PAH: Reviving old ghosts

Review: PAH
Auckland Arts Festival
Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, Hillsborough
Until Sunday

The Paa Collective’s concept for this production was nothing short of brilliant and should be taken up as a challenge by other art/dance/drama groups.

The collective aimed to “navigate and unlock the unspoken histories” of Pah Homestead from its Maori origins, the building of the farmer settler’s mansion, through to its eventual use as an orphanage, boarding school and convent and refuge for the homeless via live music, contemporary dance and artworks.

Paa’s programme boldly declares it: “Our performance – incorporating music, dance and the visual arts­ invites you into a world where the rules are changed, where there is a possibility of seeing things differently from when you arrived …”

This was certainly true for me.

I was particularly keen to see this production because some years ago I attended Monte Cecilia School when the homestead was a Sisters of Mercy convent. It was an old-fashioned school, which had no money (pre-integration), and classrooms had tilted desks with holes for inkwells.  Pupils had little contact with the main building unless they were having music lessons in a small piano parlour or attending mass or benediction in the chapel (half the original ballroom), so were always curious about the lives the nuns led away from the school.

We had weird theories based on our knowledge that there had been once been a tunnel between the homestead and the stables further down the property (built by the settler family  during the New Zealand Wars in case local Maori became restless), later filled in by fathers of pupils when part of it collapsed in the playground.

We wondered if there was another tunnel through to the friary just up the road …. as children do. Some years later when one of the nuns did run off with the parish priest (and had a very happy and long marriage, as it happens) an old friend, a fellow ex-pupil asked me, half-jokingly: “Did he come through the tunnel to see her?”

My most vivid memory of the homestead is the chapel during Benediction, a service sung in Latin and featuring a monstrance  (a big, golden spiked, round vessel with a see-through cylinder in the middle where the Blessed Sacrament [white wafers] was kept) and a thurible (a bronze jar on a chain) filled with incense which was swung during the service.

The smell wafted through the small room, the Latin hymns made the service mysterious and the priest’s special garment was golden and opulent. I loathed the school but I loved the drama of that service in the chapel.

This production had me recalling that in spades and bouncing those memories against the ones Paa created.

The audience was first fed traditional lemonade on the grass on one side of the house before being led by Victorian underwear-clad female guides to follow performers to the front of the homestead, through various rooms in the gallery and outside to the sculpture garden as they presented their take on the history over an hour and a half (not an hour as the programme stated).

The first scene outside the building began with what I think were meant to be homeless refugees who lugged in suitcases and blankets before singing and dancing in a square  area (Haanze Fa’avae Jackson, Zahra Killeen-Chance, Kelly Nash, Emilia Rubio and Nancy, Wijohn).

This evolved through  a hip-hop song based on what might have been poetic words with Maori references (sorry, no, didn’t do it for me), the odd karanga (I could have done with more of this, the settler connection to local Maori was strong) through to schoolkid rivalry before a magnificent rolling out of blankets led up into the lobby of the homestead.

The audience was then invited to wander through the gallery rooms and view art works especially those by Star Gossage (part of the collective and with a theme that evoked ghosts of the past, sometimes quite eerily) as the musicians played and dancers danced individually in gallery rooms and on the staircase.

The music by composer Gillian Whitehead was pied-piper beguiling, hinting at the past, especially children’s activities, and was played with passion by flautist Luca Manghi, cellist Katherine Hebley and clarinetist Andrew Uren. I was a bit distracted by the flautist’s bare feet as he wandered: was he trying to be gypsy-ish? Not sure.

The audience was recalled to line the walls of the lobby as the female dancers did a “flitting” dance that showed busy boarding school girls hurtling about their daily lives, up and down stairs, across halls, alone or with others. They turned into ghosts, almost passing through the walls. This raised goosebumps and was quite the best of the dances.

Using schoolbells to encourage the audience, the troupe moved into the room that had been originally half of the ballroom and later a chapel. In front of the seated musical trio, the four dancers (fourth or  fifth costume change – all simple lines and appropriate) danced first children’s games (marbles or conkers), then male/female rivalry as they “grew” older but also, later, prostrating themselves in the way nuns and priests do at their ordination or profession of vows. That last triggered my memories of that room with candles, incense and Latin hymns.

The next dance was beside a washing line outside and we sat in chairs on the balcony looking down the hills into the park. This dance may have been about the orphans and the refugees; I was less sure of the point being made.

The sun was setting as the dancers wandered down the hill bearing lights; this was the end of the performance though it seemed unresolved.

As the audience turned around to go back up the hill, the view of the house with all the rooms lit came as a shock. It looked so inviting.

I would happily go back there to see another group’s take on this, especially at night.

Had this entire production been at night, a spookier effect would have made it even better. I did like the austere floating ghost theme but more performers were needed and interpretations of some of the other parts of the history of the place.

Balls were held there and nuns were professed; a Pacific Island princess ran off from the boarding school there to marry an “unsuitable” man (or so the story we were told at school goes) and there are so many more memories that can be dredged out.

My best memory of the place is the day the Sisters of Mercy changed into modern day dress and abandoned the clodhopper boots they had worn in favour of modern shoes: I saw the usually severe music teaching nun skipping across the ground in front of the homestead in delight…

The Paa Collective did this very well and choreographer Carol Brown in particular deserves much praise.