On Sunday night Felix Cameron thanked his dramaturg Nadia Townsend, saying he couldn’t have won his two Boy Swallows Universe at the Logie Awards without her.
Townsend has since told The Age she missed the Live moment,
“I was in a workshop till about 11 o’clock, and then I tried to watch it and I couldn’t get on,” she says. When she did finally catch his speech “it made me cry. I was so proud. He makes everyone cry. It’s ridiculous. He’ll make the grips [the notoriously tough electricians on a film set] cry.”
Townsend, daughter of legendary Kid’s TV presenter Simon Townsend, has previously featured in City Homicide, Brock and Love Child but now works as a Dramaturg including for Boy Swallows Universe, Surviving Summer, Black Snow, The PM’s Daughter and as a tutor for the Film and Television School.
“We use that word – not drama teacher or acting teacher – because dramaturg essentially means ‘drama worker’,” says Townsend, who began acting professionally in her teens. “I’ll be brought onto productions to work with ensembles, liaising on behalf of the story, and taking the actors through a process that enables them to embody that story, and all turn up on the same page.”
Fellow City Homicide castmate Nadine Garner recently told TV Tonight she was working as a Dramaturg on Neighbours.
“I do work with the actors on some text, stuff that they want to work on or I’ll help do some world-building with new characters that are coming in. But I also work as a person that the cast can talk to….I’m a bit like the producer’s blotting paper, because I understand what it is to be on a television show, I get the minutiae of the problem. I think the cast enjoy coming in and kind of offloading to me about stuff that only actors can offload to about each other,” Garner said.
You can read more on Nadia Townsend here.
links to content on ABC
TV Tonight
