An afternoon of varieTea, musicaliTea and frivoliTea

Combining outrageous humour, beautiful music and quirky poetry, Oz Asia’s AFTERNOON AbsurdiTea will take audiences on an incredible experience of that wonderfully addictive beverage, Anne Norman aka Camellia Cha tells Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi.

What exactly is a Tea Performance? And what can audiences to AFTERNOON AbsurdiTEA expect?

In AbsurdiTea, rather than focusing on making tea, we are telling the story of tea, and its journey through various countries and cultures, using poetry, narrative and music from the countries where tea is grown and consumed. I have written a poem which challenges those of us who mindlessly partake of tea, to think about where it comes from and who plucked it. Just what is the story behind tea, and how did it get into my teacup? In one poem, rhythmically delivered lyrics will be supported by the Indian rhythms of Jay Dabgar and Josh Bennett.

In each place I give a performance, I usually TEAm up with a local artist or two, and a new way of combining ideas and threading the narrative emerges. OzAsia Festival is a celebration of Asian music, culture and the arts within Australia. The Artistic Director, Jacinta Thomson and I discussed potential artists to showcase at the festival in collaboration with my poetry, narrative and shakuhachi. The Australian Chinese ensemble lead by my old friend Wang Zheng Ting from Melbourne, and Tibetan singer Tenzin Choegyal from Brisbane with two visiting Tibetan monks, and the local Adelaide Indian music duo of Jay and Josh are the remarkably talented and varied line-up we selected to join me on stage. As you may be aware, Jacinta had a focus on tea in the last festival, and once again, this year there will be opportunities for the audience to view and participate in tea related events prior to our AFTERNOON AbsurdiTEA.

One of Josh Bennett’s talents includes Indian Beat Boxing – what exactly is that?

Now you have me quite excited. I can’t wait to start jamming with Josh and see just what he is capable of. From all accounts he is a remarkable musician. Beat boxing is the use of the mouth and vocal sounds to produce a rhythm section, if you will. I presume he will also incorporate a vocalization of the tabla bols. We will find out!

Would you like to share a snippet of the kind of humour and quirky poetry that will be part of this show?

You think tea is British, well of course you’re right, it’s true. Iraqis and Sri Lankans think that too. And if you’re Yank, its what you drank, then you sank it, now you thank it for your country’s liber-TEA teabag sucker sucker TEA! But the Chinese had it first, Japanese then got the thirst, and the Portuguese prayed on their knees til Chinese coffers burst...

Please share some experiences from your previous tea performances—I understand you have previously collaborated on these performances with a tap dancer and cabaret performers?

Yes. And with a cellist, and a recorder player, and a calligrapher, and a shamisen player with Japanese dancer... It has been an interesting learning curve and transition for me to ‘perform’ my book, Curiosi-tea. It is one thing to spend years researching and travelling and writing, and another to memorize parts of what you have written and deliver it with music or other art forms. Because we have such talented musicians on stage in the OzAsia presentation, I will keep my talking to a minimum in order to make time for the music to unfold. And I want to jam with the musicians on my shakuhachi where possible. Until tea took over my life, performing shakuhachi (bamboo flute) has been my primary occupation. Things are shifting a little, but shakuhachi is still my forte.

Please tell us a little bit about your book, Curiosi-tea.

Curiosi-tea is a flippantly presented, but thoroughly researched book on tea: tea’s history, health properties, and cultural associations. It makes use of the strange quirk of the English language, where over 2,000 English words end with the sound tea, such as CuriosiTY, serendipiTY etc. I had initially not envisaged a serious or scholarly book, but rather a bit of fun with puns and cartoon-like illustrations. So of course, the first chapter just had to be “Antiqui-tea” and the last “Infini-tea”, and then I thought I would fill it out with frivoli-tea... And having the naugh-tea, cheeky mind I have, I had to include chapters on promiscui-tea and sexuali-tea as well as topics which didn’t feel like they should really be in a tea book at all, such as radioactivi-tea and insani-tea. However, the more I researched and read, the more I was confronted by the dark side of tea, not just the froth and bubble of a whisked matcha, or the spice of a masala chai. It was when I began to read books like Roy Moxham’s Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, that the chapter entitled Inhumani-tea and Mortali-tea resulted. I tried to avoid including this darker material for quite a while, but the more I read I realised I couldn’t ignore it. The clincher came when I read an article in The Times of India on 1 March 2007 entitled “Tea estate closure results in 100 deaths”. The nature of my book became more weighty from then on.

Which is your favourite Indian tea, if I may ask?

I was very impressed with the organic teas of the Makaibari tea estate in Darjeeling. I came home with samples of their Silver Tips Imperial white tea and their green and oolong teas. However, when I want a kick that is more filling than a cleansing and subtle white or green tea, I sometimes make myself a milky masala chai using ‘black’ Assam tea in a saucepan on the stove at home.

You recently spent 5 weeks in India visiting tea plantations—please share with us, your many adventures.

