Parramatta Girls + Eyes to the Floor

Title: Parramatta Girls + Eyes to the Floor
Author: Valentine, Alana
Price: $29.99

The inmates of The Girls Training School, Parramatta had about as hard an upbringing as you can get in Australia. But theirs is also one of the great untold stories of making good in tough times.

PARRAMATTA GIRLS
Based on the testimony of dozens of GTS old-girls and this vibrant play is a joyous and harrowing dramatisation of the experiences of eight inmates and their reunion forty years later. Interspersed with song and storytelling, this is a tribute to mischief and humour in the face of hardship and inequality.


EYES TO THE FLOOR
Chronicles the experience of girls sent from Parramatta Girls Home to the Hay Girls Home for even more brutal, punitive treatment. Written to be played by young adults, this moving work emphasises the childish vulnerability of the inmates in a world where they must find connection with each other in order to to survive. Artfully woven with movement, chorus work and poetry, it is a compelling companion work to Parramatta Girls.


Cast : Parramatta Girls: 8F / Eyes to the Floor: 7F, 4M


AUTHOR
Alana Valentine's writing has been awarded the 2004 Queensland Premier's Award for best Drama Script, 2003 NSW Writer's Fellowship, the 2002 Rodney Seaborn Playwrights' Award and an International Writing Fellowship at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. She has also received a 2001 commendation for the Louis Esson Prize, a 1999 AWGIE Award, a residency at the Banff Playwrights' Conference in Canada, the ANPC/New Dramatists Award in NYC, a Churchill Fellowship for England and Ireland and a NSW Premier's Award. In 2012 she won the prestigious STAGE Award for Ear to the Edge of Time.

Her stage plays include Butterfly Dandy, Covenant, The Prospectors, Run Rabbit Run, Titania's Boy, Savage Grace, Row of Tents, The Conjurers, Ozone, Spool Time and Swimming the Globe.

Alana has written numerous award winning radio plays as well as episodes of the television series McLeod's Daughters and Fat Tuesday.
----------------------

When girls at the Parramatta Training School rioted in 1961, a special, more punitive institution was set up in a disused psychiatric hospital in Hay, in remote Western NSW. Redesigned to house the ten 'worst' girls in the State, the Hay Institution for Girls became both a threat to maintain order in Parramatta and a site of further degradation and psychological torment for the young women it housed. Forced to constantly keep their 'eyes to the floor', these girls were not allowed to speak to each other and were forced to lay and then break up concrete paths, scrub paint from walls and tend the institution's garden. Picking up the story where Parramatta Girls leaves off, Eyes to the Floor is a moving portrait of hope that survives even in the worst of conditions. Written especially for a young cast, whose ages are chillingly equivalent to the incarcerated girls they are portraying, this is young adult theatre about the triumph of the imagination.

Publisher: Currency Press Pty Ltd
Publication date: 02/06/2014
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781925005165
Publishing status: AU Dropshipping