Abu Dhabi’s a stage

A cavalcade of 10-minute plays at NYU Abu Dhabi showcases creativity meeting brevity

"Mouth" is one of the 10-minute plays before performed at NYU Abu Dhabi this weekend.

Everything from Syrian war tales to the travails of flight attendants will be covered in the Short+Sweet festival of 10-minute plays held over the next few days at New York University Abu Dhabi. This home-grown cavalcade does not conflate the brevity of the performance with the hard labour – spanning weeks, or even months – put into producing them. A bard's is a hard life.

The festival’s format is a great way to convince waverers – whether those involved in the productions or the potential members of the audience – to get involved because art has a long history of short-form performances. From grindhouse cinema to the evocative micro-stories of Ernest Hemingway (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”), brevity is a virtue.

Good art is like good engineering: parsimonious, and sculpted with a clinical fixation on efficiency. What worlds of the imagination can be conjured up in 10 minutes? For showing us, everyone involved this weekend deserves our applause.