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DLI NEWSLETTER 5 NOVEMBER 2020
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 We must open this week's newsletter on a sad note, with the passing of Tommy Martin, one of amateur drama's long-standing friends in the Athlone area and beyond.
DLI Chairperson Joanne Keane writes:
There is sadness in the drama community at the passing of Tom (Tommy) Martin. A long term member of Athlone Little Theatre, Athlone Musical Society and the RTÉ All Ireland Drama Finals Committee, Tommy will be well remembered for the warm welcome and the help he gave all the drama groups and attendees at the Finals in the Dean Crowe Theatre every year.
Condolences to his wife Olive, his family and friends and all who knew him.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dilis.
We were delighted with the enthusiastic response to the DLI Quiz on Bank Holiday Monday night - you logged on in large numbers, and congratulations to Moira Mahony from Galway and her Agatha Quizztie team who came first. Thanks to DLI Membership Secretary Mary Newman who organised the event , and of course to TableFish who facilitated the evening. If you want more quizzing(!), you can log onto www.table.fish for their twice weekly competitions.
Our three intrepid judges Walker Ewart, Anne Mekitarian and Trish Keane are deep in the task of each reading the unprecedented 58 plays submitted for this year's DLI/ADCI Playwriting Competition. A busy November guaranteed in THOSE three households! Stay tuned for the winners who will be announced after much deliberation in early December. In the meantime we salute all 58 playwrights out there, and be assured that each of you will receive due recognition and feedback from our judges.
The ADCI is running a series of 'In Conversation With' evenings on their Facebook page. The first one is tonight at 8pm when Sillan Players' Paddy Farrelly will be chatting to Seamus O'Rourke, actor, director and writer whose memoir Standing In Gaps has just been published.
Also tonight, and for 24 hours only from 7.30pm, you can catch Rough Magic's acclaimed production of Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, in an adaptation by Michael West for this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival. www.rte.ie/culture
Stay in touch with DLI while our Dundrum office remains closed!
089 2356672
office@dli.ie
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CLARE DRAMA RADIO PLAY FESTIVAL
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Tom Hanley, PRO of the festival writes:
Clare Drama Festival, in association with Scariff Bay Community Radio, are hosting an inaugural Radio Play Festival during March 2021.
We see it as an opportunity for groups and festivals to do something innovative in the current climate. We are encouraged by the response to the current DLI/ADCI playwriting competition and feel that a radio festival would be an ideal platform for groups and writers to present some of these new plays.
Scariff Bay Community Radio is licensed by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland www.bai.ie , and broadcasts live on 88.3FM and 92.7FM to East Clare at the weekends and is available worldwide on the TuneIn radio app. It is also one of over 30 Community radio stations in Ireland who are members of CRAOL www.craol.ie. All these stations are volunteer led and not-for-profit community organisations.
A Radio Play Festival such as ours in conjunction with drama festivals, drama groups and local community radio stations, will promote the amateur drama movement in Ireland.
All details, including competition rules, from Tom:
087 6841549
cdradioplay@gmail.com
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 Our thanks to esteemed actor, director, adjudicator and DLI Summer School tutor Geoff O'Keeffe for sharing the acting tips below:
Play your simple need.
Avoid walking into the destiny of the scene. Spoiler alert - Sive will be found dead in a bog-hole. So, make the audience think differently. Maybe this time she won’t be!
Bring the outside in. What happens off the stage needs to impact on how characters inhabit the stage.
Let the dust and residue of previous scenes impact what comes after. (Macbeth is fundamentally changed after the murder of Duncan).
Let the body tell the story. If we were to press Mute, would we still understand what was at stake?
Every movement, every gesture, no matter how minute, needs motivation behind it.
Keep your thought active - if you see the images that you describe, then we will see them too.
The language of silence is as potent as a barrage of words.
Plays are full of ghosts. Let them haunt us.
Be fearless in your playing.
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FRACTURED.....the story continues...
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 DLI members will recall recently reading The Five Stages of Mourning your Covid Show in our latest magazine. The article was written by Down at Heel Productions' Claire Joyce, outlining their ambitious project Fractured which is Kildare's commemoration of the War of Independence. Originally scheduled to run over a period of two years as a live, episodic soap opera in various locations around Maynooth.....and then Covid-19 happened.....
Joe Bergin, who, with Martina Murphy, Claire Reilly and Brendan Farrell, wrote the scripts for the project has filled us in on the current situation with Fractured -see below. Like the Down At Heel members themselves, we all have out fingers crossed for the eventual release of the Fractured podcast.
You can follow their progress on their Facebook page or downatheelproductions@gmail.com.
Like everyone else, we're hanging in there and looking forward to when we can all gather and make some theatre again.
In the meantime, thank God for Zoom!!
Fractured was written to span 2 years. We planned to record Year 1 this
year and edit Year 2 for radio / podcast to be recorded in 2021.
We had scheduled 6 days over four weekends from the end of September to the middle of October for the Year 1 recording. We managed to record three of the days and had great fun but had to stop after Level 3 Restrictions were
introduced. We plan that if / when restrictions are eased we will
complete the Year 1 recordings before Christmas. There will be a fair
amount of post production editing to be done, but, at least, the
restrictions won't impact that.
So, we're keeping our fingers firmly crossed!
Joe Bergin
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