Striking the right, fiery note

Pyrotechnician Te Rangi Huata of Hastings with some of his beloved fireworks. Photo: Duncan Brown.

Not many people can say that they get to blow stuff up and get away with it.

But that's exactly what Te Rangi Huata has been doing. For the last 18 years he's been lighting up the night sky with his firework displays.

"What makes our pyros a bit different is they're called pyro-musicals, a show that is done to music, so the shell fires on the beat, so by the time the beat hits it will explode in the sky."

He's the man behind the scenes of many of the fireworks displays in Hawke's Bay and says it takes a lot of work to pull a show together.

"It's about four to five hours of preparation for every minute of fireworks, and each show is about seven to eight minutes long," he explains. In that time, 1200 shots launch into the night sky with a brilliant array of colour. That's around 150 shots a minute.

To get light and shade in the show, the crowd is taken through highs and lows, much like in a drama.

"There is always a big finale at the end, sort of like an exclamation [mark] at the end of a sentence."

This year Huata and his team from Public Dreams Trust will have their work cut out for them, with Ngati Kahungunu hosting six major Matariki events from Wairarapa to Wairoa, and all of them will have a fireworks display. Matariki, the Maori New Year, will tell the story of giving thanks for the harvest.

"Doing it at Matariki gives it that heightened experience, with Matariki being a Maori celebration that's been revived in a modern context."

The displays don't come cheap. "The shows we're doing cost about $10,000 per show, but because we do it ourselves we can produce a show of that value but not at that cost."

His love affair with pyrotechnics began in 1998 when there was no one else available to put together a fireworks display for New Year's Eve in Hawke's Bay. So, he trained as a pyrotechnician in Christchurch, enabling him to put together his own shows. He hasn't looked back.