Interview with Sidney Moko Mead by David Lamble

A New Zealand Heritage

Te Maori

One Thousand Years of the Ancestral Art of the First Inhabitants of New Zealand At the M.H. De Young Museum to 12/1.

Give our readers an idea of what to expect when they visit Te Maori.

I don't know whether I should. Your readers should really go look for themselves and for me to tell too much about it might be taking away some of what we call the ihi, the prestige, the feeling you get when you visit this exhibition. I don't know how the American people will react to our treasured pieces. I know that because of the sheer excellence of a number of those pieces, the reaction would have to be fairly positive. Because one or two of the pieces are quite exceptional in the impact that they make: it's enough to sort of make you shiver all over when you stand in front of some of them. Te Maori features pieces which our own people would say you are very lucky to see. Some of them were allowed to leave New Zealand only after lengthy debate.

There is a word that describes the special feeling your people have for their art that transcends Western notions of art.

The word for our art objects is not a word that means art object, but rather it has a different sense. It is taonga. A taonga is an object that has come down from our ancestors. All of us who are alive today are trustees of that art heritage. It is our task to see that they're handed down to generations yet unborn.

Theatre

Dick Hasbany

MARK I. CHESTER

Image of a famous Maori carver Tikapa centerpost, 19th cent.

Albright from previous page

Beyond that, Albright's interest wavers, and with some justification, begins to wane. The works of William Wiley, Wayne Thiebaud and others from this period do seem to pale by comparison with their predecessors. Albright's handling of the next wave of artists is even more problematic as we sense his dissatisfaction with the emergence of psychedelic art, visionary artists, and the posters and comics of the time.

Albright devotes considerable space to the "personal mythologies" of crafts artists like Clayton Bailey and Robert Arneson with dutiful enthusiasm, but the book dies with a whimper over the

An ancestor figure attempting to stop the lizard, symbol of death, from entering his mouth

Tumoana housepost, 19th cent.

Your ancestors first came to New Zealand in huge canoes. In some ways you feel Te Maori serves as a kind of, metaphorical, canoe for today's Maori people.

Yes, Te Maori is our canoe into the internatinal world. It is taking us where we have never been before. It's mainly an effort to reclaim the future. We are putting our ancestors to work again. We thought they were dead. Many of our people believed that they should have remained dead, but that's because of what has happened to them through European-induced culture change. Our ancestors have done a splendid job of lifting Maori morale and our self esteem. It's their work not our's. They are the ones who produced these great works. So, Te Maori is no ordinary canoe. It carries our mana with it and it also bears our hopes for a better future at home.

Professor Mead, co-curator of Te Maori, co-hosts an audio tour of the exhibition available at the DeYoung Museum. Call 776-2272 for information.

encroaching "pluralism" Albright saw in new works of art around him, which he hated and perhaps feared.

But there isn't much of Albright in the writing about art after the sixties; the nature of his study, justifiably, constrained him from venting his real feelings about the work of surviving artists he surveyed. Still we miss that hectoring, acerbic, but so often transported tone that characterized his best writing for the daily paper.

Perhaps it isn't too much to hope that, with this illustrated history in print, work can be begun on a percep-. tively edited collection of his art reviews (and perhaps a volume of his writing on jazz as well), so that familiar voice can once again be heard.

The Director (Gerald Duff, rear) and his Guard (David Marshall, left) keep a watchful eye on two terminally ill members of a suicide club (Philip Justin Smith, left and Will Harde) in Night Sweats.

Final Solutions

Night Sweat, by Robert Chesley, directed by Chuck Solomon at Theater Rhinoceros, to 9/30. Call 861-5079.

aced with an AIDS diagnosis and a possibly agonizing death, Richard (Will Harde), a mild-mannered, attrac-tive landscape gardener decides to end his life rather than fight the pernicious syndrome. Instead of suicide however, Richard joins the "Coup de Grace Club," a bizarre netherworld consortium whose members choose their very own way of dying.

The sinister, Naziesque Director of the club (Gerald Duff) promises applicants a full schedule of experiences," the perfect plan, individually designed for that "transcendent moment." Dying is promised as the ultimate orgasm; "Death." intones the Director, "is the flower of romanticism."

The bulk of Robert Chesley's dream/fantasy play is a series of macabre, outrageous and sometimes humorous death acts witnessed by Richard as he prepares his own in a kind of sex-crazed disco party. "Clients" are hung, shot, electrocuted, choked, stabbed, and cremated as the pinnacle of their chosen fantasy-an opera diva's final aria, a cowboy shoot-out, an inquisition, a fag bashing, to name a few. is reached. Anything is possible here; playwright Chesley has turned fantasy inside out and there is something to be said for airing our worst fears about the AIDS crisis. Perhaps something this cathartic can cleanse our private horror maybe.

The difficulty with Night Sweat comes with the lack of narrative. We don't learn much about Richard, certainly not enough to be consistently caring about him. Gorgeous gay politico Tom (Philip Justin Smith), who falls for Richard in a final fling (performed flagrante delecto before our eyes) before his savage end, never tells us just what his political work involved, or what pushed him to his "final solution." Suddenly, when Richard is

almost ready for the knife, amidst some wild fucking, all the nasties and torturers of the club are charmed into docile, fairy maidens. Tom has been resurrected as a Good Queen Glinda done up in deer drag, exhorting all to "rejoice in your body," choose life and love one another. The play ends hastily in a kind of Celtic back-to-nature resolution, something akin to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Evil has been foiled, sanity restored and there is hope for the living.

The message that no one really wants to die and that we can, we must, save ourselves from AIDS is plainly didactic. At the end, Richard screams triumphantly, "I want to live, I want to live!" (remember the 50's movie of the same name with Susan Hayward playing the first woman to be executed in California?) Chesley has written a sort of morality play on AIDS and, while entertaining, frightening and sometimes provocative, it's just not subtle or coherent enough to be dramatically satisfying.

Overall, the production of Night Sweat is good, with a bit of technical tightening here and there in order. Ominous, etheral music helps in the beginning to set the mood of the Club. The cast is large, the acting sometimes stiff, other times engaging and there is plenty of exposed flesh. Mr. Chesley, no stranger to theater (Stray Dog Story, Crimes Against Nature) has given us yet another angle on the AIDS crisis, one definitely worth pondering. O August 1, 1985.

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