May - September 2013

Intracultural practice in classroom settings including classroom performances of Oedipus the King by David Greig, (First Year) Good Person of Setzuan by Brecht, ( Second Year) Herons by Simon Stephens (First Year) and Random by Debbie Tucker Green (First Year)

Oedipus the King is set in South Africa where townships sit alongside wealth and Greig makes the point that this could as easily be the housing estates in Scotland hugging the edge of affluence. My first year students used their own cultural contexts: Anglo Australian, British,  Indigenous, Fiji/Samoan, Swedish, French, South African and Ethiopian to find an ease and power to help bring them to a text which on first glance seemed unfamiliar. Similarly the second year students with various diasporic and Australian  backgrounds found their way to the Brecht which we set amongst the urban poor of a metropolis (Sydney).  We used the original Dessau score for the songs and I was reminded of when I was a student at The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama playing the very same score for our first year production of The Good Person. Herons by Simon Stevens and Random by Debbie Tucker Green completed my intracultural work in the classroom in 2014.