Artsy-Fartsy Nerd

See, it's the Europeanse (or Pakeha in Maori)

I am an artsy-farsty nerd, and I do not regret one bit of it.  I had a choice between going to the opening of the International Arts Festival and going to a toga party, and it was the easiest choice ever.  Arts Fest hands down.  By all accounts of those who chose the later, I made the right choice.  To continue, Wellington hosts an annual International Arts Festival end of February to mid March.  The festival supports venues for all types of art: visual, literary, theatre, dance, and musical.  Tonight was the opening act called "First Contact".  It was an interpretive collaborative work that involved live dancing, singing, percussion and traditional flutes, dj-ing, as well as images projected onto the outside of the museum of history Te Papa.

This was first soloist, playing the conch shell and flute

crazy, his face is huge!!

It started out just with some soft orchestral music and these patterns just rotating on the building.  Occasionally you could make out shapes, or something that looked vaguely like a bird or a fish.  Part of the reason it was so cool was that there was atmospherics in with the music: gulls calling and the ocean, but you were right on the bay as well so I was never really sure if it was the atmospheric music or the actual environment.  It got to be so soothing that you didn't even really notice the spotlight come up on a man dressed all in white on the stage until after he'd been standing there for a while.  He's the first soloist of the evening, and starts playing some traditional looking flutes with these intricate carvings that are projected up onto the wall with the changing images in the background.  Next this guy surreptitiously pulls out a conch shell and starts playing that!  How you play a conch shell I have no idea, but this guy was doing it extremely well.  The next soloist up was a man dressed in a suave black jacket with a feathered hat.  It made him look a little like a jazz man, or a blues artist.  He started up with these really quiet chants that turned in to song at points.  The chants were in Maori (I think, I've heard just enough of it to sort of recognize it, but this was definitely in a different language for sure).  The next person to join them was, surprisingly enough, a dj who started to mix the chanting, music, and song live.  That was probably one of the coolest things--seeing a dj mixing live music.  Between all of this there were two groups that would come out on stage in different dress and do, what looked like, a new take on traditional dance.  They'd come out and dance, and then would start to sing.  It was eerie at times hearing this a cappella group of women and men singing in a language I didn't understand, but was still connecting with.

EDIT: so if anyone's interested in knowing what it actually sounds like, you can check out this little clip I made at the performance Here.


I was absolutely blown away.  You know theatre is good when you can feel yourself get emotionally effected: whether you want to or not.  As the story of Cook first coming to New Zealand unfolded on the walls of Te Papa, I couldn't help but feel a little sad inside to think of how the Maori suffered from that first contact.  As with any first cultural encounter there was misunderstanding, and bloodshed, but the images of Maori artifacts coming out of

You kind of get the idea of the shifting images from this

drawers juxtaposed with readings from Cook's journals brought another kind of sadness to mind.  It was that this culture is now part of a museum: something that people go to look at and say "wow look at those by-gone primitive ways."  It's so hard to express these feelings that were broiling inside me as I watched and listened to this beautiful native singer's voice being played with these images.  It was as if the artists were saying to me, "look how this happened, the world has changed, and so have we, but our culture is still alive."  It was incredible to feel the crowds energy as traditional songs were sung in a new way, or how the dj remixed the chants just said.  It wasn't an assimilation into western culture, but like a morphing of the two into something completely different just as the images projected onto the walls of this museum morphed from colonizer to native, from ocean to land, from symbols to man.

As you can tell, it's really hard to put into words just what's going through your mind as your experiencing a work of art.  I can't wait for more experiences like this from kiwi theatre!