Help Adam Study Dramaturgy In London

Hi, I'm Adam Goodall. I used to be the Theatre Editor for The Pantograph Punch, and I'm an award-nominated arts reporter and award-winning theatremaker. In September, I'm moving to London to join the Master of Arts programme in Dramaturgy and Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths University of London. The programme only accepts a handful of students each year, and it's a big deal for me to be able to attend. But I need some help to get there. 

THE COURSE AND THE MONEY

Goldsmiths University of London's Master of Arts in Dramaturgy and Writing for Performance is an intensive one-year course taught by Fiona Graham. If you don't know Graham, she's a pioneering New Zealand dramaturge who literally wrote the book on New Zealand dramaturgy (Performing Dramaturgy, Playmarket, 2017, check it out, it's a great book). Part of the course is focussed on the study of site-specific and immersive theatre - a particular interest of mine - and it provides incredible opportunities to learn from renowned UK theatremakers (An Oak Tree playwright Tim Crouch is taking the second week of the course, for example) in an absolute hotbed of independent theatre.

However, the programme costs �15,810 - approximately NZ$30,000 on a good day. I've already raised a significant sum of money towards that - I've contributed my own savings, friends and family are helping out where they can, and the Adam Foundation has very generously contributed $5,000 towards my course fees. But I still have a chunk of money to raise before I can pay my fees at enrolment in September.

The ultimate goal for this campaign is $15,000, the amount I have to raise to cover my course costs. Luckily, some of that work is already done. Manawat? ISP Inspire.Net has committed to a $1,000 donation: they're the sponsor of Centrepoint Theatre's Creative Pathways programmes, The Dark Room theatre space and the Basement Company youth theatre company. I'm a Basement Company alumni - '07 represent - so this means a bunch to me.

A very generous and wonderful donor, who wishes to remain anonymous, has also committed to being a match donor up to $7,500. That means that every dollar up to $7,500 (including Inspire.Net's $1,000 donation) will be matched by this very good donor. 

But why me? Why back this lad's Boosted campaign?

THE ME

I live for New Zealand theatre. I've been making theatre in Wellington, both independently and as a founding member of the New Zealand Fringe Award-winning theatre company Making Friends Collective, since 2013. As a team, we've presented around thirteen productions in Wellington and around New Zealand, including the Wellington Theatre Award-nominated Wine Lips (written by Sam Brooks and directed by Stella Reid), the New Zealand Fringe Award-nominated Rageface (which I wrote and directed) and the New Zealand Fringe Award-winning immersive production Proficiency Test.

Independently, I was shortlisted for the ADAM New Zealand Play Award, the country's most significant award for new unstaged work, in 2017 for my script The Go-Between. My work's been featured on RNZ (my Final Destination 3 love letter Extremely Loud and Incredibly Gross) and on my accomplice's acclaimed Witching Hours podcast. 

From 2016 to 2018, I was the Wellington Theatre Editor for The Pantograph Punch, spearheading the country's leading theatre review coverage with Sam Brooks and then Kate Prior. Since mid-2018, I've been the Pantograph Punch's sole Theatre Editor, on top of working as a freelance critic and feature writer. At this year's Voyager Media Awards, for example, I was nominated for the Best Junior Feature Writer award, for a slate that included this piece about the defunct Pathways to Arts and Cultural Employment programme - a piece that was called "A masterpiece of long-form storytelling" by The Spinoff and that kick-started a public conversation around the Government's plans to support artists - and this piece about whether pro-am musical companies should be paying their amateur casts and crews. 

This course is a phenomenal step up for me, a chance to develop my skills as a dramaturge and bring this learning back to New Zealand. Dramaturges bring a powerful set of tools for developing new voices and new work to the productions they work on, and they're a well-established part of the behind-the-scenes process in British, American, German and even Australian theatre. However, dramaturges are still underappreciated and underutilised in New Zealand theatre.

There are no specialist dramaturgy courses available here and there are only a handful of working professional dramaturges (shout out to Kate Prior, Dione Joseph and others for their tireless and valuable work in this field). Dramaturges simply aren't accessible to the vast majority of theatremakers in our country, in part because there's hardly anyone around with that skillset.

Studying at Goldsmiths will mean that I can broaden my horizons in London, practising dramaturgy at Goldsmiths University of London and in the city's exciting independent theatres, learning things I simply cannot learn in New Zealand. But I can't make it there without your help.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT MY WORK

Check out my website at adamgoodall.online!