Background
The Nambassa Winter show was coordinated on a voluntary basis by proud young unemployed kiwi hippies against a national backdrop of high unemployment in New Zealand. This era heralded the reformation of many social issues and cultural ideas, the youth (today’s baby boomer), encouraging social revolution, while reshaping creativity and artistic direction away from convention (the norm). As well this period in New Zealand witnessed many young indigenous Māori activists protesting for land rights and to have past land acquisitions recognised and recompensed. This was the roaring seventies and countercultural idealism was in full swing.
The first 1978 Nambassa festival had been successful and some of the profits from this event were drafted into their Winter Show.
To make this event a reality, the Nambassa core group who were based in the country villages of Waihi and Waikino at the foot of the ecologically sensitive Coromandel Peninsula, temporarily moved to the city and hired the St John youth camp west of Auckland from where this production was implemented. Professional and amateur actors, musicians and dancers, choreographers, seamstress’, chiefs, masseurs, prop designers, auto mechanics, various sound and lighting technicians, roadies and administrators (who doubled as actors) assembled at the St Johns camp where over a period of two months this production was created and rehearsed. This was a live in workshop as most participants in the Winter Show were encouraged to take up temporary residency at the camp, thus the Mother Centre was established. Many participating amateurs later carved out professional careers in the entertainment industry.
Read more about this topic: Nambassa Winter Show With Mahana
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—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
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