Te Whaitaima Te Whare (left) and Jeffrey Addison of Toro Pikopiko Puppets with some of their many puppets and sets. Photo / Laurilee McMichael
Te Whaitaima Te Whare (left) and Jeffrey Addison of Toro Pikopiko Puppets with some of their many puppets and sets. Photo / Laurilee McMichael
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A Waitahanui couple who have spent years touring New Zealand with puppet shows telling Māori-themed stories in te reo and English are taking a different kind of show on the road.
Jeffrey Addison and Te Whaitaima Te Whare, based at the village of Waitahanui south of Taupō, are thepuppeteers, set-builders, writers, composers and driving forces behind the company Toro Pikopiko Puppets. For 25 years, Toro Pikopiko has taken puppet-led storytelling to kohanga reo, schools, libraries, theatres, festivals and museums. That meant 25 years of packing puppets and sets in and out of the Toro Pikopiko van for each show, sometimes several times a day.
When Covid-19 lockdown last year meant the couple's latest touring work Mama Long-Fin had to be put on hold, Jeffrey and Te Whaitaima had to take an enforced rest. Once 2020 was finished, they just didn't want to go back to the exhausting pressures that came with live performing.
But that led to a dilemma. Touring was Toro Pikopiko Puppets' bread and butter. They had to think of something else.
So the couple put on their thinking caps and realised that the stories their puppets tell could be translated into audio books.
In 2019, they had started making children's audio books in te reo Māori for the Ministry of Education; and that experience enabled them to successfully apply to Creative New Zealand for funding to make more. Now Toro Pikopiko Puppets has a deal with Audiobooks NZ to create five audio books of stories based on adaptations of its shows performed between 2010 and 2020. The audio books will be uploaded to 45 different global platforms.
Toro Pikopiko puppeteers Jeffrey Addison and Te Whaitaima Te Whare performing in Tauranga in 2015. Photo / John Borren.
Jeffrey and Te Whaitaima started work on the audio books last year and the first one will be released on June 1 with new books following on the first of every month until all five audio books are out.
"All of the stories are told in English with some te reo Māori words, phrases and waiata and this makes it accessible to a vastly bigger audience. There are now over a billion people able to understand our stories," Jeffrey says.
"We are very hopeful because people have reached an awareness of the limits of screens and how they can atrophy the limits of the imagination rather than increasing it.
"For instance, we have the story of Māui Tikitiki fishing up the North Island and all I've had to do is a rumble sound effect and the imagination does the rest.
"To me, it was really liberating that I could use narration and other story telling techniques and avoid the need to have to show everything to children. Just let them hear a book being read and imagine the world of the story as it's being read to them."
Toro Pikopiko Puppets perform Apo the Greedy Taniwha for tamariki in Taupō in 2014. Photo / Supplied
To launch the audio books, Jeffrey and Te Whaitaima will spend the next six months taking the Toro Pikopiko Tales Road Show on tour.
But rather than having to set up and then perform all the puppetry alongside the story, Jeffrey and Te Whaitaima have adopted a lower stress, more sustainable approach. At the launch of the first volume at the National Library in Wellington earlier this month they had the audio book recording playing with the puppets available for children to be able to pick up and explore while listening to the stories that went with them.
Jeffrey says it was wonderful to see the interaction between the children, the puppets and the stories.
Te Whaitaima and Jeffrey Addison have created around 150 puppets over the years. Photo / Laurilee McMichael
"We set up six different puppet stations from six different stories and that enables children to be able to cluster around the puppets - and not just children but families, because it's a whānau roadshow.
"If you look at the different ways children were interacting with me and the parents and puppets, it's delightful. They've probably never played with puppets and that's part of the uniqueness of what we're doing."
Mighty Māui is Toro Pikopiko Puppets' musical about the feats of Māui Tikitiki-a-Taranga. Photo / Supplied
The roadshow will be running from June to December on weekends and in between Jeffrey and Te Whaitaima will continue to work on the audio books in their Waitahanui studio.
Jeffrey says the puppets are clamouring to be out on the road again.
"It does feel like we're bringing all of our treasures out of their boxes where no one sees them and appreciates them, and putting them in the full glorious light of public venues.
"I feel our stories have died since we've stopped performing them and this is a way of bringing life back to them."
Toro Pikopiko Tales' audio books: five volumes
1 Five Te Ao Māori creation stories
2 Two stories: Apo the Greedy Taniwha & fun-with-phonics rhyming story The Letter Heads
3 Mighty Māui - eight chapter musical on Māui and his deeds, with 11 waiata
4 Pourakahua - rock art stories with eight waiata
5 Mama Long-Fin, a musical with 14 original waiata
The audio books are available through Audio Books NZ, www.audiobooksnz.co.nz.
The Toro Pikopiko Tales Road Show will include sessions at Taupō Library on Wednesday July 14 at 10.30am, and Tūrangi Library on Friday July 16 at 11am.
A story adapted for the theatre
As well as the audio books, Toro Pikopiko Puppets has worked on a collaboration with Taki Rua Productions called Pourakahua, a show in the Kāi Tahu dialect, which will tour schools around Aotearoa New Zealand as part of Taki Rua's Te Reo Māori Season in 2021. Jeffrey says the Taki Rua version of Pourakahua follows some 300 performances of Toro Pikopiko Puppets' re-telling of a Takitimu traditional legend, taking inspiration from rock art in Te Waipounamu. He says it's heartening to hand it over to a new generation of Māori artists, actors and creatives.
