I wasn't just drifting today.
I feel like I drift through my days far too much, but today I was so *in* the world. If that makes any sense...?
We had a workshop with Sanjoy Ganguly of Jana Sanskriti (Kolkata, India). It was a very quick overview of some warm-ups and techniques from his version of Theatre of the Oppressed. Valuable stuff. Some of it I'd done before, but he interspersed the active elements with good commentary and a bit of philosophy about relations and oppression. What we did had me starting to more closely consider how I'll communicate in workshops with the children in Timisoara. Much of what we did today was physical, so I grabbed some good ideas, but I don't want to lose the verbally communicated context. Hopefully, I'll have someone translating the really essential bits and, of course, I won't be engaging in the same type of abstract discussion we do at the university level, but I think language will have to be involved at *some* level.
Unfortunately, I had to skip out during the middle of the workshop because I had a doctor's appointment at the travel clinic. I thought I'd go in and they'd go, "Oh, you're healthy. Go to Romania." Um, yeah. No. I have to call the U.S. tonight and track down whether I've had several vaccinations, including polio, hepatitis A and B, tetanus (had that vaccination in 2002), diphtheria, and typhoid. She went ahead and started me on a rabies series. Romania is apparently not as safe, health-wise, as I assumed it to be.
Went back to the workshop and did some image work. Good stuff, though I found a pattern in terms of what my age group and culture tend to resort to when illustrating oppression.
Later my course group had a meeting with our supervisors and we shuttled back and forth between practical deadline-type concerns and academic discussion. I'd done a rough of my dissertation proposal, so Jock asked to use it to clarify what was needed. That meant me getting feedback and critique in front of everyone else, but it was helpful. However, with essays looming, I'm just going to spend a half hour tonight and then call it done. The sort of good news is that the essays can be turned in as late as the 25th or so. It's *sort* of good because I think I'm still going to try and get mine in on the 18th since I fly out the 19th. It's unlikely that I'll have the time, energy, or resources to work on them in Timisoara. So, while it's nice to have some flexibility, the news doesn't change things much for me.
After the meeting Max had me over for a cup of tea. I needed that. I needed a chance to sit down with someone and chat about other things besides school. We ended up on some really interesting topics. We also messed around with his video-recorder and ended up reading a poem of his (and a tacked-on ending I wrote after reading it) on tape. We alternated stanzas, so it was kind of fun to notice how we differ in style. Then we taped making up an on-the-spot trade-off poem. That was odd. It started with purple blossoms, ran through meeting an old lady who didn't see us, and ended in a concrete box that was safe, real, but not beautiful.
Walking home through the rain, I could smell the earth and all the rioting green growing things. It was a good day.
We had a workshop with Sanjoy Ganguly of Jana Sanskriti (Kolkata, India). It was a very quick overview of some warm-ups and techniques from his version of Theatre of the Oppressed. Valuable stuff. Some of it I'd done before, but he interspersed the active elements with good commentary and a bit of philosophy about relations and oppression. What we did had me starting to more closely consider how I'll communicate in workshops with the children in Timisoara. Much of what we did today was physical, so I grabbed some good ideas, but I don't want to lose the verbally communicated context. Hopefully, I'll have someone translating the really essential bits and, of course, I won't be engaging in the same type of abstract discussion we do at the university level, but I think language will have to be involved at *some* level.
Unfortunately, I had to skip out during the middle of the workshop because I had a doctor's appointment at the travel clinic. I thought I'd go in and they'd go, "Oh, you're healthy. Go to Romania." Um, yeah. No. I have to call the U.S. tonight and track down whether I've had several vaccinations, including polio, hepatitis A and B, tetanus (had that vaccination in 2002), diphtheria, and typhoid. She went ahead and started me on a rabies series. Romania is apparently not as safe, health-wise, as I assumed it to be.
Went back to the workshop and did some image work. Good stuff, though I found a pattern in terms of what my age group and culture tend to resort to when illustrating oppression.
Later my course group had a meeting with our supervisors and we shuttled back and forth between practical deadline-type concerns and academic discussion. I'd done a rough of my dissertation proposal, so Jock asked to use it to clarify what was needed. That meant me getting feedback and critique in front of everyone else, but it was helpful. However, with essays looming, I'm just going to spend a half hour tonight and then call it done. The sort of good news is that the essays can be turned in as late as the 25th or so. It's *sort* of good because I think I'm still going to try and get mine in on the 18th since I fly out the 19th. It's unlikely that I'll have the time, energy, or resources to work on them in Timisoara. So, while it's nice to have some flexibility, the news doesn't change things much for me.
After the meeting Max had me over for a cup of tea. I needed that. I needed a chance to sit down with someone and chat about other things besides school. We ended up on some really interesting topics. We also messed around with his video-recorder and ended up reading a poem of his (and a tacked-on ending I wrote after reading it) on tape. We alternated stanzas, so it was kind of fun to notice how we differ in style. Then we taped making up an on-the-spot trade-off poem. That was odd. It started with purple blossoms, ran through meeting an old lady who didn't see us, and ended in a concrete box that was safe, real, but not beautiful.
Walking home through the rain, I could smell the earth and all the rioting green growing things. It was a good day.