If you’re not already aware of my #2510s project I’ll give you a brief recap: I wrote 25 ten-minute plays over the summer of 2011 and released them on the web. Each of 20 of the 25 plays were rewritten using some exercises I’d been developing and testing over the past couple of years. Some were successful for me, some weren’t, but I’ll leave the final evaluation up to the reader.
At any rate, I’ve finally finished putting all of those exercises into a digestible form. If you’d like to see them, click here.
The exercises are arranged in the order I used them for the #2510s project (day by day, week by week). There are 20 exercises based on four broad areas: visual art, music, acting/directing, and dance.
I hope you’ll find it worth your time to take a peek. Feel free to try them out on your own work as well. They’re fairly rigid in their current form (they dictate a certain number of steps from which you are not supposed to deviate) but feel free to experiment with them.
The “translation” from other mediums to playwriting isn’t a 1 to 1 type of situation (as you’ll discover if you take a look). Also, I’ve tried to give these exercises as broad an audience as possible, so often the “translation” is often reductive or somewhat abstract. If you have a particular knowledge in one of these areas you an certainly use it to your advantage and increase the complexity &/or specificity of the exercise. But if you don’t have special knowledge in an area have no fear: I’ve tried to make each approachable and employable with little expert knowledge.
At any rate, head on over. Let me know what you think. Enjoy.