Up She Rises

The first thing that you see, as you climb the main stairwell in the Otago Museum, are some of Sir Edmund Hilary's personal accessories behind glass displays: his tea mug, gloves, camera. He was a Kiwi beekeeper back before the Second World War, and in 1953 he said, “Well mate, this job is sweet as, but I fancy I'd rather be the first guy to climb to the summit of Mt. Everest” (citation needed). So he went and did it – part of the entrance display are two small rocks that he brought back from the top of the Himalayas.

I imagine he must have climbed the hills around Dunedin as practice for Everest. Maybe even the other way around. I've been here for a week, which means I've probably climbed up the sloped driveway on Grey Street half a dozen times or more. Fortunately, the stuff at the bottom of that hill make the coming back easier.

For the most part anyway. I went to another fringe show on Thursday evening, again at the Globe. The play was In Absentia, a life-sized puppet show centred around a mother's daily battle with dementia. For an intimate, alternative theatre experience, the visuals were nice: it opened with a single illuminated leaf blowing across the stage, and once you regained your composure from literally being slapped in the face by a metaphor, you had the frail, puppet woman (the puppeteers were dressed all in black behind her) slowly wake up and go through the objects in her room, her voice coming through the speaker system.

After you look up what the awesomely underused word “sacrosanct” means, but before you thrash your computer around and scream out that some things, like fringe shows about Alzheimer's, are sacrosanct, let me tell you why this show didn't work. Ultimately, it was too disjointed and muddled.

STOP. Don't yell out, “That's the point!” especially if you're in a public place, because that's weird. I'm in New Zealand, I can't hear you. I get that that's the point. But it needed to go a bit farther. The play had a lot of good elements, like warped versions of her family (a rolly-polly, Tweedledee-esque puppet bouncing around as the child, and then a smaller model of him as an adult, leaving with his suitcase – I said that the visuals were nice), but it didn't tie them together to give the play its emotional impact. I heard someone in the audience say that the show really hit home to them – which is a great comment, but an even better one would have been if it meant something to me, who has never been in the situation.

If nothing else, the fade to black at the end, as the quivering form went back to bed, was well done: “I remember . . . you. I remember . . . me. I remember . . . me. Remember . . . me.”

Friday was another artsy kind of afternoon. I went to the Octagon in the morning, where an outdoor stage had been set up for the lunchtime “Fringe Picks,” a short sampler of a bunch of Fringe shows. First up was the Vaudeville, circus-style ensemble Porcelain Punch and their Traveling Medicine Show, which felt like I'd come out of a songwriting session with Jim Morrison onto the set of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. The gang from A Play About Space handed out their paper airplanes, but the out-of-context, open stage setup didn't do their show at the Globe justice. At least I still got the jokes. 

 

There's a Fawlty Towers dinner show during the Fringe (spelled Faulty Towers, I assume to avoid the inevitable suing), so Basil, Sybil, and Manuel did their thing, comedians Nick Rado, James Nokise, and Mark Scott ran through some standup, the singing comedy duo from Gobsmacked treated the crowd to a few songs, and two gals from the In and Out of Context troupe did some strange, flexible street art acrobatics to finish off the eclectic (but entertaining) afternoon.

As if I wasn't feeling cultured enough, I sauntered over to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, on the outward bend of the Octagon. Of the top five most visited art galleries in the world, I've been to four – don't let yourself be fooled though, I'm functionally clueless when it comes to art galleries. Since 2011 when I started this writing, I've made exactly one poop joke, and it was about the Tate Modern in London, so there. But still, I'm that guy who wants to see everything, so I had to take a quick spin through – and, to be fair, the landscapes of New Zealand were cool, and something you're not likely to see in such prominent display anywhere else in the world. And in the “Pleasure Principle” exhibition, the prints from Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji were arranged in the presence of porcelain vases and oak furniture.

That was enough high society for one day. The evening was relaxed – I helped make my first pavlova for dessert, and learned a German card game before an early bedtime.

After a morning Farmer's Market in the city centre, Saturday night almost ended up being as quiet. It was the part of the night where I'd opened my book (I found a well-worn copy of 'Salem's Lot in Christchurch) and had taken my contacts out, when I got a text from two members of a very exclusive group who I've bonded with over sheep shit. Anaïs and Michelle made it off the farm in Kaikoura, and a few minutes later I was running down the hill to catch the next bus to the Octagon.

An acoustic band was playing at Craft, but we soon steered to the drink specials and more lively crowd down the street, at Brimstone. There was music, a fog machine, and a weird, black and white projected screening of the dance floor. And Katy Perry up on bust – this is a university town, and we'd arrived.

It's some things, like popcorn at 2:30 in the morning, that makes that friggin' driveway hike bearable.

On Sunday I was up at the crack of noon, and piled into the family van to go to the girls' school for a Harvest Picnic. The school is a Rudolf Steiner school – what that means is an approach that adheres to the national educational standards, but fosters a lot of creativity and personal development. Class sizes are tiny (and in yurts, how cool is that?), the curriculum personalized, and you get the overall sense of a community, right from the smallest kids in the kindergarten playgroup to the network of parents. 

It's the kind of place I thought that I'd like to send my child someday – right before I remembered that I made a poop joke about the Tate Modern and that I'm nowhere near ready to have a child. That's a whole other story, let's save it for later.

It was another German game with some visiting friends that night – this time Carcassonne, which is actually nothing like Settlers of Catan but that's still a surprisingly decent comparison somehow. Anyway, it involves farm, monasteries, tiles, and roads, and it took the shortest four hours ever to play.

Once you get past the mini Edmund Hilary display, there are plenty of cool things throughout the Otago Museum on a Monday afternoon. Like an assortment of tribal masks, weapons, and instruments from scattered Polynesian islands – tiny little places, just specks on a world map, with their own histories, cultures, and political systems that I know next to nothing about. You can spend a lifetime studying the scope of Western history, easily (arrogantly) neglecting these other nooks in the globe that are just as intricate.

The coolest display was the Animal Attic, a wall-to-wall of skeletons and taxidermy. The museum's first curator happened to be a zoologist, and a lot of these skins are modern, but a number from 1868 are still on display as well. There are some weird animals in the world, and it was cool to walk between the apes, leopards, kangaroos, rats, penguins, and a hundred other things, some familiar and some totally unimagined before now.

Now that I'm back at the top of the hill, I'm going to give my book another try before falling asleep. And if I end up dreaming about Dunedin and the spots I've still got to explore in the city, I'll try to wake up before I get to the part about coming back up.

Cheers,

rb