What Does a Wooden Stage Say to Tavita Leilua's Bare Feet?

The boards at the Salt Loft give a little on the second beat. Tavita Leilua feels it before the band does. Her heel goes down, the wood answers, and the song starts a half-second later than the drummer thinks.

You are up late, so I will tell you how she describes it. Spring is the best season for a stage. In November the timber has lost the winter damp but not yet taken on the summer heat. It is the temperature of a hand that has just let go of yours. She says that to the soles, a song arrives as a rumour in the floor before it arrives as a sound.

She has never sung with shoes on. Not at the church hall where she started, not at the wedding in Papakura, not on the one television show that asked her twice. The show sent a stylist with three pairs of boots. She stood in the green room holding them like someone else's dogs, and then she walked out in her socks. The socks came off in the first chorus.

There are rules, though she would not call them rules. Pine is quick and a little bright. Kauri is slow and kind. Plywood tells you nothing and sounds like a table. A good floor has a pulse of its own, and she lets it set the tempo of the first verse. If the floor is not ready, neither is she.

Then there is Pewter Hall on Nelson Street. You may know it. High ceilings, good speakers, a floor of poured stone laid over what used to be a cold store. She arrived at four in the afternoon for soundcheck, stepped out of her sandals at the lip of the stage and put one foot down. She took it back up again. She tried the other. Same answer.

It was not a floor you could argue with. The stone held the cold of every night since the building was a place for storing fish. She did soundcheck sitting on a flight case with her feet on a folded coat. The sound engineer, a patient man named Arlo Penhale, said it was the quietest soundcheck he had ever run, because nobody wanted to be the one to speak.

That night she did sing, and she did it without shoes. Two stagehands laid down a strip of old carpet, three metres by one, from a van that smelled of wet dog. She stood on it for ninety minutes and moved exactly four steps. People in the front row said it was the most still she has ever been. She says it was the most still her feet have ever been, which is different.

Afterwards she went out to the loading bay and stood on the warm tarmac where the sun had been. She stayed there a long while. A truck reversed past her, beeping, and she hummed in time with it.

Go to sleep soon. Whatever floor is under you, I hope it is warm.