What home can be _{by Madelaine Empson}

Jacqueline Coats has a passion for music, theatre, and community. With an MTA in Directing from Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington and Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama School, plus a Postgraduate Diploma in Arts Education Management awarded from the University of Leeds, she has worked as a director, assistant director, and staging director for opera and theatre companies, festivals, and orchestras across the motu.

A singer and musician herself, Coats works closely with Aotearoa’s premier national choir Voices New Zealand and, alongside music director Dr Karen Grylls (CNZM), is the co-creator of their upcoming production Horizons. We caught up with the renowned opera director about her career so far and the Wellington debut of this immersive exploration of migration, transience, home, and belonging, which premiered in Auckland to great acclaim and heads to St Andrew’s on the Terrace over Labour Weekend from the 26^th to the 28^th of October.

How did you get into stage directing?

When I was doing my degree at Victoria University, I was in the national youth choir [New Zealand Youth Choir]. I’d go over to the music department just across the road [at The New Zealand School of Music – Te Kōkī] and I’d be a  part of the opera productions they would put on. I went and auditioned to be an actor in them. My audition was obviously terrible, because they said to me, ‘I see that you are interested in stage management… would you like to be a stage manager?’ I ended up being a stage manager and it was the best thing I could’ve done, because from there, I started doing more work for them and ended up becoming an assistant director for operas through the New Zealand School of Music, and then into the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts, and then for New Zealand Opera. So it was definitely a good path to go down.

From a directorial and staging perspective, what is it about music that you love?

It gives you immediate access to your emotions. You can change a scene so much through the music that is playing alongside it, or the music that you choose to sing. Opera takes that to another level – you have this whole emotional world that is playing out through the singing which you are then putting your visual world to. That’s the thing I love about it: that it is so immediate, and so universal. Everybody is able to connect through music in some way.

The world-building must be so crucial to staging an opera, because the music is often in a different language.

Yes, but quite often when I’ll listen with my daughter at home – she’s 13 now, obviously she’s been immersed in this world since she was born [laughs] – we’ll listen to something on the radio, and I’ll go, ‘Ooh, can you hear how the tenor’s doing this? What do you think is going on at this point in time?’ I think you can pick up on the feelings and connect with a piece even though you might not be able to understand what is being said.

Shireen Abu-Khader’s piece Huwiyati Muhajer (Citizens of Horizons) served as the starting point for Horizons. How did the music strike you the first time you heard it?

Shireen Abu-Khader, who is a Palestinian, Jordanian, Canadian composer, was commissioned by Voices New Zealand to write this piece. I was very inspired by it, by this idea, the beautiful poetry of ‘I am a citizen of horizons’. What does that mean? For her it’s coming from a very particular place, because she’s writing from her culture and her experience. And so for me, sitting outside of that, how do I connect into that piece? I started thinking about how there are people who, all around the world, for centuries, have been displaced from their homelands; that we’re always looking beyond, to the horizon, to that imagined place of what home can be and what home means to us.

The concert came out of that idea. Hers is the central piece in that. We start with this idea of thinking about home with Dvořák’s Going Home [arranged by Brent Stewart], which is all about looking back through the door, looking back to the people we’ve left at home. It moves through to looking for a new home and moving towards the horizon.

What elements of Huwiyati Muhajer fed into the immersive spirit and staging of Horizons?

In her piece we move from the marketplace to a time of war to people being moved onto a boat, and then the boat sinks. The people are lost in the ocean. She dedicates the piece to all the people who have been lost in those times of trying to flee and being lost at sea. So it’s a very powerful piece, and because she’d written it in such a theatrical way, with all this movement through it, that led me to think about how we could do this as an immersive [experience] for the audience. The audience is sitting (some of them on cushions) within this environment where the singers are moving through them, around them. It’s very intimate.

As well as staging Horizons in the round, further immersive elements include the narrator, Nathaniel Lees. The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, Sione’s Wedding… quite the change for him!

It’s wonderful to work with him. He acts as the guide for the audience, a storyteller. I really wanted someone who had that mana to do this work, to hold all these stories. We use pieces from around the world. There’s an Estonian composer [Veljo Tormis], a Latvian composer [Ēriks Ešenvalds], an Australian composer [Joseph Twist], a New Zealand composer [Takerei Komene], British composers [Bob Chilcott, Joanna Marsh]. We’re combining all of these different experiences together. [Lees] is able to draw all of those threads and weave them together to talk about a universal experience.

What do you hope audiences will take away from Horizons?

I hope that through the immersion, they get that feeling of imagining the experiences that are being told in the stories. It’s that empathy, walking in someone else’s shoes. Thinking about how we sit within the world, what we can see around us: whether we turn away from that or look towards it.

What have been some of the highlights of your career so far?

Oh, gosh! I have been very lucky to do such a wide range of things. I am working on Tosca at the moment for Wellington Opera. So, having the opportunity to do those grand operas: I directed La bohème for New Zealand Opera a few years ago. But also directing a production like Noye's Fludde by Benjamin Britten for New Zealand Opera, which involved 80 children, three opera singers, and an orchestra. I love working with community.

Where do you think the arts’ greatest power lies?

I think it lies in the way that you can uniquely express who you are. There’s a great danger that you can see in cutting the arts (and especially out of the school curriculum). Not everybody expresses themselves the same way, not everyone learns the same way, not everyone speaks the same way. The arts are a uniquely personal thing. They give you the power to be able to say things in the way that you want to and show yourself to the world.