SCENE Wellington - Issue 10 NOV 2018

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I SSUE 10 | NOV EM BER 2018 M a da m Bu tterf ly | A c tu al Fac t | Th e Tu rk i sh D ogs are Rac i st

WGTN

MADAM BUTTERFLY

BY GIACOMO PUCCINI Eternity Opera Directed by Alex Galvin Hannah Playhouse Fri 16th Nov 7:30pm, Sun 18th 2:00pm Tues 20th, Thurs 22nd, Sat 24th 7:30pm TICKETS: $60/$50/$40.

BOOKINGS: www. iTicket.co.nz So… opera. Something I have only in recent years experienced in the flesh. And, not being musically educated, I tend to see an opera as a play that's sung. Though usually I can't understand the words and people seem to just stand around in groups. But kind of intriguing.

Hoping to get a better grasp of the subject, I talked to director of this production, Alex Galvin. Asking, what is it about opera?

“Opera at it's best combines the experience of a great stage play with wonderful music. Just like a great film can, it creates a fully immersive experience combining storytelling, acting, music, set design, costumes and lighting to create something truly unique and very special.”

Okay. Madam Butterfly - a title I knew well but was all I knew until I googled the story-line.

A fifteen-year-old Japanese girl marries a US Marine who always intends to leave her one day for a proper American

ISSUE 10 NOVEMBER 2018

wife. Shortly after the marriage, he leaves Japan, she gives birth to his child and waits for him to come back.

Which he eventually does, but, unexpectedly for Butterfly, he has the American wife who has agreed to bring up the child. When she realises what's going on, Butterfly blindfolds her child, puts an American flag in his hands and then goes off and slits her throat....

Alex is enthusiastic. “ Madam Butterfly has always been one of my favourite operas. It combines some of the most beautiful music ever composed with an intelligent, powerful story filled with fascinating characters, particularly the lead Butterfly - one of the strongest female lead roles in all of opera.”

I wonder about the story - seems to me to be yet another powerless woman waiting about for a man and then seeing death as preferable to life without him. But admittedly, that's just from Wikipedia's description.

Alex sees it otherwise. “Our production shows Madam Butterfly as an intelligent and strong woman fighting against circumstances and the traditions of the era. The opera clearly shows the unjustness she has to combat, but also highlights her courage, which is just as much an inspiration for today’s audience as it was when first composed.”

Well yes, I guess women are still combating injustice on a daily basis....

They're setting the production in the early 1950's rather than the early 1900's. Keeping the location of Nagasaki, Japan. Ten years after World War Two, we see many young people embracing the emergence of American culture,

while the older generation rebels against it - which Eternity Opera say complements the story of Madam Butterfly perfectly.

“We've wanted to put on this one since our inception in 2016. Puccini’s music has the genius of being both extremely accessible but also very complex. It requires singers and instrumentalists of the highest quality, but the music resonates for everyone from opera lovers to first-timers.”

“I think Actual Fact is innovative in both the approach to making the show and the experience of the show itself. An invitation to consider the way you perceive information and make story, rather than a play about characters considering how they perceive things.”

CREATED BY ISOBEL MACKINNON AND MEG ROLLANDI Bats Theatre Friday November 16th - Saturday Dec 1st 8pm TICKETS: $25/$20) BOOKINGS: www.bats.co.nz Actual Fact is this year's STAB commission at Bats Theatre. STAB originated in 1995 from Bats's desire to initiate a commission that allowed theatre artists to experiment in a supportive environment.

The show's described in publicity as “a real-life yarn about friendship, desperation and truth. It’s about border crossings, immortal fishermen, subterranean boats, the mother of wolves, and an historian who speaks to Jesus.

But mostly, it’s the story of a dog, and her man.”

Their aim is the creation of “innovative, pioneering, performance work” from “artists who strive to push boundaries”. And this support comes in at between $50,000 and $65,000 - which to most of those working in theatre is an unimaginably large amount.

Isobel and Meg, this year's STAB winners, are suitably excited.

Says Meg: “STAB is a great opportunity to work on a piece over a year with huge support from Bats. Part of the selection process involves articulating how you are innovating with the work.

It means you can make a more outrageous proposal.

STAB also provides resources to work through ways that technical and design elements can be explored and employed as integral to the dramaturgy, which is often not possible in processes that have less resources or support attached to them.”

And how does their show fit the criteria?

Is the dog a metaphor?

