Week 2

Wow, I haven’t posted anything in a long time. On Tuesday (March 2), I had View from Australia in the morning. We were supposed to watch a movie, but the DVD player decided not to work. We then tried to use several laptops to play the movie. Unfortunately, were foiled once again, because the regions set on American laptops is different than the regions of Australian DVDs. In the end we gave up hope of watching the movie and instead had discussion over our reading guide.

We talked about National Myths and how they have influence society. Australia’s national myth is that of their convict past, which as we learned has had a huge impact on Australian culture. Speaking in generalities Australians tend to be fatalistic in there world view and have a much more egalitarian view of society than Americans do. I learned about the myth of the convict past in an article called “The Fatal Shore” by Robert Hughes if anyone wants to try and find it and read it. After The View, I had lunch and headed to rehearsal. I honestly don’t remember what all we did, but the show is moving along really well. I still wasn’t able to get my clothes off the line because it decided to rain again.

On Wednesday, I got to sleep in a little. I don’t have to be at school until 1, so I had some extra time and was finally able to get my clothes off the line. I know the epic tale of the laundry must be a thrilling one, but I figured that I had committed to it this far so I might as well finish the tale. I got to school in time to have lunch before The Gathering. The speaker was a dancer and choreographer. She had created some form of meditative movement to Bible verses. There were a lot of technical difficulties with the movie clips that she wanted to show. Overall it was an awkward chapel to sit through. Although, it was nowhere near as bad as The Singer of Israel chapel from freshman year.

After the Gathering, I went to New Testament class. We finished talking about our first lecture notes on historical context, and then we moved on to talking about literary context. Learning about exegesis is really interesting, because I feel like I’m leaning to read the Bible better. I was intimidated after the first week of class, but after the second week I felt much more confident about the class. Mark Stephens, the professor of the class, is a great lecturer.

Once NT was over, I had a 30-minute break before Theatre Secondment. I thought that Theatre Secondment was going to be puppetry for television; however, it turns out that it is with a one man or I guess I should say one-woman company called The Pupperoos. My teacher’s name is Kay Yasugi. Kay studied at the London School of Puppetry and now works doing solo puppetry projects. For class we are helping Kay workshop a story for the Wentworth Gallery, which is an aboriginal museum in Sydney. For our first day of class we got to play around a lot. We got to work with shadow puppets and see how different light sources affected the images. We also got to make some of our own simple shadow puppets out of cereal boxes. I’m excited to work on the project and I can’t wait to see how the story begins to come together.

Thursday is Easter show rehearsal day. I don’t really have much to report about the show. I’m in the process of learning my lines and working on characterization. I’m getting to know my character Jake more, but there is still so much more to discover. Wesley’s drama program is super focused on acting so it has been a really good experience to work with the students in the show. After rehearsal, I went out to the Thai restaurant by school and had dinner with a big group of people. We were staying around school because it was movie night. Once a month they organize a movie night for us so that we can watch Australian movies. We watch Ned Kelly, which had Orlando Bloom and Christian Bale in it. Ned Kelly is Australia’s most famous outlaw and is praised as being a hero. The movie was really interesting and was defiantly worth watching.

Let see, on Friday we had Indigenous Culture class. We began our day by going over our syllabi for our two ASC classes. Kimberly had gone to the states after orientation was over for a conference so we never got to talk about them. Once we finished talking about the syllabi we had a discussion over our reading of Volf’s “Oppression and Justice”. Volf is a professor at Yale Divinity School so his writing was very academic. It was an incredibly dense article to read, but it was interesting once I understood what was going on. My favorite quote from the reading was “There is a profound “injustice” about the God of the biblical traditions. It is called grace.” I found it to be an incredibly challenging statement, because it reminded me that God did not execute justice on us, but rather He chose to show grace. What would the world look like if we pursued grace? Anyways, after our Volf discussion we had lunch and we met our Indigenous teacher, Jennifer Newman. Jennifer is a great storyteller. I’m still trying to figure out why, but I think it partly has to do with how she uses her hand to act out things as she is talking about them. Our introduction to aboriginal culture went really fast. I was thankful for that because I was really tired and was ready to go home. It was raining and we didn’t feel like going out so I ended up staying at home with Greg and Ross.