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Page 4
2004.12.06. 20:13
LOOKING BACK ON…
…our first year as English majors. When you are at university there are many things going on around you: contests, parties, performances, trips… So let’s review three different kinds of events.
The Freshmen’s Ball
Every school or university organizes one like this at the beginning of the academic year. If it wasn’t for this ball we wouldn’t even feel that the academic year started. Though our Freshmen’s Ball was a bit boring at some points, we had a great time. Especially because we had two brave representatives whom we supported: Renáta Hegedűs and Béla Kiss.
Dressed up like genuine English persons, they did their best. They weren’t at a loss either when they had to introduce themselves using words like "Xerox" and "clothes peg" or when they had to clean the toothpaste off the balloon. This would have been an easy thing to do if the drawing-pins hadn’t been floating in the 2-inch-thick water next to the balloons.However, the most "exciting" test was egg-slipping. The female member of the competing couple had to slip an egg through her partner’s trousers … from his left ankle to the right one. They were pressed for time so anyone can imagine what happened if the egg got lost…Both the supporters and the competitors had a good time. The contest, won by the Economics majors, was followed by an extraordinary party. Our representatives’ message to the new English major "freshmen" is: "There’s no need for anyone to be afraid. Enter for the contest; we’ll be there to support you."
In the middle of the year: The Christmas Party
This is a little show in English organized and created by the English majors. Our teachers and The Blackbeers (a local band singing Irish songs) were our guests.This party had a surprise or two in store for us. Who would have thought that our teachers can be so … cool?In the first part of the evening we had the floor with two performances: Tree and Bank Robbery, Christmas carols, songs and a quiz. The Tree was perfect for weaving into what we had studied at the Phonetics and Phonology (2Ph) seminar. Just as in a silent film, the play stopped at a given time. At that moment a piece of paper was shown around bringing our attention on a certain element of the play. For example: after a remark full of anger we were shown a famous question from the 2Ph seminar: "Is he polite and friendly or reserving judgment?" We had a Bank Robbery performed as well.
Though it was no more than a five-minute-long play, it revealed a characteristic feature usually associated with the English calmness. The calm cashier sends the robber (a "dangerous criminal" threatening the client and the cashier with a gun-a plastic fork and a paper cutter) away saying that the bank is…closed.The teachers had the floor in the second part. They were the surprise in store. Professor József Csapó was the first to perform. He read out an extremely funny collection of mistakes made by non-native English speakers. Here’s an example: "In a Japanese hotel: You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid."And who would have thought that Attila Kiss that he’s so good at playing the accordion? He joined The Blackbeers for the evening.Probably the person we would have never been thought of as a cool person was Professor Szaffkó. Would you have ever thought of this serious and severe teacher that he occasionally plays the guitar, sings and drinks beer? One of the songs was called "Words don’t come
easy" which reminded us of our not having done the homework once.All in all, the Christmas Party was a great success we’d like to repeat in the forthcoming years.
At the end of the year:The Annual Drama Festival in English For the fourth year now the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Debrecen has organized this festival. The participants are English majors from Hungarian and foreign universities. They present their performances which aren’t longer than one and a half hours. At the end an international jury awards the best productions and the best actors.The winners of the best production award were the students from Pázmány Péter Catholic University. They performed Play by Samuel Beckett. It was a difficult play because the text didn’t offer any foothold to the actors and they couldn’t move (they were in coffins). Unfortunately, the audience missed many of the puns while concentrating on the text itself.Another "winning" play was Blood Relations by Sharon Pollock performed by the students from Debrecen. The story was based on real events. The winner of the best actress award had the main part; she played an actress who was trying to find out the truth about her friend (Lizzie Borden) who had supposedly killed her own parents. The great prize—a five-day trip to London—went to the student who played Lizzie.The most outstanding performance of the festival wasn’t in the competition. The actors of Scenehouse from Szeged were the guests of the festival. They performed an English play, David Tristram’s Forget-Me-Knot like real professionals. During the show we totally forgot that they weren’t professional actors, that we were sitting at a festival, that we had a long day behind us. They were outstanding. I overheard some of the students saying: "They are good, there’s nothing else to be said." The atmosphere was absolutely great. Laughter, long applauses, joy. Competitors congratulated each other, applauded the "rivals", as if they had been colleagues. As a matter of fact, they were colleagues to some extent: they were all performers.
Julienray
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AJÁNLOM AZ OLDALT