“It was performed on a two-storey set, with action happening on both levels simultaneously, and it was in Spanish, with abridged English language surtitles displayed above.I found the experience of watching the show extremely frustrating and also really activating. I was acutely aware of how much information I was missing as a result of my monolingualism, my one set of eyes, my inability to focus on more than one thing at once. The distilled translation on the surtitles was not the ‘whole’ story, I was aware of how much was being omitted. Neither was the slice of the action I chose to focus on the ‘whole picture’- there was always something else happening at the same time. The information I was receiving was more than I could take in. I had to make choices about what to give my attention to. I had to edit it. Those choices, ‘edits’, impacted my perception and understanding of the story. That really stayed with me, because it felt like a microcosmic experience of how we are constantly editing the world around us in order to understand it.”

THE TURKISH DOGS ARE RACIST

So where has this intital experience taken them?

BY BARNABY OLSEN AND THE COMPANY

“With Actual Fact we’re taking a really playful approach to perception-using information, ‘facts’, like Lego blocks to build elaborate meanings, and then pulling them apart again to reconstruct the same information into a different story. We’re creating a very multi-sensory experience that approaches different senses as if they were different channels for communication, or different languages …

How do you interpret information when you are listening as opposed to watching? These are some questions we want the audience to experience through the show.”

Directed by Jonathan Price Bats Theatre Tuesday 20th November – Saturday 1st December 6:00pm TICKETS: $22/$15 BOOKINGS: www.bats.co.nz

I ask what processes have been used to create this multisensory experience.

Meg answers this one. “We've had a series of workshops to test out some of our more abstract or experiencebased ideas. We want it to be an immersive experience, so finding ways to achieve that has been a vital part of creating it. Working in a semi-devised format has been rewarding, (and mind-bending at times). We have been able to work through some quite abstract concepts towards the visceral, multi-sensory experience we hope to create for our audiences.”

Their publicity quotes Margaret Atwood:‘There’s the story… then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.’

Which leaves me questioning the Lego blocks of elaborate meaning I have built in this article and having to resist pulling it apart and reconstructing it differently...

I think we're going to have to be there.

And helpfully - for me, at least - these words will be in English.

be discussed. It was a real eye-opener for me, but I also just loved the phrase.”

For further explanation Isobel looks back to a show called Cineastas which she saw at the New Zealand Festival two years ago.

ACTUAL FACT

The Hannah Playhouse venue is a more intimate one than opera is usually performed in, but Alex see this as a major advantage. Performed by a cast of sixteen, accompanied by a fourteen-piece orchestra led by music director Matthew Ross, this Madam Butterfly will allow audiences to engage closely with characters - plus, the words can be heard clearly.

“She is and she isn’t. She is, in as much as the story is about how and why we choose the parts of our travel that seem important enough to keep with us, when our adventures end. She isn’t, because she’s a real dog, and this is a story about real things that happened to her.”

The original OE experiences were Barnaby's. For a while he mapped out first drafts in his head. Then put it down on paper “in a way that I had hoped would be somewhat rich, but that could also be used as the bare bones of a story for any director or collaborator to muck around with to see what else was there”.

The title comes word for word from an interaction Barnaby Olsen had with an old Turkish man at a roadside diner just north of Istanbul. Who had an interesting - and for Barnaby pretty accurate - take on canine race relations in rural Turkey.

I suggest the word "racist" is one we are uncomfortable with in NZ, mainly, in my opinion, because we try to deny the extent of it's presence in our society. What does Barnaby think?

First, he says that addressing racism in NZ (or anywhere for that matter) isn’t really the show's mission.

But he adds: “Throughout that roadside diner exchange, I remember being far less comfortable than he was with some of it's content - perhaps evidence that you’re right, and that older, more ethnically diverse places produce people who are more ready to have some of these discussions? It was apparent that there were two very different people there, who were trying to have an important conversation, but were hamstrung a little by the fact that they came from two very different ethnic and cultural landscapes, with two very different attitudes towards how these sorts of things should

Though a lot of it was recorded pretty meticulously. “I went back to people who had originally told me Turkish folk stories, and recorded them telling their stories in their own words. Those parts have remained largely verbatim. It's a real mix.”

Once Jonathan Price came on board as director, they did a month of devising. “That did great things for our understanding of where the heart might be in this work and how we might access it.”

Has the material changed shape and emphasis?

“It always changes, I think. The angle changes and so what the content looks and feels like changes as well.

I’m really open to that sort of work. Testing new stuff out means that you often stumble over an ingenious new way of showing something.”

So how close to the truth does the final script sit?

“The way that Turkish storytellers that I met told stories is a huge influence on the work. That allows us to play with blurring the lines between the obvious and the mythological - a prominent trope of the Turkish storytelling I encountered."

But yes, says Barnaby, so far everything feels authentic.

Heightened, but authentic.

I like the sound of heightened authenticity. In Turkey.

With a dog.

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