Leki Jackson-Bourke and Saale Ilaua are the creative forces behind Strictly Brown, a new Pasifika production company that opens its first theatre show next week. Photo / Dean Purcell
Late April, in an Auckland high school office. Two teachers open a blank document on a computer screen. One of them starts typing: M-A-N-I . . .
“We titled it ‘Manifest’,” says Saale Ilaua. “Let’s go! And we listed the things we wanted to do in the next year.”
Nine months later, in an Auckland community centre meeting room. Two former teachers deliver notes to actors rehearsing the debut theatre work for the new Pasifika production company, Strictly Brown.
“If we’re gonna make some noise, we’re gonna make some noise,” says Leki Jackson-Bourke. “We have nothing to wait for. We’ve left our jobs and this is our livelihood on the line. We just got to get straight into it.”
Jackson-Bourke, 32, and Ilaua 28, were, respectively, fulltime dance and drama teachers at Marcellin College, a Catholic secondary school in Auckland’s Royal Oak. Now they are the co-founders of a creative company that - to borrow directly from their current script - is more than just song and dance.
“I think we found an impulse, at the end of Term 2,” says Jackson-Bourke. “We were worn out. I questioned myself. I’m ADHD. I know I can’t sit still. I cannot do this monotonous routine where nothing is changing.
“You had to tick this box and this box and this box. And I’m like, ‘this kid sucks at writing, but is amazing in other ways - can they not be credited for that?’ It’s not an equitable system for everyone because different people have different skill sets and passions and it’s really hard to assess them on prior knowledge and the skills they bring from outside the classroom.”
Ilaua: “We had our moments, we had our successes - but I feel like we can help the kids more from the outside.”
They point to organisations like Duffy Books which promotes reading and literacy, or Theta which uses performing arts as a health and sex education teaching tool.
“We don’t have anything for language and culture,” says Jackson-Bourke. “We celebrate all these language weeks, but we don’t have a programme that could go around to different schools . . . so we’re trialling a pilot workshop. We’re interested in that kind of space.”
First, they have to get some bums on seats - and a paying audience through the door. Strictly Brown’s debut production is, appropriately, classroom-adjacent.
Pring It On is a parody of the American cheerleading film Bring It On (in Pasifika slang, the ”b” is often exchanged for a “p”), set in a fictional South Auckland school preparing for Polyfest, the world’s largest secondary school’s Pacific Dance Festival.
Jackson-Bourke (the first Pasifika recipient of the CNZ Todd New Writer’s Bursary Grant) wrote the script, and the cast has been handpicked to deliver a world premiere that opens at the Māngere Arts Centre on January 31. Most theatre companies take six to eight weeks to stage a show. Strictly Brown’s actors learned their lines over Christmas and will spend just over a fortnight getting audience-ready.
Ilaua: “A two-week rehearsal period is crazy. No one does this.”
Jackson-Bourke: “We applied for some funding and got maybe half. So we were like ‘we’re just gonna have to work and hustle’ . . . we know we work well under pressure.”
Ilaua: “Put us in the pressure cooker and we’ll cook you something else.”
Day two and the rehearsal room is sweaty-hot. Auckland is a humid soup and there was a last-minute venue change this morning but time is a luxury and, say the directors, “we don’t have time, so there’s no luxury!”. (A few days later, when the New Zealand Herald photographer visits, the core cast is working from a car park).
That cast includes a former Miss Samoa New Zealand gone full mean girl. One of the stars of television’s The Panthers plays a love-struck teenager with “small arms and rosary beads”. There are faces from The Savage Coloniser Show and The Wizard of Otahuhu. The musical director has flown in from Australia and the cultural advisor has more than a decade’s experience as a Polyfest tutor.
If the songsheet skews old-school, the jokes are entirely contemporary (“this isn’t the hip hop nationals, Penina Goebel!”). The directors strum a guitar and beat soft rhythms on a rolled-up fala. Any day now, they’ll incorporate a 15-strong ensemble cast and four-piece band into the production.
“Trust the process,” Jackson-Bourke tells the actors as they huddle for notes. But, also, says Ilaua: “We’re still discovering our process.”
Who chucks in a fulltime job during a cost-of-living crisis? Who forms an arts company called Strictly Brown at a time when funding is tenuous, conservative political parties are issuing press releases about so-called controversial Samoan plays and more than 10,000 people are attending hui to discuss concerns about the impact of the new coalition government’s policies on Māori.
