The great thing about the New Zealand International Arts Festival is the accessibility. The free talks with artists involved are a good way to enhance any Festival show.

PEOPLE sat perched shoulder to shoulder like hot sardines inside City Gallery’s Adam Auditorium, eager to learn about a life on the other side of the world.
By the end, words such as “enlightened”, “fantastic”, and “inspiring”, could be heard in murmurs around the room.
It was incredibly worthwhile to listen to this talk by artists involved in Eleven and Twelve, a New Zealand International Art Festival production.
City Gallery is hosting a variety of similar “Art Talks” over the next couple of weeks.
The talks are invaluable to anyone who wants to learn more about the Festival show they are attending – and even better – they’re free.
The Eleven and Twelve talk was chaired by Australian Caroline Baum.
A talented interrogator, she impressed the audience with the direction of her questions, and her unwillingness to let the artists get away with anything but clear answers.
Directed by the legendary Peter Brook, Eleven and Twelve is set in West Africa and adapted from the work of Malian writer Amadou Hampaté Bâ.
It tells the true story of a disagreement over the numbers 11 and 12, and the events that follow as a result of the French colonialism in Africa during the Second World War.
It sounds like a compelling story on paper, but it was made real for the audience through insights given by Abdou Ouologuem, one of the performers at the talk.
Translating from French into English through Baum, Ouologuem told us of his life growing up in Mali, where the production is set.
“My father lived through the period of colonisation, but because our history is entirely oral, I only heard fragments of the story,” he says. “During the Second World War France needed shooters, so my father was recruited into the French Army. In Eleven and Twelve the French Army used the divide and rule tactic. There’s still a sense of the heavy-hand of colonialism in Mali today.”
Ouologuem says his father’s generation were forced to learn French, and this has flowed into the learning of today’s Malians.
“I went to school at age seven. Imagine how it feels to an African to learn a language they have no physical or spiritual connection to,” he says.
With the background Ouologuem provided about Mali – a land-locked country with no access to the sea – it was easy to connect more deeply with the culture of the production when watching it at St James Theatre that night.
And it was interesting to watch Ouologuem on stage there, because despite having a lead role in Eleven and Twelve, he’s not an actor, he’s a sculptor.
“Peter Brooks gave me a script and said ‘tomorrow you will rehearse that with the other actors’, so I memorised it overnight – coming from an oral tradition it wasn’t difficult,” he laughs. “When I rehearsed with the other actors, I had it memorised and they hadn’t. Peter pulled me aside and said ‘well, you’re pretty good at this’.”
Ouologuem now goes through two passports a year travelling with the company.
Chair Baum warned us that the artists at the talk were jetlagged and hungry.
That made it easy to forgive the deadpan (and, some whispered, “typical French”) retorts from Eleven and Twelve’s adaptor Marie-Hélène Estienne.
“The question is obvious because…” was one answer. “If you’d read some books of Peter’s you’d know the answer,” was another response to an enquiry about where Brook’s facination with Africa comes from.
Ever patient, Baum pushed her to elaborate.
“At one point, Peter didn’t want to do theatre, he wanted to travel and go to villages where people didn’t know anything about theatre. It took three years before he came back,” Estienne finally told us. “He wanted to learn everything by doing.”
It’s evident how invaluable Brook’s travel was after watching Eleven and Twelve.
The rawness of the production was created in part by philosophies, told in such a way that you can imagine sitting on the dirt floor of an African village listening to a wise elder speak.
And Eleven and Twelve’s live musician Toshi Tsuchitori added further layer of tradition to the sparsely setup stage.
“I never studied in a music school – my teacher is the world,” Tsuchitori says at the talk. “My biggest influence comes from Africa because I wanted to research it myself.”
And perhaps the reason why people involved in Brook’s plays have often never been involved with theatre, is because he’s really an “improviser” of life.
Baum sums this up in closing comments, and giggles about a recent talk by Brooks in New York.
“He subverted it of course, and the audience were suddenly part of this improvisational master class.”
Eleven and Twelve was fantastic, and Brooks is a master.
There are three more pre-show talks for other Arts Festival productions at City Gallery.
Karsh Kale from Enter the Dragon, 1pm, March 17; René Jacobs from the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, 1pm, March 18; and members of The Walworth Farce, 1pm, March 19. Visit www.citygallery.org.nz and click on “events” for details.