Playwriting for Children’s Theater
Creating Conflict
A course by Piers Torday , Children's Author and Playwright
About the video: Creating Conflict
Overview
“Without conflict, there is no drama. The conflict between a character’s dreams and reality, between desire and the thing or person desired, between their own sense of self and how they are perceived by others – just as these oppositions often provide the main tensions in our own lives, so they do on stage.”
In this video lesson Piers Torday addresses the topic: Creating Conflict, which is part of the Domestika online course: Playwriting for Children’s Theater. Bring your ideas to life on stage by learning how to write plays for children and families, from the initial idea to opening night.
Partial transcription of the video
“Creating Conflict In this lesson, we'll begin our final project by looking at how creating conflict will be central to dramatising your story. You'll be writing one scene for your project but in theatre, what applies to the whole piece, applies to each scene and every line. Conflict must be present in every moment. Otherwise, why are we, the audience, watching? What grips us? What is there to be resolved? The key difference between writing a story to be read and a story that is experienced as a performance is that a reader can stop, go back, or skip ahead, but an audience member either has ...”
This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.
Course summary for: Playwriting for Children’s Theater
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Category
Writing -
Areas
Children's Literature, Communication, Creative Writing, Fiction Writing, Script
Piers Torday
A course by Piers Torday
Piers Torday is an author, playwright, and educator from Northumberland, England. As a children’s author, he is dedicated to harnessing the power of imagination through creative writing. The art of writing has always been present in Piers' life: He wrote his first cartoon at age seven, which was about a superhero called Super Sid, and won a competition in a local newspaper. His father, the late Paul Torday, is the author of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which was later adapted into a film.
For Piers, writing children’s novels is a way to engage young readers, inspire them to ask big questions, and shape the minds of tomorrow. His most notable work includes The Lost Magician, The Frozen Sea, The Last Wild Trilogy, and There May Be a Castle. Piers also received the Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction in 2014. In a review for the trilogy, The Times states that Piers is “the new master of books for children.”
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- 1,203 students
- 16 lessons (2h 44m)
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- Audio: English
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- Level: Beginner
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