Hone Kouka: ‘All I’ve ever done has been an artist’
Sunday, 18 August 2024
Acclaimed Māori writer, producer and director Hone Kouka is touring a newly adapted version of his show Ngā Rorirori next month, for the 20th anniversary of his and his partner Mīria George’s arts company Tawata Productions. By André Chumko.
“I will never not be curious,” says Hone Kouka when asked about his desire to create. “My own motivation is really a curiosity … and just wanting to articulate things the best that you possibly can.”
The veteran artist, 57, has, in the years since being named the youngest winner of the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award at age 19, gone on to produce plays around the world that have been translated into languages including French, Japanese and Russian, and had films screen in Berlin and beyond.
In 2004 with his partner Mīria George he started film and theatre company Tawata Productions, which is dedicated to developing and presenting new works by Māori and Pasifika artists, and in 2015, he founded Kia Mau Festival, an international indigenous arts platform that’s now globally renowned.
His accolades speak for themselves.
For Tawata’s 20th year around the sun, Kouka’s brought back his unapologetic and silly/serious Ngā Rorirori (meaning the idiots), albeit in a slightly new form. It premiered in 2022, and montages dance, theatre and digital recording.
Its farcical story follows sister and brother Manuela and Pillow Rorirori, who grew up poor but now look set to come into a giant fortune as the only members of their hapū. Manuela’s an activist, while Pillow, who wears a “Make NZ Great Again” cap, is a convicted fraudster on a quest to turn their coastline into a cash cow. The story begins with Pillow returning home after the crash of his failed business ventures. Manuela desperately tries to hold her whānau together as their ancestral claims are put under the microscope by the tikanga police, and the siblings clash over their dreams for what’s possible with the money.
The comical production explores a whānau’s relationship with its whenua. On stage, as they move about, dancers and actors mime to pre-recorded dialogue that’s mostly in reo Māori, recorded by an entirely different cast.
Kouka (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Kahungunu, Kāi Tahu) says Tawata feels strong after two decades: “A lot of people are going, wow, 20 years old. You’re either really, really smart, or really stupid. I'll take both of those.”
He’s proud his organisation has lasted through ups and downs, the latter namely being the pandemic. It’s stronger and more solid now. For the 20th anniversary he originally wanted to have 20 parties. George said no… and so Kouka decided to bring Ngā Rorirori back instead.
During the lockdown Kouka says he didn’t write anything creative, only essays. Coming out of the period he wanted to make something that was a great time; something that verged on frivolous; something that’d never been done or seen before in New Zealand. Ngā Rorirori, with its mistaken identities storylines, was born from this kaupapa. Now reworked, he hopes he’s added some extra weight to the production to give its characters a sense of reality, even if they are bombastic.
Kouka’s got rid of about 30 pages of the original 2022 script, saying it was “too close to a play” and that Pillow’s character was too dominant. It’s been re-recorded, and choreographed top to bottom. An actor has been swapped out for an additional dancer to increase the show’s physicality. It will be performed at Māori-led venues, and a sound operator will be working to the pause and play its track as needed, for example if the audience is laughing.
It’s also been tweaked to be in tune with the politics of the day: the government official character in the 2022 production from the department of “whenua, whakapapa and whatever” is now from the department of “land, genealogy and whatever” because of the Luxon-led government’s directives to wind back officials’ reo usage. “This government has given me so much material,” Kouka laughs. “The story hasn’t changed that much, except the system has become more politicised.”
Some things remain the same, including the original show’s verbalised dance notations, for example, characters’ enunciating two, three, four, plié. Mā and Wynona, the musicians who composed tracks for the 2022 edition and later turned them into an EP, have reworked their score. Four of the original cast are returning.
Kouka says it’s exciting being in the dark on how people will receive the piece, or how it will look live. One piece of feedback he received in 2022 was that it was great to see Māori poke fun at Māori in an extreme manner, as it was a sign of a maturity of culture. Kouka knew it would be prickly for some, but also always had the idea of doing Ngā Rorirori again in an evolved way. He described the show as strange, ridiculous and shifting, with a beautiful ragtag crew. “Everything has stepped up two to three levels from the first time. The first time was all about discovery.”
