We’ve got the Black Box at the Chehalem Cultural Center ready for some great workshops this year, including songwriting and playwriting. Meet our speakers who will be teaching you about how to write for the stage!
Val Blaha (songwritinger)
Val Blaha is a musician, teacher, songwriter, poet, artist, and playwright. She has released five studio albums, including 2019’s World on Fire, and recently completed the first draft of her musical Ruby Sneakers. After years as a child pianist, her growing concern about human-created ecological problems led to degrees in Anthropology, and work at an environmental non-profit. In 2001, she pivoted back to music, focusing on teaching, performing and songwriting. In her songs, she blends her passion for truth-telling with her ear for melody. valblaha.com
Workshop: From Blank Space to Your Song: Songwriting for Beginners
This workshop is designed to provide you with tools and a process to guide you in songwriting. The focus will be on creating lyrics that are cohesive and compelling. We’ll cover song structure, point of view, developing song ideas and hook phrases, and pre-writing, and we’ll do some group and/or individual writing within the session. Time and interest permitting, we may also touch briefly on some music theory basics.
John Hamilton (playwriting)
John Hamilton is a local teacher/director who has been featured at McMinnville’s Gallery Theater. Hailing from Washington, D.C., Hamilton co-founded the award-winning Pointless Theatre Co where he honed his puppetry and playwriting skills. Works for the stage include adaptations of A Christmas Carol, The Canterbury Tales, and American folktales with Mark Twain’s Riverboat Extravaganza!
The Playwright and the Public Domain: The Art of Adapting Something Old Into Something New
When adapting familiar stories to the stage, one must be aware of the historical context in which the originals surfaced as well as the lasting legacy the tale has in the modern day. By taking a journey through pieces of well-known literature, writers can have an experience to share and showcase their voice in the safety of… someone else’s story! In this workshop, attendees at all levels will have the opportunity to try a bit of script-writing themselves with exercises designed to find one’s voice and harness one’s point of view within pre-established narratives.
Terroir Creative Writing Festival 