Australian Script Centre has been selectively collecting, promoting and distributing contemporary Australian plays in manuscript form since 1979. It is recognised by the Australia Council for the Arts as a Key Organisation providing essential infrastructure services to the theatre sector. The Centre’s work supports playwrights in particular by filling the gap left by the very small number of Australian plays that achieve commercial publication. Its ecommerce website, australianplays.org, gives playwrights a global distribution and marketing network for their work as well as giving producers everywhere a simple access point for professionally written and production-ready Australian plays.
The ASC is a non-profit association with a membership base comprising a diverse community of theatre makers, including many playwrights, drama educators, students, theatre companies and producers.
The Australian Script Centre is the only national arts organisation based in Tasmania. It grew out of an initiative of Barbara Manning and the Salamanca Theatre Company, called the Salamanca National Script Resource Centre. Initially the centre was a distribution service for playwrights writing for theatre-in-education. It ran successfully throughout the 1980s and in 1993 separated from the Salamanca Theatre Company to become the Australian Script Centre. The centre's collection rapidly grew as it began to incorporate all styles of play and radio scripts. It now houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of unpublished contemporary Australian playscripts in the world. This represents a significant cultural and historical resource.
Famous quotes containing the words australian, script and/or centre:
“Beyond the horizon, or even the knowledge, of the cities along the coast, a great, creative impulse is at work—the only thing, after all, that gives this continent meaning and a guarantee of the future. Every Australian ought to climb up here, once in a way, and glimpse the various, manifold life of which he is a part.”
—Vance Palmer (1885–1959)
“I long to create something
that can’t be used to keep us passive:
I want to write
a script about plumbing, how every pipe
is joined
to every other.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Freedom to think our own thoughts, freedom to utter them, freedom to live out the promptings of our inner life ultimated in this convention, was termed a monstrosity of the 19th century. What was it?—the legitimate out-birth of the eternal law of progress. This reformation underlies every other; it is the only healthful centre around which hope of humanity can revolve.”
—Harriot K. Hunt (1805–1875)