Tough road to graduation

By Sarah Ell

Weekend magazine·

26 May, 2017 05:00 PM4 mins to read

Te One Matthews. Photo / Ralph Brown and Cat Ruka

A performance graduand faced harsh reality, writes Sarah Ell.

When 21-year-old Te One Matthews walks across the stage to receive his Bachelor of Creative Arts at the Manukau Institute of Technology's graduation ceremony today, few in the audience will realise the struggles he has gone through to get there. For Matthews, it was a case of life imitating art last year, as he found himself living out of a car at the same time as working on a major performing arts project on homelessness.

Matthews, raised in Papakura, was in his final year of the three-year programme when family issues made him try living away from home, out of his car.

"I'd had a falling out with my parents, I was under a lot of pressure at uni because of the amount of energy that goes into performing arts, and I made a really crazy decision to leave home and move into my car," Matthews says. "I felt I could better support myself and organise my own life on my own terms.

"But at the same time, our major project [at MIT] ended up being about poverty and people not being able to afford homes. If anything, [the experience] brought me closer to the project, because I was living in my car and still coming to school, without anyone knowing about it."

Matthews says while his lecturer, Cat Ruka, knew about his situation, he didn't want to share his situation with his classmates, "because I didn't want to get sympathy. It was a decision I'd made and I'd put myself in that situation."

Ruka, now a lecturer in creative practice at MIT's Otara campus, says the major third-year project was themed around "the relationship between money and dreams - how does money or the lack of it affect your ability to achieve your goals?", and was close to home for many students. As part of researching the project, the group discovered the Park Up for Homes movement, a series of peaceful protests supported by the Child Poverty Action Group, in which people spend a night sleeping in their cars to raise awareness of homelessness. This inspired them to organise Park Up for Otara last June, with community groups and charities.

"The most important thing for the students as theatre practitioners was for them to understand that creating a show can go beyond the walls of the theatre, and that it is not just about creating something that lasts for a week," Ruka says. "The show became something secondary - as artists, they were given a sense of being truly connected to their community."

For Matthews, the performance of the final end-of-year show was supremely emotional.

"One of my characters' monologues was standing in front of a car . . . it was a letter to 'the boss of New Zealand', saying, in between the lines, 'We need your support, we need your help.' In that moment my emotions shot through the roof, and my voice started cracking - everything that had happened in that year just came through my body and became a real thing for me as I was saying the words.

"Then we had to sing and that brought up more emotion, and by the time the curtain closed everyone was crying . . . It was a beautiful thing, and I was so happy to be ending it and leaving that all behind."

The story has a happy ending: Matthews now has a roof over his head with extended family and a full-time job with the Te Kaha O Te Rangatahi Trust, working as a sexual health educator with young people. He also continues to be involved with Papakura's Hawkins Youth Theatre Company, where he is currently working on a play about Matariki, combining Maori traditions with black-light puppetry.

As for the future, Matthews says he'd like to combine his knowledge of and passion for performing arts and working with youth to create a platform for more young people to express their creativity.