Many years ago the term ‘community theatres’ was applied to New Zealand’s state-funded regional professional theatres and now it refers to amateur theatres, hence the term ‘community-based theatre’ in the subtitle of this book. Defined by the publishers as “theatre created by professionals working with communities”, it most vividly comes into its own when it is of the community for the community by the community.

It is not driven by commercial imperatives, which may explain why community-based theatre has tended to fly under the radar of most mainstream media. Indeed Theatreview’s coverage of community theatre productions has invariably occurred not because they have requested a review (as most producers do) but because we have got wind of their show and proactively sought them out to see if they wanted to be written into the historical record by way of a critique.

In the case of Paul Maunder’s most recent activities in Blackball (post the scope of this book), it was West Coast poet Greg O’Connell who alerted me to the work of Kiwi /Possum Productions and volunteered reviews of: Poison and Purity (March 2011), dramatizing the 1080 debate; Goodnight Irene (November 2011), triggered by the Pike River mine disaster; The Cave Above the Pa: Te Ana i Runga i te Pa (September 2012), about Maori leasehold land and its impact on race relations in Greymouth. “Paul Maunder and company re-present ourselves to ourselves” sums it up nicely.

Maunder’s active engagement in a range of community-based initiatives over some decades, his close associations with other practitioners, and his formalised study of the topic by way of his PhD thesis (completed in 2011) has now led to Rebellious Mirrors, an important and valuable book which any performing arts student or practitioner should read, not only to appraise the evolution of this multi-facetted genre in Aotearoa but also to appreciate the socio-political history it inevitably embodies. It also fulfils Maunder’s objective of creating “a resource and advocacy tool for those in the field.” 

It is well organised into five Chapters with sub-headings also listed in the Contents – replicated here as an overview of its scope:

Chapter One: Genealogy  
Community-based theatre, a definition
An alternative view of early NZ theatre history.

Chapter Two: From the Avant-garde to the Community: a personal journey, shared with colleagues. 
Edmond’s thesis
A personal account of the Amamus years 
Similar problems: Theatre Action and Living Theatre Troupe
Town and Country Players: the first attempt at community-based theatre
The early Māori theatre
A long march: Theatre of the Eighth Day 
The turning point: from Zimbabwe to Pomare 

Chapter Three: Maturity: neo-liberalism and a cross section of Community-based theatre practices.
Jim Moriarty and Te Rakau Hua O Te Wao Tapu 
A broad engagement: Pou Mahi a Iwi – Cultural Work Centre Trust 
Sam Scott and youth theatre 
The community and the nation: Taki Rua 
Disabling contradictions: Tony McCaffrey and Elizabeth O’Connor
Talking House: a regional practice
An ally in the capital: David O’Donnell
On the road: The Travelling Tuatara
Back to the future: Peter Falkenberg and Free Theatre
Back to the future 2: the Our Street project
A new century: Southern Corridor Project

Chapter 4: The Tax-payers’ Money: the impact of neo-liberalism on state patronage and educational theory.

Chapter 5: Facing the Future: the place of Community-based theatre in the period of transition.

All this is backed up with a Glossary of Maori terms, Endnotes, a Bibliography which includes a list of who was interviewed when and an extremely useful list of community-based theatre production entities plus the titles and years of their productions. The Index has captured all mentions of proper names but falls short when referencing more conceptual things, like ‘forum theatre’ for example, which is indexed for its first mention but not for its many appearances thereafter.

While I’m being picky, there are some inaccurate dates: Greg McGee’s Foreskin’s Lament premiered in 1981, not 1985 [p26]; there was no New Zealand International Festival of the Arts in 1989 [p95] (they are always on even years in Wellington) and the “marae theatre programme” Jim Moriarty’s Te Rakau Hua o Te Wao Tapu Trust was commissioned to produce was, presumably, Marae by John Broughton in the 1992 festival, co-directed by Rangimoana Taylor and Moriarty (who also revived his solo performance of Broughton’s Michael James Manaia in that festival).

But I digress. Rebellious Mirrors is clearly written from a position of experience, commitment and passion. It only sometimes lapses into academic-speak and its associated pretensions – e.g. having discussed how “Rural communities revolved around personal relations and stories of place and landscape” whereas “urban life was determined by contractual relations: the rental agreement or mortgage, the employment contract, the insurance policy and so on,” Maunder adopts the words German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies coined to describe these two paradigms: Gemeinschaft (the rural) and Gesellschaft (the urban). [p13] And he goes on to use those terms, instead of ‘rural’ or ‘urban’, throughout the book.

This strikes me as particularly odd when telling the stories of theatre forms that, by definition, have grown out of our own soil or the cracks in our asphalt, especially when it is a theatre practice that stands as a determined alternative to the common mainstream practice of importing plays from elsewhere in the name of ‘culture’. That “Gemeinschaft / Gesellschaft” irritation aside, however, I do find the paradoxes inherent in this unfolding story to be informative, in that I have always felt we are close to ‘the truth’ when a paradox emerges.

