Teatro: from ancient Greek théatron, “a place for viewing"
The Bay of Islands historic site where French Catholic Missionaries translated church texts into Te Reo Maori during the 1840’s, known to many New Zealanders as Pompallier House, was restored during the 1990’s to its original form as a working tannery and printery. There, a small group of simple props sit on an ink stained marble slab in a North facing corner and, at regular cycles through the day, are used to demonstrate the methods of 19th Century book binding.
While only the foundations of the neighboring chapel remain, a quiet light plays across the rammed earth walls of this simple, almost monastic, space. The guides’ performance has been refined through repetition and, as each of these objects are used in turn to explain the various parts of the binding process, simple gestures unite word and artifact, actor and spectator.
The progress through the various stations of tannery, print shop and bindery has already attained at time something of a liturgical quality
The lives and stories of those who welcomed those first visitors to the shore of Kororareka; those who established this outpost of French Catholicism, who built and worked in this structure and those who burnt the surrounding settlement to the ground;
those for whom it became a family home, traces of whom remain in broken china cups and combs now reverently housed in museum cases; those who patiently sifted through the layers of history to reconstruct and restore the building to something close to its original form; guides, in whose whakapapa the stories of Tanagata Whenua and Missionary Communities intersect, and visitors who climb the staircase to this corner where the tour concludes; all intersect in this performance and each person who enters this sanctuary is invited to enter into the drama – to hold, to feel, to smell, to gaze on these objects that rest quietly but now saturated with history in this ‘place for viewing’
I am grateful to Scott Elliffe and the staff at the Pompallier Printery, whose enthusiastic response to my request for permission made this project possible, and for their generous and hospitable welcome on the days I spent arranging and rearranging these objects. I hope these works in some way convey the deep respect with which they hold and share the histories they represent.
Liturgy
Softened in its passage across the Bay
Autumn sunlight rises
gently.
First positions.
Muffled voices,
footsteps ascending,
this upper room,
rammed earth, hand plastered, whitewashed,
crumbling, stained,
shadow and illumination.
Quietly she stands,
begins, again,
taking each in turn to speak for
printer, priest and tanner
missionary, preacher,
trader, chief.
Kororareko stories
stitched and restitched,
in simple gestures refined
in reenactment of the binder's art
There is a moment, somewhere,
different during each performance,
when past and present merge
boundaries and bindings are dissolved
Brush passes over leather.
(You understand, there is no glue but words
and memory.)
she takes a Bay leaf, dry and brittle,
from an earthen cup,
and lifts it up:
'the fragrance of this leaf
shall still the ravages of time'