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The 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.
A manuscript was, traditionally, any document that is written by hand -- or, once practical typewriters became available, typewritten -- as opposed to being mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has come to be understood to further include any written, typed, or word-processed copy of an author's work, as distinguished from its rendition as a printed version of the same. Before the arrival of printing, all documents and books were manuscripts. Manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps, explanatory figures or illustrations. Manuscripts may be in book form, scrolls or in codex format. Illuminated manuscripts are enriched with pictures, border decorations, elaborately embossed initial letters or full-page illustrations.
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers, typically actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. The specific place of the performance is also named by the word "theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον, itself from θεάομαι.
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.
A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays.
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc, performed in a theatre, or on radio or television. Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics —the earliest work of dramatic theory.
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.
Tasmania is an island state of Australia. It is located 240 km (150 mi) to the south of the Australian mainland, separated by Bass Strait. The state encompasses the main island of Tasmania, the 26th-largest island in the world, and the surrounding 334 islands. The state has a population of around 526,700 as of March 2018. Just over forty percent of the population resides in the Greater Hobart precinct, which forms the metropolitan area of the state capital and largest city, Hobart.
