Dr Steven Taylor and poses in front of Massey theatre students acting out the final scene of The Invisible Foot’.

‘Invisible Foot’ kick-starts workplace theatre at Massey
Massey University’s theatre and business programmes came together for a unique performance last week – a reading of a play that was never meant to be performed on stage. Called The Invisible Foot, the 40-minute piece was written by business academic and playwright Associate Professor Steven Taylor, who is currently visiting Massey University with the Fulbright Specialist Programme. Dr Taylor specialises in organisational theatre – the performing of plays in workplaces to effect transformational change. While this is a relatively new concept in New Zealand, it has a long established following elsewhere, especially in Europe. The idea, he says, is to get people thinking about aspects of the world of work in a different way.

“I see the plays as a way of opening up a conversation about things that we usually take for granted or don’t think about,” he says. “My hope is that the images and metaphors in the play stick with people and provide them with a way to talk and think about aspects of their lives that they may want to change.

“For example, I’d be delighted if a year after seeing The Invisible Foot someone said at a meeting, ‘there it is, the invisible foot of the market kicking us in the backside’, and that started a different sort of conversation about what the organisation might do.”

The Invisible Foot explores the relationship between capitalism and Christianity and critiques the business world’s addiction to growth. Students from Massey’s theatre studies programme had only a few hours to familiarise themselves with the text before performing a reading of the play in the university’s new Theatre Lab performing arts space.

Dr Taylor says when his plays are performed in workplaces he usually gets “a fair amount of laughter and knowing nods” and a lot of good discussion. The spirited reading of The Invisible Foot at Massey certainly elicited plenty of chuckles from an audience who appreciated its critique of the underlying reasons for the global financial crisis. After the performance, a panel discussion with business and arts academics and industry representatives explored the uses for workplace theatre in New Zealand. Panel member and The Warehouse general manager of human resources Anna Campbell said that she believed there was a place for theatre in organisations as long as it was used pragmatically. She went on to describe how The Warehouse uses actors as a part of its customer service training programme.

“While it’s a structured training programme, the people delivering it are improvisers and actors and it’s been hugely successful. Improvisation helps staff bring very real situations to life but in a non-threatening way. It gets them to take stock and think, ‘Oh my God, we do that to our customers, that’s really shocking.’ We wouldn’t get the same results if we stood in front of them and lectured them.”

The similarities in the skill sets of actors and good leaders was also discussed, and several members of the audience shared their accounts of being mentored or “directed” by good managers and learning to “act” in leadership roles and connect authentically with others. The performance of The Invisible Foot is just one of several workshops that will be run by Dr Taylor during his month-long stay in New Zealand. He has already worked with PhD candidate Kate Blackwood to start turning her research data on workplace bullying in hospitals into a play.

“With my New Zealand workshops I hope people will come away with some idea of the possibilities of how we can use the arts in organisations – and maybe even be a little inspired to do so,” he says.

Massey senior lecturer Dr Ralph Bathurst, who secured the Fulbright scholarship to bring Dr Taylor to New Zealand, said he hopes Dr Taylor’s visit will be the first step towards Massey embracing theatre to understand and discuss organisational behaviour.

“My longer-term plan is to bring our business and theatre programmes together to offer a troupe to go into organisations and be involved in professional development,” he says. “I’d also like students to consider turning their research into a play – that’s much more accessible than a dissertation that sits on the library shelf and never gets read.”

Derek Gordon and Sanam Vaziri in A Night In Iran. Creative producer Rand Hazou. Staged at the Massey University Theatre Lab, Albany Campus.

Iranian folktales come to life at Albany
The epic adventures of an Iranian folktale hero will come to life at Massey University’s new Theatre Lab at Albany on July 31.

A Night in Iran, produced and performed by well-known professional storyteller Derek Gordon, who teaches at Massey’s Expressive Arts programme, and Iranian migrant Sanam Vaziri, will offer audiences a rare glimpse into Iran’s legends and rich literary history in a performance of colourful storytelling, traditional songs and music.

A slayer of mad elephants, tamer of wild stallions, warrior in epic battles and seducer of beautiful princesses, Rostam is the central character in a series of 10th century folktales from Iran’s Persian region that are central to the production.

The idea for the performance came about through a chance meeting between Gordon and Vaziri earlier this year at an outdoor opera concert in St Heliers. The conversation quickly turned to Persia’s literary heritage – a subject dear to Vaziri, who moved to New Zealand from Tehran with her family ten years ago.

Under the stars at St Heliers the pair discussed the idea of creating a cultural event during Nowruz (Iran’s New Year) in March, but decided on a later date so they could concoct a fully-fledged production encompassing stories, art, music and food.

Dr Rand Hazou, Lecturer in Theatre with Massey’s Expressive Arts programme at Albany, saw the project as a perfect fit for his vision of the newly launched Theatre Lab as a space for the stories, experiences and voices of Auckland’s diverse cultures to be performed and shared with the wider community.

Gordon, who became New Zealand’s first full-time storyteller in 1981 as Bringwonder the Storyteller, says the Iranian folktales resonate with universal themes – a quest for knowledge, meaning and origins. The romantic legends featured in A Night in Iran predate Iran’s Islamic traditions, giving New Zealand audiences an insight into the rich heritage of the region, he says. And for Iranian migrants, the evening will be a special opportunity to re-connect with an aspect of their identity.

For Vaziri, who studied art at Auckland University, her love of traditional Iranian stories began at a very young age, as her grandfather would read her tales of kings and other classic folktales.

