Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin
If the story is to be believed then Zody Takurua, the creative from Toi Whakaari behind Whōre, only had two or so weeks to create a body of work after being invited to join to Six Degrees festival at BATS Theatre when another show in the festival, Encounter, a walking tour, left the space free. Whōre, regardless of circumstance, feels at home among the Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington MFA showcase and has great promise as a development.
Whōre centres around Kahu, a young guy doing cashies in an Aotearoa from the future that just made all physical currencies redundant. Kahu is a sex worker and gets money from his clients, of which he has one recurring client, but because of the nature of his work Kahu is unable to provide an Employment Payment Document (or something to that effect, I forget the exact title) to accompany the cash he wishes to deposit at the bank and therefore can’t digitise the little money he has.
The hyper-bureaucratic nature of Takurua’s world emphasises, to me, the dichotomy between a clinical, exclusive Pākehā club (of their own design) and the indigenous whenua it has been implanted onto. The corporate and political landscape that Kahu has to somehow survive has put him in a dangerous maze where people only want to employ Māori who are proper enough, Pākehā enough. Potential employers are excited by Kahu’s diversity but become skeptical and jittery within minutes of experiencing how he speaks, how he moves, who he is.
I enjoy science fiction, and for me it is a genre that leans itself into finding modern day problems and extrapolating them. It takes something that’s wrong with today and emphasizes it, builds a world around that thing and its relationships to humans. Whōre in many ways reminds me of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which imagined a world where science, technology and process were prioritised above any kind of human-centred values. Huxley wrote his novel in the 1930’s after a war that required technological booms for all the wrong reasons. Today, with companies laying off people and replacing them with A.I. (thank you Spotify Wrapped) Takurua has constructed a science fiction solo about a world that prioritises industry and money above anything more human.
The most gentle and heartfelt conversation within the piece was between Kahu and his regular client where they shared a few brief messages to organise another meet up. The stigma around sex work is still alive and well, regardless of it’s legal status for two decades now, and I thought it was used well as a catalyst for this body of work. The most intimate of human physical activities, sex, is something that Kahu holds dominion over, perhaps the only thing that Kahu has that other characters don’t. However, in the bureaucracy of the world he is undermined because he doesn’t have his stupid slip thing, and so the only work – the only humane work depicted here, is stripped of its usefulness by a controlling Big Brother state.
The job Kahu gets is a job that could realistically be done by a machine but is a job given to a human. The role he inhabits by the end of the piece is a soul crushing and inhumane job because he is essentially gate keeping the rights of other people's lives. Yet it is the only job afforded to him.
It was a thought provoking 45 minutes in the BATS Dome before the lights came up and the applause sounded. As a whole it feels like a classic that’s ready to be made, if it can be sharpened up enough. Takurua has a skill for swapping characters during scenes and every transition was slick and clear. The naivete of Kahu was fun, however there were points where I wished Kahu knew the joke he was making. At the moment Kahu plays either ignorant, angry or childish and I believe there is also room to implant quick and charming into the character. Making him smile after some of his jokes, showing he is knowledgeable and cunning as well as all the rest of himself, might make it all the more of a tragedy that someone seemingly so talented can end up with the shit end of the societal stick.
Throughout the show there were beats I missed which might need rehashing or making clearer in the longer development promised for next year. There was talk of euthanasia and Hawaiki which needs to be made clearer, and the final monologue delivered in the spotlight, standing on the sole chair centrestage, was impactful and evocative, but also ambiguous in its setting. I wasn’t sure what character was saying this and to whom. It seemed a little too eloquent for Kahu, and perhaps with a bit more critical awareness and intelligent play from the character it could feel more at home, but the monologue would, one way or the other, need clearer context in the world (if it is the author's intention to have it be totally understood).
The opening image is extremely catching: Kahu sits in a chair centrestage with a spotlight on him. He is dressed in socks, undies, a black singlet with a bag over his head, and he begins to address the audience directly. This image, however, does not last long and is undercut because of how quickly that bag comes off and is never explained or returned to again. I believe the connection here is that it might be some kind of kink-work that he has done with a client and I encourage Takurua to think about recycling this image later in the play somehow, in a more tragic context as a worker for the state. It could be a powerful mirror between the satisfied, self-governed sex work Kahu so enjoys and what ultimately becomes his fate: as an unhappy, governed worker with bureaucracy or business as essentially his pimp.