Jackson-Bourke: “I don’t conform to other people’s opinions and perspectives. I’ve just always been like that. I just don’t have ears. One of our favourite sayings is ‘the lion doesn’t concern itself with the opinion of the sheep’. I absolutely love that. I live by that.
“At the end of the day, we just want to present work and people view it is up to them . . . that’s the joy and beauty of art. We can digest some of these issues as a community and we can address them and talk about them - because we can’t do it in real life. I mean, I can, because I’m direct.
Ilaua: “Leki is very much the lion in our company. I’m still a cub, still finding my feet!”
The pair first met when Ilaua was in Year 10 and Jackson-Bourke was his Polyfest tutor. Fast forward, and the latter was on teacher training placement at Marcellin College when he discovered his old student was now a high school drama teacher. They worked together on last year’s Polyfest, making headlines when their students delivered a theatrical (and political) piece focusing on Samoan history, rather than the traditional 20-minute competitive dance segment.
At the time, Jackson-Bourke told The Coconet TV: “Polyfest should be more than just entertainment. If we focus too much on competition and criteria, then we are at risk of becoming dancing robots who sing, smile and harmonise on repeat.”
And then, one day at the end of Term 2, Jackson-Bourke and Ilaua sat down in front of that blank computer screen and started typing: M-A-N-I-F-E-S-T.
The company name is their favourite colour. It is also Ilaua’s mother’s maiden name, an ode to a show by a former tutor at the Pacific Institute of Performing Arts - and the kaupapa of what they’re trying to achieve.
“We are trying to create brown work, but we don’t mean that it’s exclusively for brown people,” says Jackson-Bourke. “We’re trying to do everything from an indigenous lens. It’s a mindset, rather than ‘you have to be brown like us’.”
Jackson-Bourke once described his culture as his super-power.
“I used to be intimidated when I would walk into a room full of white people . . . ‘I shouldn’t be here, I can’t be in this space’. Now I’m like, ‘oh my gosh, I know something you don’t know. I have this other skill set you don’t have. I have a point of difference’.”
He says that, for years, young Pasifika people were encouraged not to speak the language of their parents (”there’s no success in the language”). Today, the narrative is flipping. Young people are trying to revive what was almost lost - and Strictly Brown wants to be at the front of that conversation.
“We’re trying to use performing arts to engage with the young Pacific audience. With a young, brown audience. And we’re trying to weave in different strands - culture, identity, language, mental health . . . all the things we want our young people to learn, especially the children who are of the diaspora, who didn’t grow up in the country of their parents.”
At rehearsal, say the duo behind this new company, that’s expressed “in the little things we do”. Things like wearing lavalava, bilingual “check-ins” with the cast and beginning and ending rehearsals with a prayer. Standing in a circle is common theatre practice, but for Jackson-Bourke, that too has special significance: “I’m part Niuean and it’s the only culture that makes the tapa cloth in a circle. It represents wholeness.”
He was seven when his mum took him to watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He had his photograph taken with the cast and “I thought they were celebrities, and they were my friends and I wanted to, like, be them”. Ilaua had planned to study a music degree but when his application got sidelined by a rugby trip to Australia he auditioned for the performing arts degree at Unitec “and that’s where my path started”. When the pair re-met at Marcellin it was, they say, a full-circle moment.
Pring It On is all-singing, all-dancing and laugh-out-loud funny. The directors are fully expecting the audience to join in when they know the words. But, while the script is sprinkled with Samoan, reply phrases are deliberately in English.
“Because not all of our community can actually speak Samoan,” says Jackson-Bourke.
“If we’re unpacking really, really what this is about . . . Our kids are disconnected. We’re growing up in a different environment, away from our homeland. We’re disconnected physically from where our souls and spirits are. And some kids don’t have the tools in their life, the skills to survive this world we’ve been put into or come to.
“There’s a line in the play that says ‘it’s more than just a song and dance’. That’s really cliched, but we’re saving lives in our own way. This is our way of showing kids you belong here. This is where you belong, this is who you are. We’re not trying to solve all the problems but if one kid walks out of here and goes, ‘Mum, I want to learn Samoan now, because I watched that show . . . '
“It’s the small wins we want to celebrate.”
Strictly Brown’s Pring It On plays Jan 31-Feb 3 at the Māngere Arts Centre - Ngā Tohu O Uenuku.
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