and new learnings in the
literary world.
The event was
facilitator by Professor Osafisan and two other playwrights and dramatists,
Carlyle Brown and Chuck Mike, both Africans in the diaspora.
The participants
comprised twenty playwrights who were shortlisted from the application for
participation.
GNA