Crossing Lines. Wellington Perspectives. Exhibition. Performance. March 2011.

Today someone asked "Why are you doing this?" 

We all have our own reasons - as the producer I was first attracted to working with this project as I want to support a platform of artistic development that holds content from varied NZ communities.

There is a wider audience for performamce than theatre in NZ currently gets.  My hunch is if the content is more related to diverse people then more diverse people will come and see it. People that live in my city :)

~ Lisa Maule (Eko Producer)

Crossing Lines is an exhibition and a performance.  For this first presentation we are going into a large downtown warehouse.  We are dividing it into several spaces and one of these is Home Space.  This is a comfortable space for conversation.  The idea is to make people feel welcomed and safe to rest and also to put forward their thoughts about what they see or have seen at 70 Cable St as part of the performance and exhibition of Crossing Lines. 

At the moment Home Space is being made, mostly by Laetitia Techer who is a visual arts student, interning to Eko on Crossing Lines.  Laetitia proposed a way of people being able to add to the space that will build the visual look as time progresses and you can also see what other people are saying too.

Update from journal of Eleanor Bishop who is mentoring to Crossing Lines.

Eleanor Bishop is a Wellington-based director and creative producer. She strives to create theatre which is personal, intimate and theatrically innovative. She works primarily with her company The PlayGround Collective, and directed the multi award-winning The Intricate Art of Actually Caring. She is joining Crossing Lines because of her interest to learn more about participatory arts practice.

A big question for me coming into the viewing of this work was how do you theatricalise an issue or
question?

Feb 9 2011

Between 2008 and 2010, the Southern Corridor Project has engaged in community development though
participatory arts events with youth and community such as Playback theatre, tape art, photography
workshops, and community dialogues (ongoing!) Alongside that has been creative development including a
devising week in April and a two week devising period in August last year.

This means that there is depth and understanding in relationship to the voices of 400 people who have
contributed and fed into this work. At the same time the value of the community work stands on its own.
Of course it feeds into the final work of Crossing Lines, but it also has an important purpose in connecting
communities with art, and giving them artistic opportunities.

Feb 11 2011

“the word refugee, that label, the people become the label”Adam Awad
“so you gotta get on with it…..” Jim Moriaty

Last Wednesday we started to work with character and game in an attempt to tease out these contemporary
questions in movement five. We started working with an improv game to force out the discussion of the role
of Tangata Whenua and the integration of migrants into NZ.

One link that came out very strongly during the playing of this game was Ummy (actor) saying that she is
sick of the title of ‘refugee’, and of being asked to share the story of how she came to be in New Zealand,
rather than the life she is living now. The desire to look forward and move forward is a strong theme that
comes through in the contemporary section of Crossing Lines.

Feb 16 2011

It’s been interesting as I think back to the wananga on the first day of rehearsal where I think we all
(especially the performers) felt the pressure of the work we are creating. The pressure of holding all the
voices who have fed into the work. But it is really clear to me that the first section of the work with the sound
compositions can hold that, and the second part is these performers holding the voices they connect with
and then their own original voices. When we think of it like that, suddenly it becomes easier. And I realise
how important it is to put these performance structures in place before rehearsal even started so that this
work (of creating these characters) can take place.

March 1 2011

Characters have been given verbatim to say, and it works because all the characters have been developed
from people involved within the process (seems obvious to write that), but these performers are taking these
verbatim statements and making them their own (the character’s own). This seems like something I haven’t
seen before.

I’m most pleased to see a stronger relationship to the audience coming through on Saturday. This feels
really important as we’ve constantly been talking about how the work is a conversation. All the time on
Saturday we were thinking about relationship to the audience at every point.

March 2 2011

I’m trying to articulate why language is so important. I think often we’re scared of using language in a
performance that not everyone in the audience will understand. I think particularly in NZ where so so so

much theatre is so heavily text-based, and often people come to the theatre looking to ‘get it’, looking
to ‘understand’, to be handed a message. Whereas, theatre also has a poetic, metaphorical power that
moves beyond rationality, into moving, feeling, senses and experiences.

March 3 2011

There’s a game that’s been in the show from the start entitled ‘the line-up’. The characters are waiting in a
queue for something and it’s about the way they react to each other and change positions in the line. It was
really interesting to see that the game works best and is the most interesting when the tension never bubbles
over into overt and direct conflict.

It kinda makes me think about this as a metaphor for the entire show. No position is ever explictly stated,
many different positions are represented, yet no singular one is pushed.