From Unreel by Te Rākau Hua o Te Wao Tapu, 2023. Photo: Stephen A'Court
Those noisy and glittering machines in pubs: while the number of pokie machines in Aotearoa New Zealand has continued to decline, they are pulling in more money than ever before. More than one billion dollars a year at a recent count. And those funds are likely often from the pockets of those who can least afford it. Those flashing lights and cascades of coins lead to major gambling addictions.
The latest production by Māori theatre company Te Rākau Hua o Te Wao Tapu, Unreel tells the story of a community affected by gambling as the Hīnaki Hotel looks set to launch the very first AI pokie machine.
Te Rākau board and whanau, 2024 with the company's pou. Photo: Te Rākau
This year Te Rākau Hua o Te Wao Tapu celebrate 35 years as Aotearoa New Zealand's longest running independent Māori Theatre Company.
Co-founder and celebrated veteran actor Jim Moriarty has worked as its director for all of that time, and joins us on RNZ's Culture 101.
While Moriarty might be best known as a screen actor working on many films, and television ranging from ‘70s soap Close to Home to, in recent years, Shortland Street, Te Rākau has been central to his and his whanau’s lives.
Jim Moriarty directing Unreel, 2023. Photo: Stephen A'Court
Te Rākau’s work is distinguished by its long dedication to political theatre. Projects like Unreel are squarely aimed at wellbeing and social justice, with attention to at-risk communities.
As well as working in theatres, Te Rākau just as typically goes right out into communities - to schools, marae, prisons and community centres.
From Undertow play Dog and Bone. Photo: Aneta Pond
For over 20 years the company has worked with Unreel’s author, playwright Helen Pearse-Otene - Moriarty’s partner - to present a bold series of plays. Many of these have been published and also filmed to be shared even more widely. Those plays range from a quartet of works called The Undertow about the 180 year journey of six generations of one Wellington family (which screened on Māori Television), to The Swing, a play about intergenerational abuse.
Te Rākau's pou at an early show. Photo: supplied
Te Rākau began as a space for “Māori performance activists”. In 1989, Rangimoana Taylor, Gabe Giddens, Rameka Cope, Jerry Banse and Moriarty started the company with a deed inherited from the Māori Theatre Trust, whose vision had been to see Māori in control of telling their own stories. Established in the ‘60s, Moriarty had toured with the trust as a young man.
The Battalion at Te Papa, 2014. Photo: Mike O'Neill
The name Te Rākau Hua o Te Wao Tapu is rather beautiful. It means, ‘the blossoming fruit tree of the sacred grove’.” It had been gifted by one of Jim’s Ngāti Toa aunties from Takapapūwahia pā.
“Our name tells us that we, Te Rākau, are just one tree within a greater forest” writes Jim Moriarty’s daughter and now chair of the Te Rākau trust Kauia Moriarty, on their website.
“Within the forest we are surrounded by language, tikanga and stories, and are connected to a vast network of those who have gone before and those that will come after.”
Te Rākau create what they call Theatre Marae, welcoming people into their theatre spaces for the work as hui, engaging in discussion with them afterwards. Outside the family home in Pōneke Wellington’s Island Bay to this day stand two pou that appeared in their first theatre marae show at Taki Rua The Depot theatre in 1989.
Unreel is on a community tour of the lower North Island from 30 September to 14 October. Details here.
