Playground Duty by Manning Ned;

Author:Manning, Ned;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New South Wales Press

Excursions

In 1990 I returned with more of an idea of what Eora was about. I had been through my baptism of fire and I felt more confident about what might be possible. That first year had been about laying foundations. Now we were on our way. The place was changing. There was still the same positive energy but you could tell that everyone wanted more; they wanted to push the envelope and see what happened. I was more than happy to help.

The bulk of the class of ’89 had returned, plus some welcome additions. We were getting to know each other pretty well and we were starting to trust each other, which meant we could take more risks and be more adventurous. I didn’t feel as though I was treading on eggshells anymore. We began classes with warm-up exercises, something that would have been unimaginable 12 months before. We did improv, character work, scene work. We did theatre sports and play readings. We got stuck in. There were no more comings and goings either. The same group was there for every class; they were on time and prepared to work.

I gave out more scenes for them to work on. Now that I knew them I could fashion the material I gave them to suit their needs, interests and abilities. We worked on the scenes and came up with the idea of bringing them all together into a show. The group had enormous pride in the performance levels they had reached and they wanted to share this achievement with their brothers and sisters at Eora. There’d been heaps of music concerts and art exhibitions and they wanted their turn to show how far they had travelled.

We created a premise for the show. They were to be a bunch of travelling players, like the ones in Hamlet. This bunch of players were all blackfellas and they were performing excerpts from the classics, including Shakespeare. Not a lot of Indigenous performers got the chance to play classical roles at that time; most of the roles they were cast in involved being abused or tossed in the slammer. They were always playing victims so what we were doing was pretty special. It was years before an Indigenous actor would be cast as Othello.

We combined the text work with music; there always had to be music. It was eclectic, combining traditional and contemporary, along with songs and even a bit of opera. We also built a moment into the show when Pat told a ‘yarn’. His yarns were a bit of a moveable feast and varied in length, usually from long to even longer. The ‘hook’ was applied by a few of the female characters who would gently move him off if he built up too much steam.

I wrote some bridging dialogue to bring it all together. The focus was on performance skills and stagecraft. None of these guys had been on stage before, or, if they had, not since school. It was a big

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