I confess it was my first trip to India. As India came to the international tea trade late in the history of tea, I hadn’t written as much about India in my book as I had about China and her eastern neighbours. But India was crucial to Britain’s final economic blow to China. Britain had struggled for centuries to pay for her Chinese tea habit, and they had resorted to growing opium in India and creating a crippling dependency within China, raising a great deal of revenue through the sale of opium to finance the vast quantities of tea being shipped back to England. This all lead to what became known as the Opium Wars in the 1840s. Then the British East India Company, while gaining Hong Kong and a foothold in Shanghai and other treaty ports, lost their monopoly on the tea being traded out of China. It was time to grow it in their colonies. I therefore went to Assam to see where the British began their tea plantations.

I first went to Kolkata and met up with a wonderful fellow by the name of Ali Zaman, who gave me leads to his colleagues in the tea industry in Calcutta and Assam. I met with people from the Tea Board of India, the tea auction rooms at NILHAT HOUSE, and the secretary general of the Indian Tea Association. I then travelled to the Experimental Station of the Tocklai Tea Research Association in Jorhat. Their motto is: SustainabiliTEA through research. Now that’s my kind of spelling!

The scientists at Tocklai are brilliant. The facility there is the best tea research facility I have ever encountered. I have been to Japan and China and met scientists and tea experts in those countries, but the state-of-the-art equipment in Tocklai left my head spinning. Seeing this facility gave me a greater appreciation for the red or “black” teas of India. Clearly there is an interest in producing excellent tea in India, but, as with all things in all countries, this is balanced with the need to do it economically with an eye to profit. They had trans-genetic engineers and bio-technicians analysing DNA and making super clones of tea. Impressive work. They were also looking at finding natural ways to avoid the use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers.

I then went to Kaziranga National park and witnessed the Bihar celebrations where young women from a neighbouring tea plantation performed a dance accompanied by men singing and playing drums and a reed instrument. I interviewed the teenage girls afterwards, assuming that they were tea pluckers. They giggled and said their mothers were tea pluckers, they went to school. So I said, “well I guess you will all be tea pluckers one day”, to which they all loudly replied that they would not! They had their sights on the tourist industry and housekeeping in the resort adjoining the Kaziranga National Park. “So who will pick the tea when your mothers get too old?” I asked. “Our brother’s wives” they laughed.

I then went to Dibrugarh and on to the Hollonghabi Tea estate. I stayed with a tea planter and his generous wife, and saw their worker’s facilities... including an embarrassingly ill-equipped school for the workers children, and extremely basic medical facilities. The tea estates have an enormous burden of responsibility to look after a large number of workers and their families, and I began to get an inkling of the planters’ side of the story, and the headaches they face in managing their charges. A manager of a tea garden is not an expert on education and is not cashed up enough to fund a state-of-the-art medical facility.

I also went with my wonderful guide Rajan to meet members of the original tea tribes of upper Assam near the border with Burma. We forded a river in a small canoe to visit a Tangsa Naga family who live in a village made up of stilt bamboo homes in the rain forest. As the rain poured off the roof, we sat at tree level and drank tea made from leaves plucked from wild tea trees in their forest and ate a meal of which all the ingredients (chicken, rice, fruit, vegetables, spices) were grown on their property. Only the salt and onions had been bought at market.

I also had the opportunity to drink green tea in another bamboo stilt house with a bright fellow of the Singpho tribe who makes organic tea commercially. He was a powerhouse of knowledge on the tea history of his tribe and has helped anthropologists from around the world with their research. On the same day I attended a luncheon at the Margarite Club for the annual golf tournament and met several other managers of Tea Estates and their beautiful sari clad wives. Very hospitable folk.

One day I hope to return to upper Assam and Arunachal Pradesh with Rajan to explore the Chinese border region, and see what we can find in the way of evidence of a branch of the ancient Tea and Horse road that the Chinese scholars write about. Certainly the tea tribes I have visited in Yunnan remind me physically and culturally of the Tangsa Naga.

After Assam, I went to Darjeeling and met several knowledgeable and helpful men who have worked in the tea industry all their lives. One is the grandson of a Bengali Raja and the other came into Darjeeling as a young man on holiday from Gujarat and stayed to become a tea manager. I also spent a week living with a Gorkha family, where the head of the household is the son of a woman who came in from Nepal to pluck tea. He is a Buddhist Lama and local government clerk.

I still haven’t told you of visits to numerous temples; improvising music with the male ‘wives of Shiva’ in a Bhakti monastery on the island of Majuli; wandering around the blindingly white and glorious Taj Mahal; my adventures on trains, planes, rickshaws, an elephant and overly crowded ‘taxis’; or a leisurely day on a river boat in Kerala... It would take a book to tell you all my adventures! I love India and can’t wait to return.

AFTERNOON absurdiTEA, as part of the Oz Asia Festival in Adelaide will show at the Space Theatre on 26 September, 2010, at 2pm. For more information, please visit ozasiafestival.com.au/afternoon-absurditea