The first half of this post was written on Monday morning, when my Facebook feed was filled with happy statuses about a great Sunday, or somewhat less happy about the upcoming return to reality when Monday rolled around.
I have been to the future, my friends, and Monday is not so terrible.
It started with a meeting; or rather, with a phone call as I was about to leave for the meeting. My mad e-mailing seems to be going somewhere, as I was asked for an interview for an assitant teaching position at a nearby international school. Then it was off to the University of Fine Arts, and I didn't really know what I was planning to ask about. The pretext for my meeting, I found out later, was something about wanting to do research on the Royal Ballet, but we soon got past that. As a matter of fact, I just wanted to know them, and be known, and both turned out splendidly.
The meeting took place in the administrative and admissions office, which was simply a large room in one of the long buildings that make up the university. Next door was the music department, its doors wide open and some very lovely music spilling out, and on its other side "Choreographic Arts", though apparently they just teach the theory.
In the middle of the room was a wood table with a teapot, and surrounding it about five or six old desks, retro 70s style, clunky and somewhat gray. One had a slab of rock under one foot to keep it stable. Two of the desks had enormous desktop computers, the kind that look like old TVs. The floor, tiled red and white, was very dusty. Here and there a few pieces of scenery or decorations lay on the floor. It was cool, though, shaded and a couple ceiling fans gently keeping the air circulated.
I guess that's what counts for high tech here. Nonetheless, the man I was meeting was very friendly, passed off a few phone numbers and suggested I meet the teachers at their Secondary School. Exams, he said, are tomorrow, and then vacation, so you should go tomorrow.
Guess where I'm going tomorrow then? Somewhere way up in the north of the city, though really it's maybe 5 km, to a campus that they didn't really know the street address of but knew roughly how to find it and pointed it out on my handy Phnom Penh map. Interview, then secondary school. Sounds like a good day to me...
In any case, I also started my workshops -- due to the Secondary Fine Arts school having their exams, as I had just learned this morning, 11 of my students were not present, leaving me to try and ingratiate myself to the 4 who were present. They were all very nice, don't get me wrong, it's just that the long and the short of it is:
They have never done anything at all like this. I don't speak Khmer, though I do have a translator. They don't even know what 'choreography' is, as with a lot of people; I say it means making dances and they want to slap movement together. But there's more to it, and it's my job to get them to trust me enough to try it this new, strange, and decidedly different way. I'm trying to let them stay in their comfort zone by using movement they are comfortable with, but we are approaching it in a vastly different way than they know and -- well, that's why I'm here, to give them a new way of looking at things.
It was a long three hours, but that's okay; if this is going to work, it's going to take a lot of patience and a lot of attention from me. I bet you anything that the more we go along, the better it will be -- mostly because I'll have a better idea of how to approach it, introduce it, etc. I already do, and looking forward to restarting with the full 15 tomorrow.
Tonight my friend is taking me to a popular expat biweekly event called "Nerd Night," in which people present on something they're a nerd about, from tea drinking to barefoot running, by talking about 20 slides for 20 seconds each.
In the mean time I'm having a quiet dinner at home -- some veggies, some rice cooked with olive oil and salt, and bread. For dessert I decided to have half of what I suspected was a mango, and having never cut a mango before was unsure how to proceed, having somehow gotten into my head I should cut it like an avocado.
It was certainly a mango, but you most certainly do not cut it like an avocado, but juice everwhere aside, it is perfectly ripe and very, very yummy.
Not a bad life at all...
No comments:
Post a Comment