Online exclusive
Don’t ask performer Ana Chaya Scotney about binaries.
This or that, one or the other, here or there; she’s much more interested in the spaces in between and how we’re shaped by a multitude of influences. It mirrors her own life as the daughter of Jewish, European, and Māori (Ngāti Tāwhaki, Ngāi Tūhoe) parents, living with her mum in Wellington, where she went to a Māori immersion unit at Thorndon School, and spent school holidays with her dad in Te Urewera.
Here, she helped at her late father Joseph Doherty and stepmother Joanna’s whānau business, Te Urewera Treks, and spent time on the marae listening to oratory as epic as the classical literature she grew to love.
Best known for screen roles in Millie Lies Low, Cousins, Educators, The Breaker Upperers, Shortland Street, Netflix’s God’s Favourite Idiot, and most recently Bad Behaviour, Chaya Scotney was a Te Tumu Toi New Zealand Arts Foundation Springboard Award recipient. She’s also been learning about working behind the camera, as one of 10 emerging directors chosen for Jane Campion’s film intensive, A Wave in the Ocean.
Her latest stage creation, with Auckland’s Silo Theatre, is ScatterGun: After the Death of Rūaumoko. It celebrates the connection between the human body and homeland (te whenua ūkaipō), weaving together the things Chaya Scotney loves: poetry, prose, movement, music and verbatim voices of whānau from Te Urewera, Pōneke, and Tāmaki Makaurau.
Ana Chaya Scotney, why did you make ScatterGun: After the Death of Rūaumoko?
For a few reasons.
I really love poetry, longform poetry. When I was a kid, a teenager, I loved studying the classics and I loved learning about the sort “masc” Grecian Etruscan heroes of works like The Odyssey and The Iliad.
I also loved, as a child, sitting on the marae and hearing whaikōrero (formal speech making). I come from Ngāi Tūhoe and I think in Tūhoe Country, being able to stand and deliver this form of whaikōrero with a particular calibre of eloquence is highly valued. As a young girl, I had the great privilege of hearing the most extraordinary reo Māori, so the theatrics of the marae were inspirational to me. Te reo was my first language, I learnt to read and write in it, but I have always been bilingual. As I’ve grown older, I’ve lost a lot my reo, but it’s there somewhere and I’m grateful for that foundation.
Flash forward many years, and it’s 2020 and the pandemic. I was becoming impacted by the diatribes, all the opinion-holders and the gatekeepers, during what was an upsetting time. Just within the context of the internet, I looked at it and how fractious it felt. There was so much pain.
I thought, “all right, this is a good time to make something”, and I thought, “what about that epic poem you always wanted to make?” So, I started work.
How did you make it?
Well, my friend Nisha Madhan – she’s gangsta – was working at the Basement Theatre in Auckland and told me they had an Ideas in Residence coming up and asked if it was something I might like to do. I told her I had this idea for a big poem about what binds us underneath all the fractious talk about identity politics.
I got the residency, so I asked another friend Eleanor Bishop, who’s one of my thespian idols, “do you want to come into the bush with me?” and she jumped at the chance. I think she was really brave, because she jumped into the deep end with me and for 10 days, without ever having been in such a staunch te ao Māori context, she came and interviewed my loved ones and family across different parts of the Tūhoe nation.
The question that we asked everyone was what does the word ūkaipō mean to you? The literal translation, that I heard from my Uncle Fi, was that ū is a new shoot or plant, kai is food, and pō is night. So, ūkaipō describes the place where an infant is first nursed on their first night of life.
It’s where we hail from, our stomping ground. That became the basis for the work.
Audiences are led on a journey by a character called Agnes. Who is she?
She’s existential. She is reflecting on life, following the death of her little brother Rūaumoko, at a memorial on the fifth anniversary of his passing. She takes us with her on one night of her life through the streets of her city and the sinews and synapses of her internal world to meet people, spirits, and other-earthly forces that lead her home.
Where’s home to you?
I grew up in Wellington, with my mum, but spent the school holidays in the bush with my dad and stepmum. Right after I graduated from drama school [in 2016], I moved to Auckland, but I am back and forth between Wellington and Auckland at the moment.
So, as a child you had “the best of both worlds” – a little bit of city, a little bit of country – or were things hard to reconcile sometimes?
A bit of both. The experience of being in the bush itself was hugely nurturing but when I was a teenager, I was like, “this sucks! I hate it here. It’s so isolated and I just wanna be with my friends”. But looking back, it was pretty epic. I think it put a fire under me and made me feel so passionate about making art and storytelling. It’s like each of those worlds is so self-sufficient without the other so we’ve got a “national script” that is inherently at odds. Storytelling is a reconciliation tool for me to make sense of standing at the intersection of both of these worlds.
Why was your Pākehā mother so committed to you learning te reo?
She’s from pretty progressive Pākehā stock. Her parents, my grandparents, were really hard lefties. My grandfather [Albert Henry Scotney] set up Salient, Victoria University’s student magazine, and was head of the Post Primary Teachers Association.
I think mum could see the significance of being able to kōrero Māori or at least to have a foundation in te reo Māori, even though I didn’t stay within Māori education contexts through secondary school. But to have that sense of autonomy, of being able to choose, to have some starting points and foundations that again, I think, focus on the innate wealth and abundance of being from Aotearoa, regardless of what your race or ethnic constitution is, I find that a much more interesting place to be living from.
So, you walk in two worlds?
The thing I find, and that contributed to making ScatterGun, is that this binaried idea of “walking in two worlds” is held up, but, for me, that’s an old-school conversation. I would place myself in the ambiguity that comes from being more pluralistic: Most of us are more than a binary of “Māori and Pākehā”. I am more interested in where things like class and gender overlap and intersect, how it all blurs, and, significantly, what things bring us together underneath.
What’s next?
I’ve been part of Jane Campion’s A Wave in the Ocean film intensive for new film directors/writers since November 2022. We finished in October 2023 but have been given $100,000 by Netflix to make a short film, which has to be done by the end of this year. It’s like a miracle for a young artist, a young storyteller. Although I’m 29 now, and that’s not super young. I’m getting to be an old girl! What is it about? Well, that’s to be confirmed!
