Alan Scott, National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art | August 2006
Alan Scott talks about the 'theatrical success story' of Te Rākau and its grounding in political and social justice
I first met Jim Moriarty when I was sent by the Christchurch Press to review Kia Maumahara at the Christchurch Women’s Prison.
I was impressed enough to offer my services as a voice tutor. Since then I have worked as a dialogue coach and voice tutor on sixteen of Jim’s productions and eventually became a Trustee of his Company.
What follows is not an academic analysis of the work of the Te Rakau Theatre Company, but an attempt by someone who is on the inside, but also reviews theatre from the outside, to explore some of the dimensions of Te Rakau’s work and locate it in a wider context.
"Sterling defense of the 'children of the poor'"
More specifically, I am concerned to show the political elements that exist in the work. For all the talk of Maori theatre and rehabilitative theatre that surrounds Te Rakau, for me first and foremeost, its work is a sterling defense of the “children of the poor,” to use John A. Lee’s phrase.
What the theatre does is offer the dispossessed a voice and reveals to the audience the dark face of the capitalist economic system. While the theatre belongs to Te Rakau, these musings are my own. This is basically how I see the work.
The work of the Maori theatre in education company, Te Rakau Hua O Te Wao Tapu, is well known in New Zealand.
Led by Jim Moriarty, the company works in prisons, youth justice centres and in the community, employing techniques from group therapy, anger management and addiction therapy to enable participants to present public theatre about their lives to a paying audience.
Using Maori ritual, the company breaks with the cultural form of conventional Western theatre to produce a bicultural theatre practice.
'Theatrical success story'
In many respects Te Rakau is one of New Zealand’s theatrical success stories. Despite a frequently hand to mouth existence it presents its productions to thousands of people each year, whether they are patrons of Arts Festivals who have to go into a prison to watch its distinctive brand of a theatre of cruelty, or whether they are school students who pack into gymnasiums to see people of their own age reenact life on the dark side of the hill.
There can never have been a theatre company in New Zealand, or anywhere else for that matter, that has so moved its audiences to tears, for Te Rakau is the theatre where the lost and the damned reveal the pain of lives lived in a manner most of us can hardly comprehend.
The productions are heart wrenching and disturbing, for we are dealing with often desperate people in appalling circumstances. At the same time, though, we know that these are not voices from some distant shore. They live around the corner or are a twenty minute drive from our nice, safe neighbourhood.
What makes Te Rakau’s theatre so distinctive is the neat reversal of the convention which is at the heart of theatre for in Te Rakau actors are not pretending to be real people, rather real people are doing their best to be actors.
People from the other side of the tracks act out the stories of their lives. In doing this they draw the audience into their world, but achieve their own awareness by distancing themselves from it.
This gives us both engrossing drama and transformational therapy. As Jean Paul Sartre said, “Human life begins at the far side of despair" and Te Rakau’s theatre triumphs precisely because it reveals the pain and transcendence of such a philosophy.
'Sense of rebirth, promise of new life'
The three prison productions in Christchurch, Kia Maumahara and Watea at the women’s prison and Te Timatanga Hou at the men’s, had an immense effect on their audiences.
Unquestionably, people left after the shows in an altered emotional state. The plays were sojourns in the underworld, glimpses into the abyss for which most of them, paying their mortgages and going about their daily business, were not prepared.
As the prisoners call into consciousness acts of bludgeoning violence and fearful degradation what becomes unbearable is the realisation that the actors are not playing roles but bearing witness to the destruction of their childhoods.
They become, before the audience’s eyes, yet another stolen generation, a band of little ones society was supposed to protect.
The one consolation left to the audiences is that the productions are also therapeutic processes which carry with them the hope of recuperation and rehabilitation.
It is this, perhaps more than anything else that connects with the audiences who watch Te Rakau’s disturbing and explicit theatre; this sense of rebirth, of people whose lost souls are being born again.
William Wordsworth expressed the promise of new life when he said:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life's star
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.
For Wordsworth being born is being born again. What he is alluding to here is the sense of possibility, of the potential inherent in all people as they begin their life. The baby has a chance to become “fully human” to use Paolo Freire’s term.
For Wordsworth this gift of hope, a gift from god, is the heart of the human condition. Te Rakau’s productions succeed with audiences because they seem to return the participants back to the beginning, to a land of possibility, to a world of light.
'Consciously Māori theatre'
At the same time what also impresses the audiences is that the theatre of Te Rakau Hua O Te Wao Tapu is consciously Maori theatre.
It is not white theatre where racial issues are played out. It is self consciously and uncompromisingly marae theatre.
Its use of karanga, waiata and haka helps to focus the actors, but it also announces the break with the cultural form of conventional theatre, and indicates to the audience the speaker’s rights they will enjoy at the end of the play.
While it is marae theatre it incorporates traditional elements from Western Theatre to produce a truly bicultural theatre experience.
It is this blending of certain elements of western theatre with Maori tikanga that makes Te Rakau’s work so striking.
The theatre draws on elements of Brecht's ensemble style, political theatre and Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, but to this it adds the Maori dimension of the whanau which makes it unique.
The importance of political theatre
Over and above its explicit intention to heal and rehabilitate individuals, Te Rakau is also making a statement about the importance of political theatre which is meant to challenge our traditional notions of Western theatre.
Political theatre is not about the well made play and dry white wine at the interval; it aims to alter the conventions of writing and viewing.
While it is all too easy to stigmatise theatre as high culture for the well to do, and while there are playwrights like Tony Kushner, for example, whose politics are uncompromising, a sense of theatre as a museum where we find ourselves exhibited is hard to shake off.
Political theatre takes several forms. It can take a stance and be polemical, a theatre of protest. It can raise issues and explain: a theatre of education. Or it can give a voice to the silent, the unheard and the down trodden: a theatre of the oppressed.
Lastly, it can take its plays into, and make them among, the community: a theatre of the people. While the productions are anything but polemical, they engage in all the other approaches to a politics of performance
This excerpt was published in full by Alan Scott. Click below to read the full article.
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