Gordon, who has performed in schools and festivals both nationally and internationally, says the art of storytelling has a unique power to create empathy by communicating across cultures and time zones. “There’s a magnetism in stories with heroic journeys, in love stories, and stories of discovery and realisation. Beauty and wildness co-exist – it’s magic,” he says.

According to the Heritage Institute website, the names Iran and Persia are often used interchangeably to mean the same country. Iran is the legal name and Persia was an ancient kingdom within Iran. Iran came to be known as Persia in the West thanks to classical Greek authors during whose time Persia was the dominant kingdom in Iran.

A Night in Iran will be performed by Sanam Vaziri, Derek Gordon, Azita Kusari, Morteza Hajizageh, with creative production by Dr Rand Hazou. It will run from 6pm to 8pm on July 31 at the Theatre Lab in the Sir Neil Waters Lecture Theatre Building, and Middle Eastern refreshments will also be served.

Watch a TV3 News item about the production Online.

Caption: Dr Rand Hazou, at the Albany campus’ new Theatre Lab to open next month.

New theatre lab a hub for community stories

Growing up in Jordan across the valley from the troubled West Bank has given Palestinian-Kiwi theatre-maker Dr Rand Hazou a unique perspective on the role of theatre in telling marginalised stories. It’s a theme the scholar is keen to explore in the context of ethnically diverse Auckland at the University’s Albany campus. He bucked the migration trend and moved here from Australia to take up the role, bringing a colourful mix of theatrical experiences – from a kid playing the youngest thief in the musical ‘Oliver’ and Shakespearian roles as a teen, to backstage manager in Jordan’s capital Amman for a political satire of Middle East leaders, then researching the role of theatre in advocating for asylum-seekers’ rights in Australia for his PhD.

As the new champion of the Expressive Arts programme in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr Hazou wants students across academic disciplines to take part in and create cutting-edge theatre. A custom-made Theatre Lab is currently under construction inside the Sir Neil Waters building, to be launched at the end of March. Theatre workshops, performances and artists’ talks are in the pipeline.

“Theatre programmes in universities around the world are constantly battling against shrinking budgets and classes, and here it’s expanding which is really exciting,” he says.

Dr Hazou is especially interested in the role of documentary theatre as a way of connecting with a community, and in the idea of tapping into untold true stories within communities.

“Documentary theatre is about storytelling,” he says. “I’m really interested in finding out what makes this local community tick, producing students who are creative, and engaged with their local community as well.”

His doctoral thesis, which he did at La Trobe University, Melbourne, explored potent examples of how documentary theatre was being used to tell the stories of asylum seekers. Titled Acting for Asylum: Asylum Seeker and Refugee Theatre in Australia 2000-2005, he examined how the traumatic experiences of asylum seekers held in remote detention centres in Australia were told through theatre. The main source of public information about asylum seekers on hunger strikes and rioting was from a government slant via the media, he says. “It was shocking stuff.”

“What was amazing was the theatre response. Actors, directors and ordinary people who were hearing what was going on started contacting groups with access to the detention centres, and going in to befriend these asylum seekers,” he says. “They would write down their stories, and make performances. During this period we had a renaissance of political, documentary theatre in Australia.”

Asylum-seekers’ stories of perilous escape and life in detention centres were turned into scripts and posted on websites so that community theatre groups could download and stage them. During his research he documented 35 new performances about asylum seekers, with some staged numerous times. He also spearheaded the Harakat Project involving Palestinians in Australia – supported by the Australia Council for Arts. Still a work in progress, he hopes to stage it in New Zealand. Again in the documentary theatre mode, it delves into the issue of interrogation, inspired by a New Yorker magazine article. He may straddle two cultures, but for Dr Hazou being Palestinian is at the core of his sensibility towards other marginalised peoples. He grew up in an international community and bi-cultural family, the second of three sons of a Kiwi mum and Palestinian father whose family left Jerusalem in 1947 just before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

His father, Tuma Hazou, a radio announcer for the BBC World Service in London, found himself a war correspondent when he bought a camera and returned to Jerusalem to make a documentary about the old city when war broke out in 1967. Mr Hazou met his Kiwi wife Virginia later when he was working for the Hashemite Royal Palace where she was working as a trained nurse and nanny. New Zealand was an exotic faraway place from a Jordan perspective but Dr Hazou’s maternal heritage allowed him to spend a year here as a five-year-old, and again for several months as a high school student during the Gulf War.

As a child, he recalls viewing the West Bank and the lights of Jerusalem from across the Jordan Valley. He didn’t visit the city of his forefathers until he was 21, and has been back several times to Jerusalem and the West Bank, though never to Gaza. As a member of the Palestinian diaspora – estimated at around five million, or half the total population – he believes Palestinian refugees “should be allowed to return and live in peace side by side with Israeli neighbours. Many in refugee camps dream of this.”

But he feels it would be condescending to suggest theatre could heal conflicts as deep as the Arab-Israeli one. “It’s more complicated than this. The idea that people don’t understand each other is false. They just have very deep grievances.

“The theatre that I’m interested in is more about raising questions than solving, or having any therapeutic effect. Provoking people – not just across cultures, also Palestinians, about they how they perceive themselves.”

When it comes to teaching drama at university, he believes theatre skills are highly relevant to a broad range of professions, from business to health, teaching, science and media. “The type of skills you learn in theatre – engaging people, using your voice confidently, physical communication, listening – you can apply in any chosen career. I’m hoping there will be room to cater to people from other disciplines, not just actors.”

Theatre, he says, can also transform and enhance people’s experiences of living in an urban environment. So his drama dreams are likely to spill over into skate parks, beaches and shopping malls, because for Dr Hazou, all the world’s a stage.