Epic Hiking and Wine Tasting Adventures

Well I've finally gotten out of Wellington!  And I picked the perfect day to go do it: it was beautiful on Saturday.  I went along on an organized trip for the International students at Massey, there were about 35 of us on the trip, so not the total population of international students here, but a good chunk of them.  The trip was two parts: a wine tasting at Alana Estate and then off to Patuna Farm for either horseback riding or a chasm walk.  I chose to go on the chasm walk.  It was epic.  Before that, however, they thought it might be a good idea to loosen us up with a wine tasting--so on to the wine tasting!

Does this look like a hill?

We arrived at Alana Estate around 10, and the drive there was ridiculous.  It took us through these small mountains that our bus driver playfully called "hills."  Essentially these roads were insanely large, with windy roads and tiny guard rails.  There was even a section of gravel uphill, with other cars whipping around the corners, craziness.  Anywho, once we got past the hill country it was really flat and full of vineyards.  The day was perfect and sunny, practically cloudless sky!  Before we actually got into the tasting part of the venture the manager took us on a short tour of the vineyard.  We walked up to rows and rows of grapevines, and he told us about how the soil needs to be rocky, with little rain.  They don't even spray for pests because it gets soaked into the soil and then into the grapes, so it destroys the flavors.  The best kind of soils for wine making are the ones with mineral rich soils.  They grow three different grapes for wine at Alana: Sauvignen Blanc, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir.

Hohepa

This was a jam packed weekend!  I went on that epic hike, it was St Patrick's day, I went to the Opera, and I moved flats all in the same weekend.  Insanity.  Anyway, this post is about the Opera so I'm going to talk about opera.

After the epic hike I had barely enough time to run back to my flat, change into something opera-worthy and then book it down to meet my friend Josh at the Opera.  This was another show that was part of the International Arts Festival, which ended this weekend.  The opera was another world premiere show and, similar to Troilus and Cressida it was Maori based.  Unlike the last show, however, the majority of Hohepa is sung in English.  There is some Maori sung, in fact it was expertly woven into verses between English lines.  The opera tells the story of a Maori chief when New Zealand was just beginning to be colonized.  Hohepa is friends with some of the settlers, and it tracks their interaction and the interaction between the two cultures.  It's a short opera, only two hours long, and written by Jenny McLeod, a native Kiwi. Here's an interview with the lead vocalist of the show.

The show had a couple theatrical conventions in it that I'd noticed in Troilus and Cressida, one of them being the hand shaking.  Well, to my good fortune, my friend Josh has more Maori knowledge than I do and told me that most of the time when people are shaking their hands by their sides it has a sort of spiritual meaning.  Part of the Maori culture is a very deep connection with your ancestors.  Indeed that's almost entirely what Hohepa was all about; bringing back the bones of your ancestors to their native land.  Anyway, the idea behind shaking your hand by your side is like an indication that your ancestors are with you, but Josh said it has a lot to do with that's being said.  Sometimes, like when I described the kind of threat it looked like in  Troilus and Cressida, it can mean things other than respect for ancestors, but Josh said that he'd have had to heard what the lines were to have told me more.

The other very cool convention of Hohepa was one of the characters, ironically the same actor who played Troilus in  Troilus and Cressida, was really solely responsible for these kind of presentational dances.  He was always in Maori dress and would do almost a mini haka throughout the show whenever someone started talking about war or fighting the Maori.  They did several very short hakas within the opera as well, but they changed them around so that they weren't necessarily chanting it, but more singing the haka in keeping with opera.

There isn't much else to say about Hohepa; it was a typical modern opera if you're into those sorts of things.   It was only about two hours long, in two acts, with a bit of a discordant score at parts.  I'm not the biggest fan of operas, but I did enjoy this one.

Troilus and Cressida

Last night offered me another chance to indulge my theatrical side.  It was the premiere of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida in te reo (spoken Maori).  I went because it had the two key ingredients going for it: the words 'free' and 'theatre' combined in one phrase.  The event was part of the International Arts Festival that I've mentioned in previous posts, and held at the Te Papa museum.  Now, because it was a live performance, the 'no photography' rule applies, which means I don't have any fun pictures to share with you.  Instead I shall apply my extreme description skill to get across this unique show.  Bare with me guys, as some of you know I've got a research project that deals with Maori performance integrated into theatre, so this will be an extra long post.

A description of the translation technicalities can be found here, so I won't get too into that here.  First, I suppose I should give a quick run down about Shakespeare's version of the show.  At the very bare bones of it, the story is structured around the ancient battle for Helena between Greece and Troy.  Even though that's the conflict that provides the backdrop, the action of the story is about Troilus (Toroihi in this show) and Cressida (Kahiri) and their love affair.  Much like any of Shakespeare's love stories, Troilus is a Trojan and Cressida is a Greek.  Now that's really all of the story that you need for me to talk about the Maori interpretation of it.  If you want some more here's the wikipedia entry on it.

First Week of School...Kinda

So, as some of you know, it's autumn here in Wellington now which means I FINALLY started classes!!  Well, I've kind of started classes.  The school set up is a little bit different here than in the States: they run their classes with a lecture and a lab/workshop/tutorial component part for each class (or paper as they call it).  That means that I have lecture one day a week for one hour, and a workshop one day a week for two hours for each class.  Since I'm only taking three classes while I'm over here, I wanted more time for adventuring and I have an theatrical independent study to work on from back home, that means that I'm only in class for four days a week.  I have all of my lectures on Tuesday: five hours straight yay, and then one workshop on Wednesday, one Thursday, and one Friday.  However, it was the first week so that meant that the workshops for two of my classes got canceled--I got done on Wednesday!!  So I went and did something fun on Wednesday night, but before I get into that I'll let you know what kind of classes I'm taking.

First off, I'm taking a Media Script Writing class, a 300 level writing course about how to analyze and write scripts for television and movies.  This was the only class where I had both the lecture and workshop for the first week.  For this class we're going to spend quite a lot of time watching bits of movies, so our lecture is slated for three hours instead of one, even though we won't always be meeting for the full three.  We jumped right into class, talking about our favorite scripts what makes them good and why scripts are written and for whom.  We even got to do a bit of writing already in our workshop class; we were given the task to come up with a scene that was impossible to film and I'm glad to tell you that my lecturer (they don't call them professors here since most of them aren't full-fledged professors) said that I came up with the best idea.  I proposed that the most impossible scene or type of show to film would be a reality show of someone being a CIA agent, or trying to become one.    I was pretty proud of that =)