Tu by Patricia Grace

Author:Patricia Grace
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742288215
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2010-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

23

monkey

With a month of the Exhibition still to run Pita found he couldn’t do the performances any more. After Jess’s comments about their faces, their jumping about, he began to feel more and more like a showpiece or a clown act. A drawcard. He couldn’t stop wondering about this, and once on stage he couldn’t help thinking about the thousand eyes and about what might exist behind them. What did the eyes see?

Who were they now that all their people had gone, and now that their performances were no longer among themselves or for themselves? What were language, dance, movement, song – which was part of the sap of them all – to those who didn’t know, deep inside themselves, what they were about? Who were they to these different eyes, the eyes of people who crowded their hall every night and applauded so generously, or who exclaimed over the reed-lined meeting house with all its decoration and sculptures? Who were they to the people who gathered round the carvers and weavers throughout the day as they demonstrated ‘the arts of the natives of New Zealand’? This audience touched wood, listened to the carvers’ stories, talked to the girls plying their strands from front to back as they moved along the panels, creating their patterns. Were these not the same eyes as those belonging to the men who didn’t move over for him on the canteen bench, or who treated him like a boy, a sweeper, when he’d been a man all his life? Were they not the same eyes as those belonging to the woman behind the shop counter who couldn’t see him standing there?

In this enormous construction, and with all that went on around and inside it, were their arts, their dances and their music just another ‘attraction’? Were they exhibits too?

Near the end of their nightly performance, a highlight of the programme was when the girls sat on stage in formations of eight to perform their stick routines. This began with a simple tapping and passing of the pairs of sticks in time to singing. But as the item went on, the various movements – sticks passing from one pair of hands to another, spinning, rotating, criss-crossing – became more complex. The rhythm became faster until the actions on stage were as a flow of hands weaving magic over an ever-changing pattern of airborne batons, luminous and flickering in stage-light. The performance always excited the audience who would remain silent and attentive right up to the moment when the sticks began flying from left to right across the stage, decreasing in number, the clicking and tapping becoming fainter as the batons disappeared behind the curtain. There would be an outbreak of applause and people would stand and call for an encore.

Could the girls with their magic hands and their flying sticks be viewed in the same light as ‘living wonders’, such as the magicians of the Chinese Theatre; or the acrobatic sensations in their brightly coloured costumes,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.