New Zealand's newest major opera: The Bone Feeder

The Bone Feeder, Libretto Renee Liang, Composer Gareth Farr
Auckland Arts Festival
ASB Waterfront Theatre

The new opera, The Bone Feeder, is the story of a young Chinese man trying to trace his ancestry which is linked to the tragic sinking of the SS Ventnor which sank off the Hokianga Harbour in 1902. It was carrying the exhumed bodies of 500 Chinese workers which were being returned to China for burial in their hometowns.

The work consists of two parallel stories, that of Ben, the young Chinese man coming to the Hokianga to search for the burial sites of his ancestors and the ghosts of the buried men awaiting discovery and return to China.

In both narratives, the individuals are concerned with ideas related to death, the afterlife, the desire to be interned in one’s homeland and the links to the ancestors.

The work itself takes on all the dimensions of a mythic tale with common links between European, Maori and Chinese cultures. Each has different ideas about what happens to the body and spirit as well as some similarities.

Spirits Bay in the far North is considered a sacred place in Māori culture because, according to legend, spirits of the dead depart there to their ancestral home in Hawaiki. Many Chinese in the 19th century believed that the bones of the dead should return to their village for internment close to family and ancestors. Europeans' burial practices have varied over the centuries but in many cases the notion of returning bodies to ancestral homes is still prevalent.

While these concepts are tied into the primitive ideas and superstitions of an afterlife and the notions of the soul, they also provide the very real way in which individuals feel connected to their history and culture.

The opera drew in all those ideas, notably in the opening sequence where we encountered a Charon-like figure, the ferryman of Hades who carried the souls of the dead across the River Styx, as in Greek mythology those bodies left unburied had to wander the shores.

Te Oti Rakena singing the part of The Ferryman and Ben (sung by Henry Choo) the young Chinese man as the two living characters provided the narrative line.

Rakena gave his character a fine mixture of the solemn and the comic while Choo provided much of the rich emotional texture of the work.

Jaewoo Kim as the great great grandfather of Ben inhabits the stage partly as a ghost but also as part of the present with Ben occasionally feeling his presence. He conveyed a certain ghostly quality with a voice that evoked melancholy. He was well supported by the trio of ghostly miners – Clinton Fung, William King and David Hwang

The female chorus of Sarah Court, Dilys Fong, Helen Kim and Kararaina Walker provided a splendid eerie sound that added an element of despair

Renee Liang has written a finely judged libretto combining clear description, poetic reflection along with some witty and sensitive passages. There was an emotional richness which combined both a depiction of the real world as well as the abstract spirit world.

The music by Gareth Farr combined western instruments with traditional Chinese flutes, fiddles and zithers, along with taonga pūoro, mirroring the combined strands of the story. He used the instruments to produce a superb range of sound, from eerie ghostly sounds through the dramatic and ritualistic.

The audio-visual material with images of land and sea along with surtitles in English, Maori and Chinese was one of the best examples of combining visual information, sense of place and text to have been seen in some time.

The use of surtitles on the large screen is to be commended not just a great way for the audience to follow the dialogue but also the visuals became an intimate and integral part of the opera itself. That the company saw the importance of providing the words was of major theatrical importance. Most English language opera productions fail to provide English surtitles, which weakens the power of the performance and this disdain of the audience does them a disservice.