{"id":335,"date":"2014-04-03T21:13:50","date_gmt":"2014-04-03T21:13:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/?p=335"},"modified":"2014-05-14T23:05:42","modified_gmt":"2014-05-14T23:05:42","slug":"yet-another-win-for-massey-playwright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/2014\/04\/03\/yet-another-win-for-massey-playwright\/","title":{"rendered":"Yet another win for Massey Playwright"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blue balloon dream a second-time winner for Massey playwright<\/h1>\n
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Associate Professor Angie Farrow<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Angie Farrow’s short play ‘The Blue Balloon’ has won Best Wildcard Award at the Sydney Short and Sweet Festival Gala Finals in March.\u00a0 This is the biggest short play festival in the world with over 1,000 international entries.\u00a0 The Blue Balloon won two ‘Judges Choice’ competitions before being selected for the finals.<\/p>\n

The Blue Balloon has also previously won first prize in a Canadian international playwriting competition, the Toronto-based InspiraTO Theatre Contest, in 2013.<\/p>\n

The play \u2013 metaphorical and surreal \u2013 is about a relationship breakdown, and sees the grieving male protagonist releasing a blue balloon that engulfs his city and its inhabitants. The balloon is a liberating presence, prompting characters to think, say, feel and do things they hadn’t thought possible.The story, inspired by writer Ronald Bartlheme\u2019s The Red Balloon and influenced by the likes of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, takes an imaginative punt on the existential notion of how to free the human psyche so it can revel in pure visionary, expressive wonder.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe blue balloon is a metaphor and is antidote to the usual constraints, rules and conventions that prevent us being more expansive, and more truly alive,\u201d Dr Farrow says.<\/p>\n

Dr Farrow says she loves the idea of short theatre tackling bold, challenging ideas in a short space of time. And she reckons the short play might be entering its heyday, with busy lives and short attention spans demanding artistic satisfaction in smaller chunks.<\/p>\n

Describing short plays as \u201chaiku theatre where you say big things in small spaces,\u201d she says her success is particularly pleasing because there are so few competitions for playwrights.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a frustrating area in that sense. There are dozens of competitions for short stories, but for theatre there are very few \u2013 they are like gold,\u201d says Dr Farrow, who has written 10 short plays, including prize-winners such as Tango Partner, Falling and Lifetime.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blue balloon dream a second-time winner for Massey playwright                           Angie Farrow’s short play ‘The Blue Balloon’ has won Best Wildcard Award at the Sydney Short and Sweet Festival Gala Finals in March.\u00a0 This is the biggest short play festival in the world […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,13],"tags":[62,61,174],"class_list":["post-335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palmerston-north","category-theatre","tag-blue-balloon","tag-farrow","tag-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":444,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions\/444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}