March 2013

March 19, 2013. OK, so trying a blog again for the new play Klaem long lada ia…climb the ladder. The play explores the drift  towards a politics that flirts with organized crime on the one hand but goes unquestioned, because at the other end of the scale, poverty is growing, as shown in the  play by a group of young men on a building site and their wives in the settlement who can focus only on making a pittance to survive.

Rehearsals start next week; this week we are reconfiguring the stage .We’re acting on split levels a lot more than in the past and because one of the main locations is a building site, we’re using bricks and scaffolding to give it that atmosphere. The play has a large amount of chorus in it too which I hope to stage using all the actors, with people jumping out of the chorus to take on a character; even sometimes taking a line of a character whilst almost simultaneously part of the chorus. This means we need to stylize the costumes a bit so that everyone can be on stage a lot of the time as chorus without having to change or be too associated through costume with their character when they are in the chorus.

For the first part of the year we have been making and touring a 45 minute verbatim piece on different kinds of violence in our society. In December last year Joseph Marae, an elderly man, was killed by a drunk youth who was trying to drive away from a fight. He ran Joseph over and the car dragged him along the road . Angry residents stoned the bus. The owner of the bus returned with a gang, smashing up people’s houses in the street including that of Joseph and his wife. Perhaps he was unaware of why his bus had been stoned.  Joseph died in hospital the next day. He had acted on and off with WSB for a decade. He was in a film in 2003 or 4..or 5, my memory isn’t what it was, and he was in our last big stage play Zero Balans , even accompanying us  on our tour last year to Santo. There he made an unscheduled appearance too at a local music concert sitting on a stool in front of over 1000, singing a couple of songs he had learnt in his youth when working on ocean going ships. His wife, Leisongi, and he had acted in some series of Love Patrol too. Vanuatu is purportedly a country that adheres to the much vaunted ‘respect for elders’ maxim, but  youth make up 50% of the population and it is their affection or disaffection that will make or break Vanuatu (well its one of the factors) . The way Joseph mucked in with youth in a non-patronizing, non censorious way was an example to all. His funeral became a march through town to the cemetery; one of the biggest protests seen in Vila. For the most part although angry, the crowd was restrained. There were no calls for wholesale blocking of freedom of movement from one island to another, just for trouble makers to be sent back and for the police to respond to calls. But mingling amongst the marchers and onlookers, there were some who had had enough. 

All this influenced our decision to look at violence in the first play of the year. One that Jo does not write. The actors interviewed all sorts of people and we turned the words of the interviews into songs, sketches and monologues. Some of the interviews were very shocking and in discussing them the actors in turn volunteered stories so that some of our meetings became informal therapy sessions; memories of watching the 2 students, who bullied one actress when she was in class one, being stood on chairs in front of the whole school, told to pull down their trousers and being beaten with electric rope. The scars of that event are perhaps less healed today than the bullying that preceded it.

We performed in schools and communities around Vila running discussion and role play workshops after the performance.  Now the actors are in Tanna and Santo. The shows in Vila were also fundraisers for Joseph’s widow and family. She, one of her sons, Kalo, and a number of small grandchildren came to one of the performances at WSB and asked to make a speech. Leisongi and the children unfurled a banner with a quote from Gandhi:

Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Science without humanity
Knowledge without character
Commerce without morality
Worship without sacrifice

Politics without principle

Gandhi claimed these were passive forms of violence that led to more active violence in a society. Kalo went on to ask the audience to think about the direction Vanuatu was heading if we wanted to maintain our supposed status as the happiest place on Earth. It was a moving event with, for me, a weird side effect. The actors were seated behind him waiting to perform. As the family left the stage Danny got up to thank them and introduce the play but he was choked, as were several of the cast and yet, as I said to them later, they were being watched by the audience waiting for the play. No one in the audience uttered a sound as they waited for the actors to find their composure but it was also a performance because they were on stage. A very truthful moving performance and worth pondering on…the simplicity of truthful emotion as opposed to acted emotion and as actors there are times when  we want to make the gap between the two as small as possible.