This, In Here is a play about ‘home’ told in the words of real people and devised by long-time Bay Buzzcontributor Jess Soutar Barron. It’s taken from interviews with Hastings residents and inspired by the work of verbatim-theatre maker Puti Lancaster.
It’s the final show of the Hawke’s Bay Arts Festival 2025, 2pm Sunday 19 October, Hastings Community Arts Centre, Russell Street, Hastings.
Emails between Puti and me were endless when she was online, then there’d be spans of dead air when she was on the road. She arrived in Heretaunga suddenly and was suddenly everywhere, making confronting theatre about local issues, people and places. She worked across disciplines and her practice felt haphazard and chaotic until the last minute when it all came together with discipline and structure. She made installation works too and collaborative works with visual artists, dancers, soundscapists, designers, old people, children. When she died, she was working on a piece with a ‘nose’, an expert perfumer.
An email in 2021 talked of an idea Puti had to explore “voice, verbatim theatre forms, story-telling of place, performance art and home as a whole audience piece.” She asked if I’d be interested in “working and thinking” through the idea with her. She signed off “Anyways no pressure.” Things got busy: life. Then Puti died on Christmas Day that year. It was as if she had left mid-sentence. There were so many ideas hanging in the ether, half-realised, projects begun with no way of knowing how things could continue without her.
In late 2022 we started picking up the pieces. For the HBAF that year, two of us sat in a temporary writer’s room and invited anyone – everyone – to sit with us. We asked them to tell us what home meant to them. Bridget Freeman-Rock and I (we’d both worked with Puti, and written for Bay Buzz) thought a few friends might drop by. Instead, nearly 80 mainly strangers came and shared with us over three days. We took notes of over 50 stories, hand written with HB pencils on A4.
We were told about Hastings in the 1950s, about the political changes of the 70s and 80s, we were told about heartbreak and broken homes and marriage break-ups, being homeless. People shared stories of neglect and isolation, poverty. Some people told us things they admitted they’d never told anyone before.
It was exhausting work and hard going and a lot of the time it was sad. Also, though people told us stories about their favourite homes, places they’d felt safe and happy and heard. At that stage we didn’t know what we were going to do next, how we could ‘use’ all those interview transcripts, and how we would ever be able to encapsulate the project and share it back to people.
For HBAF’23 we made an installation work of 40 of those stories reimagined as poems. It was a tentative way to hand them back to Heretaunga. After that, I sat with the pile of stories for a long time and the weight of them became greater and greater. By that stage Bridie’s focus and energy was elsewhere: life. I kept going into the pile and reading a story then shoving it back in. I’d pull out bits and place them alongside other bits. Slowly I built a kind of play, a performance piece for voices; weaving these stories together as a fabric of experience from across the district, across ages and backgrounds, and lived experiences, across time. Over a year I workshopped it with theatre mates and a local director who had been in hiatus until I coaxed him out and forced him to participate, in the way Puti had made me get involved in her crazy ideas.
This last piece in the trilogy is coming to a head now. This long, careful, quiet project has become a bold, dynamic work entitled This, In Here. We have one performance only, fittingly as part of the Hawke’s Bay Arts Festival. Wonderful, experienced Hawke’s Bay actors Laughton Maitai, Kim Wright and the legendary LJ Easter are joined by newcomer Sita Fitzgerald and directed by Glen Pickering to breathe life back into these stories.
You should come. Puti would’ve liked that because she had great love for Hawke’s Bay and its people. She wanted us to have nice things that were meaningful and thoughtful and showed us back to ourselves.
And, if any of you remember sharing your story with a couple of writer/researchers during the Arts Festival in 2022, you should definitely come. You might recognise yourself, or bits of your reflections on the subject of home. Or, you might not, and your story may have fragmented to such an extent that it isn’t yours anymore, and instead it’s become something that belongs to all of us.