In bringing back Ngā Rorirori, he says he’s making a new statement. “I’m going to say something. That’s just my nature. We should look at [issues], and bring it forward in really digestible ways.”
He says being an artist has not gotten easier with time, but that’s how it should be. He reckons his job is to bring joy and politics to people. “[The world] is really unstable. So for us as artists, it’s questioning what’s reality. What’s real, what should be real? What shouldn’t be real? … It’s just us responding in whatever ways we are. … It’s a tough time, but it’s an exciting time, I think, both intellectually and creatively.”
And why does he continue to make? Well, as his brother rightly pointed out, he never gets complacent with anything. He tends to ask people what they’re thinking, before what they’re working on. One of the reasons he and George have worked for so long, other than their both being the youngest sibling, is their shared nosiness and curiosity, he says.
As a Māori artist, Kouka says, while he’ll never be in the mainstream, he can be ahead of everyone else: “What I found in my career a lot of the time is you’ll be doing something and then the mainstream will come towards you, and then you just move away. And they’ll just keep chasing you. I find that really fun and hilarious. Why don’t you just resource these people properly, and then you won’t have to chase? But I think that’s part of the evolution of art, too.
“I love our artists. I think they’re the most amazing people on the world. They’re the funniest, the most stupid, the grittiest, the staunchest, the most open, the most closed, the whole deal.”
Kia Mau Festival, Kouka says, arrived at the right time ‒ when he was questioning his artistic longevity. It’s given him a new surge of energy. As a mentor and leader, he’s been proud to witness a wave of young artists pushing the boat out and exploring new pathways, approaches and ways of thinking. “It just blows my mind. One of my key roles is to create space and resource for them. Just do you.”
But they’re also a generation “so far away from me”, the Generation X artist says.
Kouka’s found young people’s creative philosophies to be at odds with his own. But, as in Ngā Rorirori in 2022 when four of its artists had never performed live before, he has learned to change his process to adapt. “It’s a beautiful landscape of newness.”
His daughter Maarire Brunning-Kouka, who turns 28 this year, is a musician who works under the stage name Mā, and Kouka has revelled in being appointed to the role of “Mā’s dad” in introductions. He moved up to Rotorua with George in 2018 from Wellington to be closer to George’s whānau and escape a 24/7 work culture. They’re there to “live and be” ‒ spending time at George’s marae, with whānau, and other than that? Hardly leaving the house.
The couple have a young dog, George Clooney George Kouka, whose traditional Cook Island name is George George but who Kouka affectionately refers to as Georgie.
He loves basketball, and producing George’s films. He feels supercharged when returning to Pōneke, the city that built him as an artist. He loves seeing his daughter evolve as a businessperson in the arts. He can see in her, as he does with the rest of her generation, a goodness to self.
“I feel really fortunate that all I’ve ever done has been an artist. … We were just there to grind through it because that’s all you got. This lot here go, nah, let’s take a break, we’ll find another way to do it. It’s self-preservation. Boundaries. When so much is coming at you from the world, I really understand why it’s been created that way.
“I really credit them with that. It’s good to be good to yourself, because if you’re good to yourself, you’ll be good to others as well. I think this is what’s given me revitalised faith in being an artist. … It should be tough, [but] it shouldn’t be horrendous.
“I didn’t expect to talk so much about process but actually, it is the thing that was the biggest shift for me when I made the show in 2022. And I really thank them for that. … You give goodness out and it comes back.”
Ngā Rorirori plays at Wellington’s Te Whaea (September 12-14), Auckland’s Te Pou Theatre as part of Kōanga Festival (September 19-22), Gisborne’s War Memorial Theatre (September 25) and Christchurch’s Aurora Centre as part of WHAO Festival (October 4, on sale soon)