'The Parramatta Girls Training School operated from 1889 to its close in the late 1970s as a state home for 'uncontrollable' girls. Under the guise of 'reforming' them, these teenagers were subjected to mental, emotional and physical brutality. It was a start in life that was metered out to vulnerable, uniformly poor and frequently indigenous women. 'Parramatta Girls' is based on verbatim accounts of the women who were incarcerated at the Parramatta Girls Training School.'
Source: Belvoir Street Theatre website, http://www.belvoir.com.au/
Sighted: 09/05/2005
'Parramatta Girls' (as a work in progress) was presented in an early draft at the 2004 Winter Play Reading Series at Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney.
Rehearsed reading 23 May 2005 of third draft, as part of the Winter Play Reading Series at the Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney. Director: Wesley Enoch.
Produced at Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, from March 17 2007. Director: Wesley Enoch.
Riverside Productions presentation at the Lennox Theatre, Parramatta: 3-17 May, 2014
DIRECTOR: Tanya Goldberg
DESIGNER: Tobhiyah Stone Feller
LIGHTING DESIGNER: Verity Hampson
SOUND DESIGNER: Jeremy Silver
PRODUCER: Camilla Rountree
PERFORMERS: Christine Anu, Holly Austin, Annie Byron, Vanessa Downing, Anni Finsterer, Sandy Gore, Sharni McDermott, Tessa Rose -
Alana Valentine and Parramatta Girls
Dino Dimitriadis
(presenter),
2020
25305569
2020
single work
podcast
'In the third episode of the series, Dino Dimitriadis and Alana Valentine talk Parramatta Girls, Valentine's multi-award-winning play. An intimate look at drawing theatre from life, and the challenges and joys of making 'close-work' art.'
Source: Production blurb.
'When the New South Wales Board of Studies put Tom Holloway’s Beyond the Neck (2007) on the list of prescribed texts for the Year 12 Verbatim Theatre elective, they seemed to be wilfully ignoring the playwright’s statement that the play is not verbatim. On the one hand, the lack of vernacular speech and characters that correspond to real-life people would seem to confirm Holloway’s argument. Conversely, the play’s reliance on interviews, community consultation, bottom-up history and mode of diegetic theatricality would seem to support the Board of Studies’ decision. This article argues that this difference of opinion is due, in part, to a difference of definition: whereas Holloway conceives of verbatim as a genre, the Board of Studies sees it as a practice. To contemplate verbatim as a practice opens the way for new research across theatre, performance, dance, television and film.' (Publication abstract)