For instance, “The Philippine Educational Theatre Association (PETA) influenced the early Māori theatre movement.” [p20] And in their quest for a more authentic, grass-roots and relevant theatre practice, Kiwi practitioners used Polish theatre researcher Jerzy Grotowski and Brazilian Augusto Boal (founder of Theatre of the Oppressed) as their role models.

In Chapter One Maunder articulates the principles academic Jan Cohen-Cruz sets out in her study of community-based theatre in the US (Local Acts, Rutgers University Press, 2005): “‘communal context’ states that the professional, collaborating artist(s)’ craft and vision should be at the service of the community group’s desire …; “‘reciprocity’ requires the relationship between the artist(s) and community to be ‘mutually nourishing’; “‘hyphenation’ allows any project to “have a wider purpose than the normal one of achieving a work that is attractive and entertaining … [e.g.] educational, celebratory, therapeutic, political or developmental; “‘active culture’ [is] based on the principle that all people can make art, and get more out of the making than they can through observation.” [pp23-24] He then measures each example of community-based theatre in NZ against these principles, which is fine.  But when he goes on to discuss how neo-liberal economics (he doesn’t call it ‘Rogernomics’) imposed a compulsion to measure everything, and its detrimental effect in education – the NCEA assessment system in particular – I cannot help but go, “Hang on a minute …” and smile.  

To be fair, Maunder evaluates rather than measures against the Cohen-Cruz criteria. And he does concede, in his assessment of how Te Rakau evolved, that “critical analysis has its limitations. Ultimately, one is required to unreservedly congratulate Moriarty and his group for what they have accomplished and for the profoundly important work they are continuing to do.” [p115]

The tension between the necessarily particularised nature of community-based theatre projects and the general embracing of cultural diversity simmers throughout the book without specifically noting that the particulars of ‘hermetically sealed’ stories invariably distil universal and timeless truths of human existence.

I also enjoy the internalised debate the book rouses in me because it almost makes the reading experience interactive (does this make me a Baolist ‘SpectACTOR’?). Maunder’s ‘tell it like it was, moment by moment’ methodology works more like a play than a textbook of immutable facts, in that the true stories and actions of fallible people raise questions and concerns that are often answered and resolved in later ‘scenes’ as community-based theatre Kiwi-style evolves.

For example, in his introduction, Maunder tells how his Amamus Theatre Group came into being and how their first production, I Rode My Horse Down The Road – which “was critical of the perceived conservatism of the communities in which we had been raised” – was created: “We used our collective experiences as content and improvisation as a means of production, rather than being under the thrall of an absent writer.” [p10] Later, in the Genealogy chapter’s alternative view of early NZ theatre history, he complains that in the “official history, there is invariably an equating of theatre with the written, authored text.” [p27] Apart from the tendency of community-based theatre not to promote its activities more widely, or to leave lasting evidence like a written text, this implication that the wok of playwrights is somehow worth less gets me defensive on behalf of our political playwrights – Mervyn Thompson, Renée, Dean Parker, et al – whose objectives have a lot in common with Maunder et al, even if they go about it in a different way.

Then, in the Maturity chapter, it emerges that Maunder, and others, do write scripts for community-based theatre. While his plays – including I Rode My Horse… (1971), ’51 (1972) and Gallipoli (1974), which are available through Playmarket – are based on what the group has researched, improvised around and workshopped, the major works Te Rakau leaves as its legacy – Battalion(2006); Ka Mate, Ka Ora (2008); The Ragged (2010); Dog & Bone (2012) – have been written by Helen Pearse-Otene based on her own research. And, as with any good theatre company, everyone involved in bringing it into production tunes into all that research and expands on it according to their own perspectives.

It is instructive to realise that from the 1971 through to 2009, Maunder has identified some 19 community-based theatre entities which have created some 78 productions. His list is alphabetical; here I summarise it in rough chronological order:
Amamus Theatre Group (9 titles),
Theatre Action (1),
Te Ika a Maui and Rori Hapipi [Rowley Habib] (3),
Mangatiapa Marae (2),
The Travelling Tuatara and Brian Potiki (7),
Town and Country Players and Murray Edmond (4),
Theatre of the Eighth Day (6),
Petone Borough Council (1),
Otago University Theatre Studies and Simon O’Connor & David O’Donnell (6),
Talking House and Simon O’Connor (8),
Te Rakau Hua O Te Wao Tapu and Jim Moriarty (8),
Pou Mahi a Iwi, Cultural Work Centre (9),
Victoria University of Wellington Theatre Studies and David O’Donnell (4),
Massive and Sam Scott (5),
A Different Light and Tony McCaffrey (4 titles),
The Free Theatre and Peter Falkenberg (4),
Skillwise and Elizabeth O’Connor (2),
Taki Rua (2),
Auckland City Council (1).  

