We're delighted to announce that the edited videos of plays performed for Gi60: The International One Minute Play Festival, 2011 Live U.S. Edition are being posted on the Gi60 Channel on YouTube starting this week (click the link on this page). After spending a long summer in the editing booth, our wonderful film editor and YouTube master Christopher Thomasson will be uploading them in small batches. Keep watching, and if you don't find a particular play that you're looking for, check back in a few days. It will take some time to post all one hundred plays from US and UK, so enjoy them all, and please let us know your responses on the blog.
Please share these plays with your friends around the world; remember that one of Steve Ansell's original goals for Gi60 was to get as much theater to as many people as possible, no matter how remote the location. Watch these little plays on your phone, email them to friends, post them on your Facebook page. It will only take a minute...
Our great thanks to all contributing playwrights, the acting companies, directors, the film directors and camera operators, stage managers, and designers for their amazing work, and to our fantastic audiences for their ongoing support. Enjoy!
Wednesday 28 September 2011
Thursday 1 September 2011
The Length of a Minute, The Length of a Moment
My first memory is of a car crash.
Staring out our living room window, I must’ve been four years old, the inevitable impact unfolded. Two cars crumpled like paper, spilling their guts of gears and engine parts onto the street.
What I can never forget is the way time seemed to stretch and slow itself down to individual, isolated beats.
Staring out our living room window, I must’ve been four years old, the inevitable impact unfolded. Two cars crumpled like paper, spilling their guts of gears and engine parts onto the street.
What I can never forget is the way time seemed to stretch and slow itself down to individual, isolated beats.
If a moment can linger and expand, a minute is much longer than we think.
The most common form of miniature drama is the TV commercial. Most leave a lot to be desired from an artistic standpoint.
Some, in sixty seconds or less, can offer an experience that resonates across generations.
Digital culture has sliced and diced our lives into even smaller fragments. Twitter has created a space where splinters of random thoughts, jokes, ideas, commerce fly at us from all over the world, often without context or the frames necessary to allow for real communication or understanding. It's like entering a town made entirely of billboards.
Ruben Carbajal is a freelance copywriter and author of the plays The Gifted Program, Portland, Car & Carriage Collide and others. He's proud to have participated in five Gi60 Festivals. You can learn more about him by visiting www.rubencarbajal.net or following his sardonic tweets @rubencarbajal.
(Scene from Hour of The Wolf by Ingmar Bergman)
The most common form of miniature drama is the TV commercial. Most leave a lot to be desired from an artistic standpoint.
Some, in sixty seconds or less, can offer an experience that resonates across generations.
Digital culture has sliced and diced our lives into even smaller fragments. Twitter has created a space where splinters of random thoughts, jokes, ideas, commerce fly at us from all over the world, often without context or the frames necessary to allow for real communication or understanding. It's like entering a town made entirely of billboards.
There are even Twitter plays:
(by Laura Barbiea, from the Twitter feed of another short-form theatre innovator, The NY Neo-Futurists)
A minute, then, is practically an eternity.
Visit the Gi60 YouTube Channel and you’ll find discreet minutes, each filled with a different confection: comedy, drama, horror, absurdity, observation, melodrama, minimalism, maximalism, lightly drawn sketches, strange scribbles, bold-brushed epics, love stories, ghost stories, innuendo. Some are flavors you've never thought of and would be hard-pressed to classify.
Taken as a whole, the collection can be seen as a meditation on Theatre itself.My earliest memory had a part to play in writing what would become Moment Before Impact, which takes place in the split-second before a middle-aged husband and wife lose their lives in a car accident.
A single second expands, and the two partake in a cold, clinical accounting of their lives.
According to Pascal’s Wager, by believing in God, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. If there’s no God, worshiping something that doesn’t exist has no cost. If there is a God and we turn away from him, we risk the incalculable loss of everlasting life.
However, if there's no heaven or hell, and all we have is this one life, isn’t what little time we have here priceless?Ruben Carbajal is a freelance copywriter and author of the plays The Gifted Program, Portland, Car & Carriage Collide and others. He's proud to have participated in five Gi60 Festivals. You can learn more about him by visiting www.rubencarbajal.net or following his sardonic tweets @rubencarbajal.
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