DOPPELGANGER DIALOGUES
Doppelganger Productions announce Doppelganger Dialogues, our new exciting workshop initiative.
We are planning a series of innovative and stimulating creative workshops for new and aspiring playwrights. These are a hands-on sessions designed specifically for new writers, as well as those with some experience who are seeking to develop their skills.
Writers will be invited to submit their work in advance of each workshop, with a length restriction of ten-minutes for each submission. Writers may submit a ten-minute play, a sequence of mini-plays with an overall length of ten-minutes, or a ten-minute extract from a longer play.
Suitable submissions will be chosen by the workshop organisers and the selected works read out by their authors and discussed in the workshops. The writers will receive constructive feedback from workshop leaders and the other playwrights contributing to the workshops.
The workshops will also explore writing practice and will help enable playwrights to develop strategies to support their creative processes: how to start writing and overcome the blank page syndrome; finding your own individual creative voice; putting the words on the page; developing ideas.
Doppelganger Dialogues hopes to discover new and exciting voices through this workshop, and to nurture emerging talent and new writing.
Doppelganger Productions has created a showcase of short plays by new writers which will be staged during 2013. We are keen that future showcases should feature new writing developed in the Doppelganger Dialogues workshops.
Doppelganger Dialogues will begin in the new year at the Winchester Pub on dates to be announced shortly. Admission will be free.
All welcome! Admission free.
Doppelganger Productions
A Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales 8174535
Registered Office: Towngate House, 2-8 Parkstone Road, Poole BH15 2PW
Artistic Director: John Foster
Email: johnfoster37@gmail.com
Executive Producer: Ted Street
Email ted.doppelganger@gmail.com
About us
Doppelganger Productions is a new not-for-profit theatre company based in Bournemouth. We specifically produce innovative new writing and stage new work by emerging and established playwrights with a focus on Dorset-based writers. We aim to create a vibrant theatre culture in Bournemouth and to present our work to audiences nationally and internationally.
Based in Bournemouth, we are the resident theatre company of The Winchester Arts Pub which is a fringe theatre venue. We have performed at the Allesbrook Theatre of Bournemouth University, the Lighthouse Poole, Regent’s College London and the Charing Cross Theatre London. We have been staging plays in the Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival since its year of inception in 2011 with the support of Arts Bournemouth and Bournemouth University. In autumn 2012 we mounted our first Comedy Festival which we aim to make an annual event.
As part of our commitment to new writing we run Doppelganger Dialogues, a free bi-monthly theatre-writing workshop which nurtures innovative writing and offers support to emerging playwrights. Selected projects originated in Doppelganger Dialogues will be developed through rehearsed readings and workshops to produce full-length works.
Our strong ties with Bournemouth University and Arts University Bournemouth has led to collaborative projects with student groups. It is our aim to forge more creative pathways where programmes of student playwriting can be performed under the auspices of Doppelganger Productions.
Staffing and structure
Doppelganger Productions is a not-for-profit organisation which became a company limited by guarantee in 2012 and is currently preparing to become a registered charity. The Artistic Director and Executive Producer (Company Directors) work part time. We engage production staff for specific projects and have a broad membership who work in an advisory capacity. Our marketing is managed by The Creative Enterprise Bureau of Bournemouth University.
Between 2013 and 2015 we will continue to work as a small lightweight independent organisation. We are currently developing our three year plan which seeks to strengthen theatre provision in Bournemouth and open up opportunities to tour our work nationally.
Performances planned for 2013
January onwards - Doppelganger Dialogues bi-monthly writing workshops
June - Bournemouth University Festival of Learning
Five Go Killing, a play by John Foster.
This dark and powerful play, written by BAFTA award-winner John Foster, is a one-woman-show inspired by true events. Set in Bournemouth, a group of young middle-class professionals style themselves on the Famous Five and embark upon a killing spree involving the murder of old people. The ringleader, Joley, an attractive and articulate young woman, talks from her prison cell to members of the audience, who symbolise her imagined visitors. Reliving the killings with a callous disregard for her victims, Joley takes us on a journey through the thrills of the Five’s violent escapades, pensioner resistance, police interrogation, and the ensuing media frenzy driven by the public’s insatiable appetite for a sensational murder story. This performance is funded by the Bournemouth University.
July - With the Sprit of Audrey by L.E. Kearley
Debut stage play celebrating the story of Olivia, a strong, independent woman whose world gets turned upside down when she has to battle against ovarian cancer. Through treatment, Olivia begins to lose herself. To her own belief, the spiritual and mysterious counsel of the late Audrey Hepburn emerges to guide her through. Olivia discovers that every journey through life can bring both hardship and joy.
September – Seven Shorts by Women
This year's Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival features the first Doppelganger New Writing Showcase, Seven Shorts by Women, consisting of seven short plays written, directed and produced by women. They are dark, intense, passionate and, at times, funny. The performances will be promoted by an innovative digital project of short trailers designed to reach a wider audience. Each play will be produced in a downloadable digital text version which will also incorporate the actors' voices.
October - Black History Month
Showcase of new plays by John Foster, Charmaine Jay Parkin and other playwrights which dramatise the oppression of black people in history. One play, based on true events, depicts how selected black people were taken from Nazi concentration camps by limousine to film studios in Berlin where they were made to act in propaganda films, then driven back to continue a bleak and uncertain existence.
December - The Weevil in the Biscuit
Tour of Dorset venues which will extend to Easter 2014 - first performed in the 2012 Bournemouth Arts Festival by the Sea. Robert Louis Stevenson, sick and almost bankrupt in his Bournemouth house, is inspired by a dream which soon becomes a supernatural nightmare. Regularly embattled with his nurse and whirlwind wife Fanny, he feverishly writes The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in three days… then burns it. Over the next ten weeks Stevenson writes with superhuman energy until his masterpiece is complete, likening the creative demon inside him to that ‘pallid brute’ Edward Hyde, living in upright sobriety within Stevenson like ‘a weevil in a biscuit.’
Doppelganger Productions is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales 8174535
Registered Office: Towngate House, 2-8 Parkstone Road, Poole BH15 2PW