Lively shows recall settlers tales

Dave Kahn, David Ward and Peter Daube have been performing somewhere different every night for a month.

Variety of genres and instruments recapture intriguing characters and chapters of colonial New Zealand.

Twenty-six shows, three performers, eight original epic songs, each one up to 12 minutes long, Wheel of Experience winds up its tour of New Zealand in Auckland this week.

Indian Ink musical director David Ward, and musicians Peter Daube and Dave Khan, have been travelling from Northland to Stewart Island with a show they say walks a fine line between history and legend, theatre and music.

The songs explore some of the more intriguing characters and chapters from early New Zealand.

Audiences are treated to tales of love and betrayal on the Raurimu Spiral; the crimes of the Burgess Gang, who murdered Otago gold diggers; confidence trickster Amy Bock's infamous transformations; the plight of shipwrecked sealers; and the murder of elderly Chinese man Joe Kum Yung.

The trio have selected the right instruments for each time period so the banjo, fiddle, mandolin, cigar-box and Chinese guitar zhong ruan are used, while musical styles include ballads, wailing sea shanties, bluegrass and blues as determined by the tale being told.

The show was devised for Auckland Live's Random Acts street theatre festival in 2011, but Ward and Daube saw the potential for an extended version of the production. And they were hooked on discovering more about some of the less well-known tales from our past.

"We quickly discovered there are so many around, but we looked for characters and events that lent themselves to storytelling through song and that had enough mystery about them to spin a yarn," says Ward.

Daube says the intention was never to get up and present a history lesson.

"I don't know why we would be surprised we have these kinds of characters in our past, but we seem to have spent a lot of time avoiding talking about them. Maybe it's because we don't like airing our dirty laundry or we're afraid of offending the older generation."

But wherever Wheel of Experience has been performed, audience members have shared their own insights, anecdotes and sometimes family experiences of the historical accounts.

Ward says they have been doing a show somewhere different every night for a month, so there hasn't been time to add anything new to the songs. "But I think what we've seen and heard has changed our attitudes by making it more real for us."

Music preview

What: Wheel of Experience
Where and when: Q Loft, Wednesday to Saturday
Hear them: On the A Hundred Trees EP available at wheelofexperience.bandcamp.com.