Thinking Theatrically/Acting Locally

Abstract

I understood that Maori can only be a hybrid, as in traditional Maori society the concept of a theatre was foreign. I also realised that, because our had to be a hybrid, I should understand and hold firm to my traditions and Maori point of view. Otherwise, the I created would become purely generic.-Hone Kouka, State of Contemporary Maori (241)Spirits do not live easily in kitchen-sink naturalism.-David Carnegie and David O'Donnell (221)Here in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand), are committed to the integration of theory and practice in our teaching and research at all levels. For us, it is vital that students come to a theatrical consciousness of the diverse threads that have been interwoven in the making of contemporary New Zealand and performance: European, American, and British theatrical traditions together with Maori and Pasifika ritual and performance practices, past and present, here and elsewhere. This is especially true when come to teach Maori plays in classes that are predominantly Pakeha (i.e., non-Maori). Theatrical engagement, that is, has the potential to move students beyond lip service toward embodied understandings of the roles they, and others, might play in life, as well as on stage, here as elsewhere.Every year, in our foundational courses, I trace an historical arc that begins with the Greeks in the first semester and in the second semester with Theatre: Realism and Beyond, moves through the realist plays of Ibsen and Strindberg to culminate with the work of several generations of New Zealand playwrights: Bruce Mason, Mervyn Thompson, Hone Kouka, Miria George, and Eli Kent. In this, I am challenged to remain mindful that while I have lived in this place for a long time, I am not of this place-not in the way that Kouka (and others) insist upon-and as such, I teach these plays and the culture(s) they represent through a process of encounter as approach to, rather than arrival at, full understanding of the Othernesses contained within.In this essay, I want to share in some depth my experiences in teaching two plays by prominent Maori playwright, Hone Kouka: Nga Tangata Toa (The Warrior People) and Waiora (Health or Wellbeing). These remarkable works are deliberately modeled on Ibsenian drama while also representing two of the earliest and, in my view, still most powerful experiments in bringing Maori ritual and traditional performance onto postcolonial New Zealand stages.2 We read and analyze the play texts, of course. We look closely at the points where English gives way to te reo Maori (Maori language), shifting from prose to verse and back again. Just as importantly, though, because the practical component for the semester is based on Uta Hagen's Respect for Acting, the techniques that shaped my own training and outlook many years ago, apply her Stanislavskian approach to acting to selected scenes with problematic results. We hit brick walls. While the characters are driven by desires that can be investigated and activated, the language is too formal, the scenes abruptly broken: by private reverie; by figures, ghosts, tupuna,3 or inexplicable strangers; by karanga (a call, or chant, of welcome), waiata (song), haka (dance) and whaikorero (oratory).The pleasures peculiar to teaching theatre, for me, begin with the potentially profound differences between reading a play as a text and engaging with it as performance, both as the product of and as material for creative exploration and idea making. In this, I find myself following Diana Taylor, who begins her discussion of The Archive and the Repertoire by recognizing that we learn and transmit knowledge through embodied action, through cultural agency, and by making choices. Performance, she continues, functions as an episteme, a way of knowing, not simply an object of analysis (xvi). …