Arts reflections

Mentioned in Dispatches:

For the opening of the Waikato Museum in October 1987, Dr Kirsty Cochrane, then lecturing in Waikato University’s English department, was commissioned by the Hamilton Civic Choir to write the words for a work to be known as The Waikato Song.

Her words and lyrics were set to music by Edwin Carr and in performance the work encapsulated the essence of the river and its history with a remarkable authority and potency.

Just on thirty years after that Waikato Song premiere, on this Friday, February 16, a formidably talented ensemble will present Witi Ihimaera’s dramatised history of the Waikato River, entitled Flowing Water.

Ihimaera’s longer, more operatic libretto has been set to music by Dr Janet Jennings who is also closely associated with the University of Waikato. Jennings, already well practised in the aligning of music and words – her Shakespeare Songs sing beautifully – has created a score in which the rhythms of the Ma¯ ori language evoke a sense of bicultural history and provide an auditory ambience which carries new depths of meaning for Ihimaera’s already sensitive version of the Waikato story.

The music generates both tension and equanimity as it illuminates a narrative which moves through a natural history to early Ma¯ ori settlement, the arrival of Pa¯ keha¯ settlers with its consequent clash of culture and power, and finally the development of a peace, uneasy as it may be at times, which is the Waikato today. The river is the historical conduit. Here the people are the agents of change. The words convey the narrative, and the music the emotion and atmosphere of the history as a whole.

The presenting cast is dynamic, and includes some superb voices. The presence of Maori kapa haka experts offers exciting contrasts with music emanating from European traditions, and the event is something no one in the Waikato should miss. It can be experienced from the 8pm start in the Hamilton Gardens on Friday or Saturday, February 16 and 17.

FESTIVAL REVIEW MINIS

The full reviews have already appeared on Stuff, and these are an abbreviated reminder of what you missed among the variety of events at the festival: Audiences have become accustomed to employing only two of their senses, visual and auditory, but taste, having something deliberately connected with the show, in our mouths? Never, Until tonight.

Williams’ drinks and canapes were delivered to the tables, and Mayall directed the audience to smell the drink, taste, and feel it, while listening to his original compositions and consciously linking these rarely connected senses.

The first round finished. There was silence. Stunned mullet came to mind. We went What the??&#^*#!! But Mayall encouraged conversation and gradually it began, tentative moments of ‘‘What the hell do we talk about!?!?’’ . . . but growing, through an evening filled with similar sensory experiences, to full-blooded discussion.

What experiences we had. What a shout for the enormous fun, enjoyment, and stimulating satisfaction to be gained from

such an originally memorable offering. Let me tell you, oh patient reader, that this homage to the iconic and immortal Edith Piaf is full of genuine passion and understanding, redolent of the unforgettable performances that made Piaf famous, and with music as relevant today as it ever was.

Piaf is quoted, ‘‘It is impossible for me to sing if I am not in love …’’ and the lovers, the tragedies, the peaks and successes are compressed into an hour-and-a-half but the essence of Piaf is a constant.

The historical Piaf phenomenon was remarkable for the way in which it involved listeners as though they were experiencing a window on their own lives. Tonight’s performance was so true to the legend one could not miss the range of emotional response in the audience, the wonderfully nostalgic self-referencing, and that enormous lift one has in the presence of passion and truth.

Am I sorry I went? Mais non, mes amis. Vraiment, non. Je ne regrette rien …

This was a performance to savour, and to remember. Even the witty title was a delight.

Set in the 19th century, when men rushed to find gold and women bred furiously and life was, as the cliche has it, mostly nasty, brutish, and short, it resonates in quite extraordinary ways with life in 2018.

In the day of Mary Best, a (fictional) colonist from England who was part doctor’s nurse aid, part maker of herbal medicines, and part the Everywoman of the colonial period, pharmaceuticals came from plants, wayside herbs and cultivated vegetation.

Playwright Bishop, a real-life authority on medicinal plants, used plants grown from seeds that her ancestral colonial alter ego might have brought from the Old Country to demonstrate Victorian pharmaceutical thinking, like using honeysuckle to alleviate homesickness or angelica for heartburn and flatulence.

We are constructed by our history. Experiencing it in today’s format was as illuminating as it was entertaining.