Imagine Aotearoa in days of yore, when the land was cloaked in lush native forest and the song of the tūī welcomed Māori treading lightly upon a carpet of leaves. The tūī's voice rang pure and clear, chiming with the flutes played by the patupaiarehe (fairy folk) frolicking among the trees.
When new voices arrived, the tūī, an adept mimic, began to change its tune.
This dream world, about to be swept aside by colonisation, is portrayed in a new Māori cirque du reo work, Te Tangi a te Tūī (The Song of the Tūī), which will be performed in te reo as part of the Auckland Arts Festival in March.
A woman, Aotahi, and her son Piri hold the centre of the story, which follows the pair through a decade as they try to evade a rigid ancestral curse. When Piri reaches his teens, he decides to take control of his future.
Te Tangi a te Tūī, created by Amber Curreen and Tainui Tukiwaho, is a co-production with the Te Rēhia and Te Pou Theatre groups and veteran Auckland cirque company Dust Palace. It’s led by Eve Gordon, Tukiwaho’s old school friend from Rotorua.
Te Tangi ran for a season in Vancouver’s York Theatre last October where it was praised as “unbelievably athletic” and “beautiful, insightful and timely”.
“The story of the curse that has to be lifted is sitting on the surface,” says Tukiwaho (Te Arawa, Tūhoe), who was recently awarded the 2023 Bruce Mason Playwriting Award of $10,000.
Te Tangi’s message is optimistic. “What we are trying to do is show that intergenerational trauma can be dealt with. Piri teaches his mother that we don’t have to be a slave to the trauma that our tūpuna [ancestors] had to endure.”
The play is also a metaphor for the endurance of te reo Māori.
“One of the tūī's superpowers is their mimicry to try to blend in but that means their original voice fades away,” says Tukiwaho. “I could see a parallel between that and the potential for what could have happened to our language.”
As well as co-writing Te Tangi, Tukiwaho plays a role and directs the production.
In theory, directing should be a breeze. Two of his sons are in the cast: Paku Fernandez, 17, plays Piri, and Te Rongopai (Popai) Curreen-Tukiwaho, 11, appears as a boy trying to save his grandfather.
Seven tamariki, aged from 18 months to 20 years, are in Tukiwaho’s blended whānau. Their care is shared with his partner, Maria-Del Fernandez, in their Henderson home.
Tukiwaho laughs at the suggestion that his large household must need to run like clockwork. “My children would call it strict but I would say well organised.”
Five of the kids helped Tukiwaho write a comedy during one of the early Covid lockdowns. Hemo is Home, which starred Popai as a boy raised by ghostly ancestors in an urupā, was a runner-up in the 2022 Adam NZ Play Awards and opened the newly renovated Te Pou Theatre in West Auckland’s Corban Estate Arts Centre the following year.
And Paku has a significant role in the upcoming te reo film Ka Whawhai Tonu, based on the Ōrākau Pā battle in 1864 during the Waikato wars.
Tukiwaho, 43, has forged a versatile screen career over the past two decades, acting in TV series such as Step Dave and the Madeleine Sami vehicle Super City. He delivered a nuanced study of comedian Billy T James in the 2011 TV movie Billy.
Fluent in te reo since childhood, he hosted Māori TV talk show O Whakaaro for three years, and was the guy giving his workmate ballroom dancing lessons in a Speight’s TV ad. He’s got range, but alongside all of that, Tukiwaho has committed as much time as possible to theatre, specifically developing platforms for Māori story-telling and performance.
Somehow, he also finds the time to study. This year, he is completing his master’s degree in Māori and indigenous leadership through the University of Canterbury.
Right now, he is multi-tasking as a writer-director-actor in three back-to-back stage productions, including Te Tangi a te Tūī.
At the beginning of January, he began rehearsals as director of Hyperspace, a co-production of Auckland Theatre Company, Te Rēhia and Te Pou Theatre. A “haka-fusion” homage to the Wellington 90s dance scene written by his playwright mate Albert Belz, it’s a sequel to Belz’s retro-comedy Astroman, which Tukiwaho also directed for ATC in 2019.
