Journeys through the Pacific

Auckland is preparing to celebrate its Polynesian heritage with the Pasifika Festival and performing arts event Malaga. GILBERT WONG and MICHELE HEWITSON profile three players.

Igelese Ete

Tall and quietly spoken, Igelese Ete, 33, grins and counts on his fingers the languages he has had to become conversant in: Tokelauan, Fijian, Tongan, Nuiean, Cook Island and Tuvalu.

The seventh, Samoan, he already knew. His family settled in Wellington when he was seven, but as the son of a Christian Congregational Church pastor, the traditions of his birthplace remain paramount.

He is the driving force behind Malaga, a production by Auckland University and 400 performers from the Pacific Island community. The word means "the journey" and that's what Ete, who co-created and composed the music, has been on.

"There are issues that we are all dealing with, but Malaga is about celebration and empowerment of young people," he says, tracing the different strands of music he has written, from gospel to rhythm and blues and hip hop, that in their own way trace the journey of young Pacific Islanders.

Through music and dance, Malaga will trace the journey from the ancestral homeland of Hawaiki. "That's a journey any Pacific islander should be proud of. It was a huge feat of navigation," he says.

More important, he says, was the mindset that allowed Pacific Islanders to contemplate long ocean journeys confident that they would survive. They had to have a mental toughness.

For five weeks, he and a team have dug deep to find a similar endurance, as they have rehearsed keen but raw talent for the latest incarnation of Malaga.

First aired in 1998, it was a 15-minute choral work commissioned as part of the opening ceremony of Te Papa. The Christchurch Festival of the Arts commissioned Ete to expand the piece into a three-part choral work sung by 200.

In Auckland, Malaga will stretch to 100 minutes and include the talents of violinist Sam Konise, nose-flautist Leo Hopenea, vocalists Lole Usoalii and Darren Kamali, and more than 300 young performers, selected by audition.

"They're great. A lot of them have come from church choirs and their singing is fine, but learning the disciplines of professional performers has not been easy," he says.

Ete, co-creator and wife Jakki Leota-Ete, an anthropologist, and 2-year-old Aria have been commuting from home in Hamilton, where he is vocal director at the Vision Leadership Bible College. They all look like they could do with a good night's sleep.

"But you know, I think the people who come along will be inspired by what they see. I'd hope the performers will be inspired, because they can show what they as young Pacific Islanders can do."

Ete has been a teacher and performer since completing a degree in music (singing) at Victoria University.

He was a stalwart of the National Youth Choir and toured as part of the Classical Polynesia troupe headed by the late Iosefa Enari.

"I trained in opera. I love opera, but I always had a fondness for all this other music. Motown, R'n'B, soul." Black music spoke to him.

With Malaga, he found a creative outlet and perhaps some of the freedom a traditional classical background had denied him.

* Malaga: The Journey, composed by Igelese Ete, Auckland University School of Creative and Performing Arts, Auckland Town Hall, Saturday.

Erolia Ifopo

The joke at the Masi cafe in Wellington's Willis St, where Erolia Ifopo works, is not that she is an actor waiting to be discovered - it's that she is already an actor. One who just happens to spend her time spying on her customers from behind the cappuccino machine.

Ifopo has been an actor for nearly a decade. But the condensed version of her one-woman play, The Native Chef, which she will perform at the Pasifika Festival on the weekend of March 3, represents her first solo outing as both actor and writer.

It's a cut-down menu, a 20-minute taster of what Ifopo calls "reality theatre." From March 11, in Wellington, Ifopo will perform her show at the cafe where she treads the boards serving coffee and food for her day job.

The Native Chef, which features Barbara Cartland's recipes for food and romance and Gordon Ramsay's temper, is both a tribute to good food and Ifopo's observations of the interaction between cafe staff and customers.

She belongs to the "can't cook, won't cook" school of gastronomes herself, but she loves food - its flavours, its textures, its colours. And since starting work at the cafe two years ago, she has become a little more ambitious in the kitchen. Friends come over, she says, and ask, "Did you really make this? Because it's got flavours."

