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.