“This play is what Albert always does well,” he says. “It’s deep drama wrapped up inside so much comedy that [it makes] what’s happening with the drama bearable.”
The other play on his schedule, which he wrote and performs in, is more sombre. The Sun and the Wind, a home invasion drama filled with high emotion, joins the Auckland Arts Festival line-up.
“It’s a contemporary piece on the challenges that our whānau go through with suicide and what tools we employ to survive,” Tukiwaho explains.
“It’s a love story between a man towards a boy he thinks is his son. The boy who is receiving his gentleness has needed it his whole life. You see so many of them in real life. All they needed was someone to tell them they love them.”
Tukiwaho grew up in Rotorua, one of three children to his electrician father, Rangiteaorere, and his mother, Rahera, a te reo Māori teacher who ran a kōhanga reo. “My family was little but we had a big extended family,” he recalls. “We had three biological children in our house but my mother – and my sister has, too, – picked up the habit of having more of the family living with us. So I grew up with aunties and cousins as siblings helping to raise me.”
Tukiwaho learned te reo with his mother and in classes at Western Heights High School, where he started to engage with the performing arts when he was 16.
“I saw my brother Boni doing community theatre. Then, understandably, I really liked drama because my first girlfriend at high school, Eve Gordon [who later formed Dust Palace], was into it.”
Tukiwaho successfully auditioned for Unitec’s School of Performing Arts in Auckland and started his degree in 1999 at the age of 17, probably to the amazement of his high school principal.
“My principal said I should do seventh form again because I didn’t pass anything but Māori,” he says. “I wasn’t very literate. I couldn’t spell or write properly and I didn’t read a full book until I was at acting school. I was very behind in understanding the world in terms of English literacy. I had a lot of catching up in those three years but I had very supportive tutors.
“Unitec was very Pākehā. Looking at it from today’s lens, it would be majorly problematic but when I had to experience it, I think I was in the most supportive space that the early 2000s could have created. But I lost a lot of my te reo Māori because I had no one to speak Māori to.”
When Tukiwaho graduated in 2001, “I was sick of actors,” he says. “I didn’t pursue any acting except the jobs I thought were cool.
“I worked at the laser tag place, the Megazone, a DVD store, I was a rubbish man for a while. I enjoyed doing those things; the industries and the personalities worked for me.”
Eventually, Tukiwaho decided it was time to use his degree. He took charge of a central Auckland company called SmackBang Theatre in 2006, which became a vehicle for fast-turnaround shows by independent makers.
SmackBang’s very own theatre debut, Raising the Titanics, written by Belz as a tribute to the great Māori showbands, was directed by Raymond Hawthorne, with Tukiwaho producing. It was a roaring success in 2010 and toured the country.
“We sold out the first season a week before it opened so I thought it was easy to put on a show. I was quickly shown that was not always the case and it has never been the case since.”
Tukiwaho was resolved to focus on te reo theatre so he dissolved SmackBang in 2012 and established Te Rēhia as a kaupapa-driven company, which is now run by Amber Curreen.
After a stint as CEO of kaupapa Māori performing arts organisation Taki Rua in Wellington, he followed his dream that Auckland should have a whare for Māori theatre, and signed a contract in 2017 to found Te Pou, where he remains on the board.
Te Rēhia and Te Pou, both based at the Corban Estate Arts Centre, have become thriving places for the development of Māori theatre skills and productions. Though the two often intertwine, the former is independent, whereas Te Pou receives funding from Creative NZ.
“For example,” says Tukiwaho, “Te Pou can’t become very political. But if Amber had a strong political work she wanted to put out, Te Rēhia could be an engine there to support that.”
He predicts a need for powerful political theatre over the next few years.
“We are all thinking about that. Our funders have cautioned us to be frugal. The danger is that in being more cautious, we might become quieter. I’m of the opinion that we need to be louder.”
Hyperspace: ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland, February 7-24.
Te Tangi a te Tūī: Te Pou Theatre, Corban Estate Arts Centre, Henderson, March 1-10.
The Sun and the Wind: Q Theatre Loft, March 20-24.
