23.07.20
Dear Grif-friends,
Two weeks ago, I was hiking through the snow with my partner Troy. He lives in Melbourne, so in my one week off work I thought it would be fun to plan a little holiday together. We rode our bikes on the rail between Beechworth and Bright, climbed Mount Beauty, stayed in a Yurt with a stunning 360-vista of rolling hills and fields.
This was my view:
Then, while I was away, the Victorian border closed. So, I am now on Day 12 of a mandated two-week period of self-isolation in Potts Point—in an apartment which some would say was built just a little too close to the building next door.
This is now my view:
I’m not saying I miss human contact, but if I had a deflated basketball, it would definitely have a face drawn on it by now.
As such, I’m now the only person on this planet who actually enjoys time on Zoom. And this is lucky, given we’ve just held two full script workshops over it. At the start of the month, our Associate Artistic Director Tessa Leong led a one-week development of Orange Thrower, a new work by Griffin Studio Artist Kirsty Marillier. And just last week, we had another script development of Mark Rogers’s play Superheroes, led by director Shari Sebbens. I got to work on both scripts as dramaturg–and with the SBW Stables still dark, and the theatre world mired in chaos, it was a quiet relief to spend time with playwrights. I was reminded, once again, of their tenacity, their intelligence, their generosity and the painstaking care they put into building worlds for audiences to sit in.
Playwrights have given us our other recent ray of joy at Griffin, with the 2020 Griffin Award rolled out via an online ceremony (which can be watched in its entirety on our Youtube channel!) The winner was playwright, actor, and Palawa man Dylan Van Den Berg for way back when, an astonishing, poetic work of colonial revisionism.
Much love,
Declan x
Declan Greene
Artistic Director
