My policy when I return to New Zealand is simple: Say Yes. When friends invite me to events I haven’t heard about, I gratefully reply, “Yes, please,” buy a bottle of wine to ensure future invitations, and toddle off. In the past two weeks, my strict Embrace Yes policy has been my ticket to family dinners, road trips, studio visits, gallery rambles, video marathons, high tea and three evenings of Culchah in downtown Auclkland and its environs. Having a great time, wish you were here, but since you’re not, some impressions of a benefit concert for earthquake relief, a drama debut, and an authors' panel…
Singing for Christchurch
Bobby McFerrin walking onto the Sky Tower stage, dressed as casually as if headed to the corner grocery store, wordlessly seating himself and launching into an equally wordless song from somewhere – Africa? Asia? Here and not here. Mesmerizing a sold-out audience, engaging the phalanx of choir members seated behind him – who haven’t met him before, haven’t practiced anything they’re now being shown to sing —with a flick of the wrist, a nod, a raised eyebrow. Turning to the audience later to ask, “D’you know Ave Maria?” and on nothing but trust and 10,000 hours of experience, singing the Bach underlay while the audience, who from the sound of it were given an evening off from singing in the Angel’s Chorus, sang the whole aria, knew the tune, the words, and ended in an Amen of harmony we must have practiced over and over in an alternate universe. Inviting two volunteers to come and sing with him one at a time, one providing tuneful comic relief and the other a heartstopping seductive improvised vocal pas de deux that made me realize when their last chord ended that I hadn’t breathed the whole time they were singing.
A Night at the Theeaytah
Evening at the Maidment Theatre, downtown Auckland: Enter the theatre for the 6.30 (!) performance, settle in among an audience divided between the usual grey heads, a section of high school students and a dozen or so youths inexplicably dressed in the Full Mime – striped shirts, white faces, gloves. The elaborate set is aswirl with cloud or fog as we take our seats, then houselights dim and the metaphorical curtain rises on an original play built around songs by a “world famous in New Zealand” (local phrase, not mine) musician. A home grown professional production, a Kiwi go at an experimental play: surreal melodrama interrupted by music. This particular experiment ticked all the Houston we have a problem boxes: a twice life size papier mache zebra head, a dead man inhabiting a 7 year old’s body, a father digging digging digging in the garden and bewildering rock songs with no discernible connection to the action, sung by actors who turn to the audience, a la Ethel Merman, before beginning to sing, giving us that split second to pray intensely, no, please, no, not another song. Hard to know what to say when my Kiwi friends turned to me, faces beaming, after the shamelessly milked ovation and asked how I liked it. Thought it might be a good moment to grab a mask, turn to the rows behind me, and belt out a tune. Still, better than the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical I saw in LA a decade ago at which people applauded the chandelier on the set. They would have loved the zebra head.
Authors Talking Among Themselves
Setting: a former convent newly born as an art museum filled with contemporary NZ art bought by the heir of a meat packing fortune. Title offered by the panel of authors: Nazis, Natives, and Nudity. And yet even with that gotcha title we were the only three audience members (other than Grae – one name-- the “temporary art” installer there to video the evening) until a minute before the event began. But then the magic of the written word takes over, along with the personalities of the three writers who read to us and questioned each other and somehow included us in the discussion, which ranged from how “shutting the door to hold the audience at bay” while writing keeps you from second guessing your own voice to how you manage to sit at your computer again after a savage book review. Then they kicked off their Lucite 6” heels, switched chairs, and tucked their knees under them to discuss the ignominy of being disinvited to appear at a local library event because of the sex scenes the people in this “funny little Presbyterian country we live in,” were afraid you’d read and the importance of a good editor-- especially if you are dyslexic and “can’t spell for toffee.” All of this, the reading of the torrid sex scene in question, the talk about writing to make time stop around a single image – is done with the meat packing heir who has funded all of it --the building, the art, the writer’s residency, the evening’s panel --sitting with his Tom Wolfe linen suit and his circus striped socks in the front row, with good, bizarre and downright odd sculpture visible through the window behind the authors, and with a glass of good NZ pinot gris in hand.
Homework
Compare and contrast.
Watch Bobby’s experiment with the pentatonic scale, then try to keep yourself from wondering how hard-wired we are for music.
If I’d seen this video of Poor Boy, the Split Enz song that lent its title to the play, I might have known to expect a wander down Surreal Boulevard.
Scroll to the May 1 2009 blog entry, Collections, for more on what to do with an inherited meat-packing fortune.