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angels

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ethan
Jan 16 2003
10:38 am

I am currently involved in a Rep. Theatre course her at dordt college, which will eventually be heading out on tour with the Pacific Northwest as our ultimate destination, making stops along the way. We are taking a long one act play called “an appearance of the blessed virgin at a brookline health clinc.” IT deals with several issues, mainly abortion, with an “oops pregnant girl” dealing with what to do juxa posed against the appearance of gabriel to Mary and the whiole christmas story. Our goal is to appraoch from a very post-modern view, using Anne Bogarts viewpoints.
Anyway, one of the things we are doing is as a company exploring every possible resource for ideas of things we can explore, and i have chosen to look into the concept of angels, another issue the play deals with, and i was just wondering what people on this site thought about angels, and if anyone has any good suggestions for reaources and perspectives into the subject.
thanks.

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Adam
Jan 18 2003
07:37 am

Pacific Northwest, huh? Does that include Seattle or Vancouver? I know that in Vancouver the Angels are one of the more well-known white gangs who do a lot of drug trafficking. I don’t know if that interests you at all. Have you read Angels in America?

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JasonBuursma
Jan 18 2003
12:28 pm

Ethan,

Read Daniel 10 – It’s not the part of Daniel you’re thinking of- pretty wild stuff.

Do you have any specific questions about angels or just researching the topic generally?

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BBC
Jan 18 2003
04:43 pm

Besides the Bible, which is an awfully good resource for a whole lot of things :) — C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity has some interesting things to say about the difference between Angels as a creation of God and humans as a creation of God — and springboards off into free will and the value of human praise for God. Good stuff.

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Norbert
Jan 18 2003
06:09 pm

I hate and love to bring this up. The beginning of the Simarillion by Tolkien is an absolutely beautiful account, though fantastic, of the creation of the world. The Valar (angel types) have an incredibly interesting role in that. Though Tolkien hated to have his works directly described as “Christian”, there is a very cool link.
Anybody else impressed by Tolkien’s account of the beginning?

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BBC
Jan 19 2003
07:14 am

Yup. One of the things that works so well about Tolkein’s description of the Valar is that, although they parallel angels, they are not angels — more like Middle Earth’s equivolent of angels. That gives Tolkein some freedom of artisitc depiction. If anyone tries to describe an actual angel outside of the accounts in the Bible, that account will immediately be found to be unorthodox. I would think that would be one of the problems facing this play thing. If you put some guy on stage in a white suit (or a purple cloak, or a robe and halo, or whatever), some yo-yo is going to respond that the Bible doesn’t say that angels wore that kind of thing.

What we are dealing with here is nothing less than the dillema that faces ever Christian artist — do you write about Biblical things and be branded a heretic for getting things wrong, or do you write about worldly things and be branded a heretic for not writing about Biblical things?

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Norbert
Jan 19 2003
11:18 am

That’s one heck of a pessimistic attitude BBC. I’m sure it’s half in jest, but I’m sure it’s also half true. I’d love to visit one of you creative writing classes to see how you challenge your kids to balance this.

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BBC
Jan 19 2003
01:21 pm

I have my up days and my down days….

Actually, for the most part I am a pretty upbeat kind of guy, but it gets frustrating when discussing literature and some Christians (probably not even very many, but they sure are loud) don’t seem to cut artists a whole lot of slack in any direction.

Then something happens like the fact that I am reading my daughter The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and I remember that grace finds a way to shine through.

I’m not sure I always do such a good job of balancing the tensions for the christian writer in my creative writing classes, Norb, especially not this past semester. I have 26 kids in the class. I can deal with that in a Senior english class, but for Creative Writing, it was just too much.

Say, wasn’t this thread about angels?

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BBC
Jan 19 2003
01:23 pm

Where is Ethan in all this? He started it, after all. Ethan, can you tell us more aobut the production?

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ethan
Jan 20 2003
05:11 am

the production is going to be approached using Anne Bogart’s viewpoints, a very postmodern approach to theatre and directing, based much more on movement and relation in space and working off of impulse than the more structured, psychological approach to theatre most of us are accostomed too. The play deals with angels by addressing the very things that you talked about, BBC, the fact that any human approach to portraying angels is going to be flawed, and hoepfully will directly challenge everyone who sees it to really think about what “ANGEL” means. Because this word is everywhere,right? Almost an Angel, Angels in the outfield, Angels in America, You are my special Angel, touched by an angel, angel eyes, angel food cake. Babies are “little angels,” our loved ones are angels. And every single one of those things I just mentioned are unbiblical perceptions of angels. I don’t think that we will put an actor on stage in a white suit wit wings to represent an angel. Actually, the feeling i get right now, and i have no idea what the director wants, but what i would suggest if he asked me, is that Gabriel be dressed in a t-shirt and jeans with a leather jacket, like someone who walked straight out of an Elvis movie. I know we are planning to get images of angels (and everything else we want to address in the production, but we want as wide a variety of angels as possible, so that we can show a slide of a precious moments angel and the next instant show a slide of someones interpreatation of the angels described in Revelation.

that was a bad description of what we want, but i hope it helped some. Basically, i would love anything you can give me, no matter how off the wall or crazy it may seem.

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BBC
Jan 26 2003
09:43 am

It has always amazed me that the one thing consistent in all Biblical descriptions of angels is that they are scary. They always seem to reassure people (except when they are in disguise) that there is no need to be afraid. What amazes me about this is that we have somehow turned angels into little big-eyed precious moments children with fluffy wings. Nothin scary abou that. Frankly, my grandma could take down one of those cute little things.