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2-13 June, 2015, The Gym, The Arts Centre
Footprints/Tapuwae is a bicultural opera that juxtaposes motifs from Wagner’s Ring Cycle with waiata and haka. Supported by Christchurch City Council, this performance was performed as part of an event called Te Puna Toi, which fosters contemporary interdisciplinary performance. This event saw Free Theatre collaborate with Taiporoutu Huata and kapa haka performers from Te Ahikōmau a Hamoterangi and Te Pao a Tahu, both of whom recently represented the Waitaha (greater Canterbury) region at Te Matatini.
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ReviewsThe opera is a daring vision of two cultures, two sets of footprints, inviting us to find commonalities and to relish distinctions. Bravo Free Theatre for taking us with you. There are moments of beautiful visual drama, some genuinely unsettling sequences and the show is definitely not short on mood. Articles‘Footprints – Free Theatre stages bicultural opera’
The Press, 1 June 2015 It’s time for audiences to question our sense of place and identity George Parker, The Press, 29 May 2015 Wānanga/workshops were held as part of the wider Te Puna Toi event. These explored bi-cultural performance practice.
Thanks to support from Christchurch City Council Creative Communities Scheme we were able to engage in an intensive devising process, experimenting with design ideas and sharing performance practices. This involved workshops led by our collaborators early on in the process, performers from Te Pao a Tahu and co-director Tai Huata. |
Te Puna Toi - Event Overview and Purpose
As an annual event, Free Theatre's Te Puna Toi works between the local and the international, and between the avant-garde and the traditional in theatre, performance and film. It is especially interested in producing ideas about the performance of encounter and identity between cultures – in particular, between the European and Māori, but also amongst European, Māori, Pasifika, Asian and other peoples, as New Zealand becomes increasingly multi-cultural in its orientation. This is especially relevant in post-quake Christchurch where the usual ideas around identity have been unsettled and new migrants come to help build a new city - there is an opportunity here to create meetings between cultures that lead to new and surprising ideas about who we are and where we are going.
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For 2015, Taiporoutu Huata served as the first participant in the event’s cornerstone residency programme. He was also one of the speakers at the symposium during the event and led workshops that shared our experience working between opera and kapa haka.
The inaugural Te Puna Toi followed in the wake of Te Matatini in March 2015. While Te Puna Toi is a standalone event, the interest generated by Te Matatini helped provide an eager and interested audience for new work that engages with indigenous performance practice and identity. Te Puna Toi is one of the key projects in Free Theatre’s New Works Programme in The Gym – the first being the critically acclaimed and popular Kafka’s Amerika. A showreel from the original production of Footprints/Tapuwae in 2001 (and images right):
Te Puna Toi Symposium
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Free Theatre hosted a public symposium: Between Theatre and Marae on Saturday 6 June, 2015. Speakers included those involved with the Footprints/Tapuwae project and experts in kapa haka and Aotearoa/New Zealand theatre. This was a great opportunity for audiences and the public to be involved in the discussion about the possibilities and outcomes of bicultural performance.
Speakers: Taiporoutu Huata Peter Falkenberg Te Rita Papesch (Te Wananga a Aotearoa) Corban Henare Te Aika Dr Emma Johnston Assoc Prof Sharon Mazer (AUT) Dr George Parker (Convener) |
