It's one thing for film festivals to shift online to continue during the Covid pandemic, but what about a theatre festival? The annual Kōanga Festival showcases new Māori plays and playwrights.
This year the organizers will pre-record the now-in-development plays and then premiere them online during the festival period. After that, they'll be made available free to audiences through the social media of the host theatre, Te Pou.
Lyn Freeman talks with Amber Curreen, and actor and producer who's been heavily involved in the reimagined Kōanga Festival, and with playwright Tainui Tukiwaho, about their plays Willie's Wānanga on Wheels and Found in Translation. They belong to a part of the Kōanga Festival called Whytangi?
Photo: supplied
Does knowing the play will be recorded and seen by a wider and different audience change their approach to crafting their productions?
"I'm really missing people coming together and ...enjoying or being challenged together, in a room where you don't get to choose when you watch it or listen to it, and don't get to choose who you're sitting next to, you might encounter someone different," Curreen says.
"I've been thinking a lot about that when curating how we're going to do Kōanga Festival online. Having the works presented as an audio podcast is mostly what we're going to be doing with the play readings, it allows people to really deeply listen to a play.
"And then we're able to bring them together on a Sunday in a Zoom hui, so people can come together, these strangers, to talk about a work that they've listened to. Like a book club but for the plays. And I think through that we can get the best of both deep listening and hearing, and being able to share it throughout the world, and at the same time people communing with art, she says.
Tukiwaho says despite the pandemic there has been some silver linings for New Zealanders in the time during lockdown that has given many a pause to reflect and to spend time with family.
But he agrees the different performance 'stage' they are writing for has changed the process and the end product.
"I don't know if I'd say things were lost, I think things were definitely exchanged though. There's new challenges for artists and new challenges for audiences engaging in theatre in this manner, but for anything that we do lose by not doing it live audiences gain other experiences.
"Traditionally my opinion of filmed live performances is that we lose too much and I would never do it if I wasn't pushed to do it - and I'm pushed now. But I'm really enjoying trying to discover and reshape my understanding of this art form so this is an enjoyable experience for our wider whānau as well."
"It's been different in lots and lots of different ways, but it's been exciting," he says.
Curreen says the Whytangi? brief was adopted after she was confronted by a difficult part of New Zealand's history.
"In about 2017 I was doing research for another project and came across Henry Williams' cover letter to his translation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and at the bottom of the cover letter there's a little cop- out that says 'this is an accurate translation, insofar as the idiom will allow'.
"Now reading that made me quite cross to be frank, and so I had wanted since 2017 to make a play that responds to that statement about te reo Māori. So this is what Whytangi? has become, we've commissioned playwrights from past Kōanga Festivals to write a work about te reo Māori, about Te Tiriti o Waitangi, from that inspiration.
Curreen says one of the exciting thing about commissioning different playwrites to work from the same starting prompt is the different plays they produce.
"The way I interpreted the statement, it says the language has restrictions to it and therefore makes communication less than ideal," Tukiwaho says.
"I created a work, [Found in Translation] ... where a colonial soldier has to marry a Māori princess and there's a translator there working hard to make sure that any miscommunications through the languages lands them both in a true love situation. So it's a playful romantic comedy done in about nine pages.
"It's also a homage to one of my favourite short playwriters David Ives, he has a series of plays in a book called Sure Thing, and in that there is a couple who find love with each other with the assistance of a translator as well."
Curreen says her father formed part of the inspiration for how to play the concept out as a performance.
"It's Willie's Wānanga on Wheels, it's a one-man show, where we have Tyler Wilson Kokiri playing our Willie, and he's taking us on a bus journey from Tāmaki-makau-rau to Te Rēinga, and it's all about the perils of translation and what can be lost in translation.
"I'm a learner of te reo Māori from a young age, and something you learn is the dangers of trying to wetewete - or take apart - the language, and find different meanings that aren't necessarily there. You can end up with all kinds of ridiculous translations when you try to compare it to English.
"Willie's a bit of my dad, Bill Curreen, he's a bit of that generation of man who left places like my father did, Tutekehua in Mangamuka... and came to the cities, and that deliberate urban shift of Māori men from rural places to the city.
"He's that kind of man who's had to work hard to learn what has been lost over generations in his family. And sometimes he messes it up a bit, but also sometimes he messes it up just to see if the audience is listening properly and to really take them on a journey of their own understanding."
