DRAMA ESSAY
Breanna Burgess
Australian theatre practitioners use various performance styles, techniques and dramatic conventions to help portray their ideas to their audiences and make them feel a particular way to the ideas presented in a play. Without the use of these styles, techniques and conventions it wouldn’t be possible for the practitioners to emphasise their ideas. In the play ‘Ruby Moon’ Matt Cameron the playwright uses various techniques such as symbolism, transformational acting, cyclical and episodic dramatic structure and a fractured fairytale. Ruby Moon was written by Matt Cameron in 2003. It is a story about a well known tragedy. In Flaming Tree Grove everything seems to be perfect. A young girl, Ruby Moon …show more content…

Practitioners must explore techniques and dramatic conventions to be able to convey their ideas that they want to get across to their audiences. Without the use of techniques Matt Cameron wouldn’t be able to convey his ideas in Ruby Moon such as: holding onto hope that a missing child could still be alive, portraying that maybe it is all just a sick game, do we want to really know the truth and also Ruby is able to have a voice. This all helps the audience sum up the messages hidden in the play.
In class I missed most of the workshops. I was there though for the transformational acting. In one of them people from the class were chosen to stand up and act out a particular scenario until the girl said change and changed the students characters in that scenario. This workshop really showed how when one actor plays various roles in my mind I still took characteristics from each character and had a link between all the characters that the one actor/student played. In Ruby Moon this is what Matt Cameron calls ‘theatre magic’ because if you were to do the same thing on television it wouldn’t have the same effect. When Ray and Sylvie replay each character from previous scenes when arguing this gives the idea that they are playing other characters making sense of what happened.
The other workshop which I was a part of was sexual innuendo. We were given settings which we then had to come up with as many innuendos as