I’m not sure that Christchurch’s Free Theatre belongs in the list as it may be argued its founder, expatriate German Peter Falkenberg, has brought European content and sensibilities to the work of Kiwi practitioners; that while they are ‘alternative’, ‘avant-garde’ and very good at what they choose to do, they do not really qualify as community-based. Indeed the only ‘community’ Falkenberg lays claim to is the Free Theatre group itself: “The common goal is the work that we do. People are taken away from the their own personal life into a shared goal that creates a community that has meaning.” [p175] This notion would surely apply to any mainstream production group as well. 

On the other hand the Playback Theatre movement, co-founded in 1975 by Jonathan Fox and New Zealander Jo Salas “to encourage individuals from all walks of society to let their stories be heard”, and active in NZ for decades, is only mentioned obliquely, yet it ticks all the boxes for community-based theatre, albeit at the ‘fast food’ end of the spectrum.

Likewise, verbatim theatre surely deserves a mention. Verbatim was conceived in the early 1990s by Miranda Harcourt and William Brandt. Funded by the Justice Department, it was devised from verbatim interviews with a young murderer, his sister, his mother and the husband of his victim, then written by Brandt for performance by Harcourt, who first performed it to long-serving inmates in all of New Zealand’s 20 prisons. Having reflected back something close to their own view of the world and introduced them to the viewpoints of others, she then facilitated discussions that allowed the perpetrators of violent crime to confront themselves productively.

The Bare Hunt Collective’s back/words (2010) could have been included too, although their response to the Christchurch earthquakes, Munted (2012), happened after this book’s cut-off point. Such works certainly reflect a community’s own stories back to themselves.

Which brings me to wondering about the title of this book: Rebellious Mirrors. Surely Hamlet’s advice to the Players – that the purpose of playing “was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” – aligns not only with community-based theatre but with most mainstream theatre too. And the mirror on the wall in the Brothers Grimm’s Snow White is totally committed to telling the truth.

So the rebellion, presumably, is not that community-based theatre reflects reality per se but that what it reflects is ignored by the mainstream, is directly relevant to the community it serves and is often more politically confronting. While some may argue that such values are central to a lot of conventional theatre practice, it is the active involvement of communities throughout the process, including in post-performance forums, that most distinguishes community-based theatre.  

There are gems aplenty to be mined from this book. For me the investigation of Te Rakau Hua O Te Wao Tapu and Jim Moriarty’s work [pp93-115] epitomises the capacity of theatre practice to make a major difference in the lives of people and their communities, especially through their activities in prisons and Child Youth and Family Service (CYFS) facilities. Likewise Maunder’s first-hand in-depth account of The Tokelau Project [pp116-126] makes for riveting reading, especially when he tells the Mafine story and shares the experiences of those who engaged with it.

A project by Eko Theatre and the Southern Corridor Project, which involved bringing the Maori and Somali communities together in South Wellington, is the last to be profiled, although the book’s scope ends before it came to fruition with Crossing Lines (2011). This reinforces the fact that while Maunder has laid a strong foundation and the first few ‘storeys’ of the community-based theatre in Aotearoa/NZ story, it is a vital dimension of our live theatre landscape that we need to remain conscious of and engage with. (And as indicated above, Theatreview does do its best to keep abreast of developments.)

The penultimate chapter, headed “The taxpayers’ money”, discusses “the impact of neo-liberalism on state patronage and educational theory.” Maunder’s analysis of “policy shift within state provision for the arts” is invaluable.

His concluding comments on the future – “the place of community-based theatre in the period of transition” (aren’t we always in a period of transition?) – are provocative, although I’d rather he didn’t ship in a raft of ‘overseas experts’ to have the final words. The most optimistic voices are our own: Annie Ruth, heartened by the idealism of some of the students graduating from Toi Whakaari (of which she was director when Maunder interviewed her); a couple of young practitioners, and “a group of post-marxists who are, in my opinion, usefully speaking to the nascent ideology of this generation.”

Otherwise we hear from various doomsayers, who speak of “widespread loss of the future”, “a degraded utopia of the present”, “Society of the Spectacle”, the “illusion of encounter”, narcissism as a “virus” … And I have to confess, the “final affirmation of the place of community-based theatre in the current milieu” as provided by a US philosopher, to be largely incomprehensible and completely uninspiring.

Again, by its very nature, community-based theatre in Aotearoa New Zealand needs to continue to evolve – to be sustained, re-evaluated and organically reformed – on its own terms. And maybe it’s time to write off mainstream “commodity theatre” in the process and achieve some sort of symbiosis in peaceful co-existence. Just a thought …

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