Whōre is a powerful work in development at BATS Theatre and is on until the 14th December. More info here.
The hyper-bureaucratic nature of Takurua’s world emphasises, to me, the dichotomy between a clinical, exclusive Pākehā club (of their own design) and the indigenous whenua it has been implanted onto. The corporate and political landscape that Kahu has to somehow survive has put him in a dangerous maze where people only want to employ Māori who are proper enough, Pākehā enough. Potential employers are excited by Kahu’s diversity but become skeptical and jittery within minutes of experiencing how he speaks, how he moves, who he is.
I enjoy science fiction, and for me it is a genre that leans itself into finding modern day problems and extrapolating them. It takes something that’s wrong with today and emphasizes it, builds a world around that thing and its relationships to humans. Whōre in many ways reminds me of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which imagined a world where science, technology and process were prioritised above any kind of human-centred values. Huxley wrote his novel in the 1930’s after a war that required technological booms for all the wrong reasons. Today, with companies laying off people and replacing them with A.I. (thank you Spotify Wrapped) Takurua has constructed a science fiction solo about a world that prioritises industry and money above anything more human.
The most gentle and heartfelt conversation within the piece was between Kahu and his regular client where they shared a few brief messages to organise another meet up. The stigma around sex work is still alive and well, regardless of it’s legal status for two decades now, and I thought it was used well as a catalyst for this body of work. The most intimate of human physical activities, sex, is something that Kahu holds dominion over, perhaps the only thing that Kahu has that other characters don’t. However, in the bureaucracy of the world he is undermined because he doesn’t have his stupid slip thing, and so the only work – the only humane work depicted here, is stripped of its usefulness by a controlling Big Brother state.
The job Kahu gets is a job that could realistically be done by a machine but is a job given to a human. The role he inhabits by the end of the piece is a soul crushing and inhumane job because he is essentially gate keeping the rights of other people's lives. Yet it is the only job afforded to him.
It was a thought provoking 45 minutes in the BATS Dome before the lights came up and the applause sounded. As a whole it feels like a classic that’s ready to be made, if it can be sharpened up enough. Takurua has a skill for swapping characters during scenes and every transition was slick and clear. The naivete of Kahu was fun, however there were points where I wished Kahu knew the joke he was making. At the moment Kahu plays either ignorant, angry or childish and I believe there is also room to implant quick and charming into the character. Making him smile after some of his jokes, showing he is knowledgeable and cunning as well as all the rest of himself, might make it all the more of a tragedy that someone seemingly so talented can end up with the shit end of the societal stick.
Throughout the show there were beats I missed which might need rehashing or making clearer in the longer development promised for next year. There was talk of euthanasia and Hawaiki which needs to be made clearer, and the final monologue delivered in the spotlight, standing on the sole chair centrestage, was impactful and evocative, but also ambiguous in its setting. I wasn’t sure what character was saying this and to whom. It seemed a little too eloquent for Kahu, and perhaps with a bit more critical awareness and intelligent play from the character it could feel more at home, but the monologue would, one way or the other, need clearer context in the world (if it is the author's intention to have it be totally understood).
The opening image is extremely catching: Kahu sits in a chair centrestage with a spotlight on him. He is dressed in socks, undies, a black singlet with a bag over his head, and he begins to address the audience directly. This image, however, does not last long and is undercut because of how quickly that bag comes off and is never explained or returned to again. I believe the connection here is that it might be some kind of kink-work that he has done with a client and I encourage Takurua to think about recycling this image later in the play somehow, in a more tragic context as a worker for the state. It could be a powerful mirror between the satisfied, self-governed sex work Kahu so enjoys and what ultimately becomes his fate: as an unhappy, governed worker with bureaucracy or business as essentially his pimp.
Whōre is a powerful work in development at BATS Theatre and is on until the 14th December. More info here.