I popped over to the Pacific nation of Vanuatu last week for a spot of sun (my God it is freezing here in winter in Melbourne at about 13 C during the day). Happy to report the temperature was twice what I was experiencing back home (though you’ll see from one of the photos below, that with my skin pigment, I will only ever get a darker shade of pale!).

But while I was there, I tried to discover if the performing arts of any kind are taught in schools on any of the many islands that make up this beautiful country?

Well, the answer is most likely no, but you’ll see below an image of a theatre building for youth. This was effectively a youth centre of sorts, with privately funded training programs for disadvantaged and/or unemployed youth. The workers were proud to show me around the centre and I discovered one of several programs included teenagers rehearsing and performing plays on a simple stage.

I also passed another building (unfortunately closed at the time) for the Vanuatu Amateur Theatrical Society.

So even though acting is not formally taught in the schools of Vanuatu, my travels indicated at least a presence of theatre performances of some kind in the capital Port Vila.

There’s a full-time Drama teaching position available in my department at my school, starting in 2009, if anyone is interested in applying.

Avila College is a Catholic girls school in Melbourne, situated in Mount Waverley with a student enrolment of 1150.

The job will most likely entail teaching Years 7-10 Drama, with the extra curricular activities of contributing a Drama item or two to a Creative Arts Festival in May and coordinating a Years 7-10 festival of student-written plays in November.

The job is advertised as English/Drama, with the split being about half/half between the disciplines.

See last Saturday’s Age newspaper for advertisement or online details (including online application form) are located on the school website here.

Applications close September 12.

Justin Cash

A note for those of you who use my other website Justin’s Theatre Links, a fully annotated and categorised links directory to thousands of theatre-related websites from across the globe. The website has just gone through a major upgrade and until search engines such as Google crawl all the pages within the site, you may be receiving some dead pages if querying the site via a search engine. Until then, it’s best to just enter the home page URL www.theatrelinks.com into your browser and navigate the rest of the site’s web pages from there.