She describes The Native Chef as a culinary culmination of her 10 years spent working in theatre. It certainly promises to be more robust fare than nouvelle cuisine. Alongside Cartland and Ramsay are characters from past roles: Toaga from Dawn Raids (written by Oscar Kightley), Mrs Aiu from Romeo and Tusi (a joint writing venture between Ifopo and Kightley). And her family, whom she lovingly refers to as aliens, make appearances - all played by Ifopo.

She'd love, perhaps at a future performance, to serve up her mum's chop suey, or perhaps her hit dish - sweet and sour pork. But, she admits, "I actually preferred my dad's cooking to my mum's."

The Native Chef, which takes improvisational performance to its outer limits, is as Pacific Island as one of those plastic lei fashioned out of recycled bread bags. It's wholly contemporary, with a nod to a Samoan family history and influenced by improvising freely from the palagi pantry: cans of pineapple, and the Chinese-influenced chop suey.

Expect the unexpected. It is, in a peculiar sort of way, an oral history thing - in that it tells stories from behind the cafe counter, observed at a particular moment in Wellington's cafe culture society.

Once she's served up that particular amuse bouche, Ifopo whips off her kitchen apron and puts on her director's hat for Pasifika. She'll direct two performances of Popo the Fairy, a multilingual children's adventure fantasy set underwater.

Written by Makerita Urale (Frangipani Perfume), it stars Shimpal Lelisi, Siaosi Mulipola and Kightley and features, as far as we know, not so much as a scrap of sushi.

* Popo the Fairy, 10 am, the Performing Arts Stage, and 4.35 pm, the Children's Stage.

* The Native Chef, 12.35 pm, the Creative New Zealand tent.

Andy Lelisli'uao

Samoan swear words, images of naked erect Pacific Island men beating their bloodied wives, a painting showing church ministers handing out hidings to children in white shirts with the slogan "Samoan ministers are w**kers": if artist Andy Leleisi'uao has any demons, they are well and truly exorcised in his art.

In person Leleisi'uao is a solid, shaven-headed 31-year-old New Zealand-born Samoan. He's terribly polite, prefacing requests with a please, ending answers with an earnest thank you.

Leleisi'uao's entry into the art world has been through the back door. When he left Mangere College, his applications to art schools were rejected.

With few options, he took jobs in the South Auckland factories where earlier generations of Pacific Islanders had found their lot. He ended up a union delegate and his experiences continue to feed his art.

"A palagi would come in and ignore everyone else to look for a white face to speak to. No hello, or nothing. It was just ignorance."

There was much that he witnessed that left him angry, but it seems not in his nature to display any hint of that disturbance. Always, he says, he was painting.

In 1999 his life changed. On the strength of his portfolio, he applied for and was awarded the Pasifika Scholarship at the Auckland University of Technology, which gave him direct entry and the cost of course fees to a master's degree in art and design.

Now he divides his time between his studio, in his parents' Mangere garage, and his studies. His career has just received a boost with a solo exhibition, Tired of Silence, at the Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt.

The painting for which the exhibition is named depicts the naked, erect wife-beating islander. The museum was unsure at first if it should be exhibited, but decided that the artist's choice would stand.

"I'm not setting out to shock people. I'm painting what I see and hear out there. It's what is happening in the community. Some of it is bad, some is aspirational. But it is all happening."

He thinks he might have been the first to feature Samoan swear words in the text that often peppers his work, which is distinguished by a colourful angry energy.

The conundrums of dual cultural identity - Pacific Island and urban New Zealand - will continue to drive a blossoming in a "brown consciousness," particularly in Auckland, he says.

"It's coming through. There's King Kapisi's music, John Pule's poetry, Sia Figiel's writing. We've multiplied and our presence has increased and with that so has the excellence of what is coming out," he says, excited in his own, mild-mannered way.

* Leleisi'uao's work appears in the group show Matou Atoa, Aotea Centre, February 25 to March 21. Tired of Silence, Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, until April 29.