Barrier Ninja: from left Julie Edwards and Fran Kewene. Photo / Peter Jennings
The second Whangārei Fringe Festival features two solo plays that feature the voices of Māori in the health system, and a wise grandmother from Denmark. Mary de Ruyter talks to the people behind the shows.
Sometimes, the most powerful thing an actor can do is not act at all – especially when they're channelling people who are often not heard or are misunderstood. This conundrum is at the heart of Barrier Ninja, a verbatim play about nine people's experiences of hauora (health) within New Zealand's medical system.
Kaipara actor and producer Julie Edwards (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Whare), who has appeared frequently with Dunedin's Fortune Theatre and around the country during more than 30 years in theatre, is performing the show in Whangārei this month. Verbatim theatre is a form of documentary theatre that exclusively uses real people's words, often taken from videoed interviews. She describes it as a way to get raw stories straight to an audience, with no embellishment.
"It's a really tricky process because what you have to do is not perform, and get yourself out of the way a lot," she says. Putting your own creative stamp on a 'character' isn't the way verbatim works: instead, Edwards studied video interviews with the people to learn their gestures, mannerisms and vocal intonations.
During a performance, she listens to the audio score through headphones and re-presents the stories to the audience. This simplicity puts the focus squarely on the barriers Māori still face in accessing healthcare, and how they need to be 'ninjas' to get past those challenges.
"You trust that the less you do, the more the audience will get the wairua of who you're representing. Because you are just reflecting and being a – it sounds so pretentious, doesn't it? – but you are such a vessel for them to move through you. You have to learn that technique, and most actors can't learn it truly. Most actors just don't like verbatim because it feels quite restricting," says Edwards.
Fran Kewene (Waikato, Maniapoto) devised Barrier Ninja for her Master of Arts at the University of Otago. At the time, she had been working for 15 years in Dunedin in Māori public health, and was also the university's full-time Hauora Māori Practice Fellow at the Kōhatu Centre for Māori Health, helping develop the hauora Māori curriculum for medical students.
All that time showing up for her community and building relationships meant people trusted her enough to share their stories. Kewene interviewed Māori and Pākehā navigating and working in the system: a fourth-year medical student, a Māori nurse, a non-Māori clinician, a community health worker, patients and their whānau.
Most of the nine participants kept their names private, but two people gifted their real names to the show. Reitu's name was central to her story, says Kewene, as all she wants for her name to be pronounced correctly.
"The majority of the population take for granted and never critique being able to pronounce a Pākehā name, but when it comes to any names that are not English names, people often bastardise them. And what that says to that person is that you're not valuing who they are. You're dehumanising them, yet again."
Then there was Will, who was on dialysis and has since died. She describes Will as her muse and the catalyst for her work. "He was already working with the medical school as one of their case studies, but he also wanted to broaden the ability for his story to be told."
His whānau are Māori and Samoan, and they also agreed to be interviewed "to share their experiences and the cultural tensions that they experienced when they were engaging with health professionals. Will wanted the system to change, ultimately. He wanted health professionals to hear his lived experience, so they would have a sense of what was working and what wasn't working for Māori and Pacific people."
The play's theatre debut in 2018 was directed by Erina Daniels (Ngāti Wai), and it's only had one other public season since. But it has been seen by close to 1000 people in other settings – at Otago Medical School, Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University, and recently to graduate students at AUT University's physiotherapy department.
Inequity, frustration, misunderstanding and needs not being met aren't usually key ingredients for a great night out at the theatre, but Kewene has taken care to weave light, shade and hope into the show.
"You need to take the audience on a journey, and the journey has to have texture and colour and humour – and in regards to Māori humour, you know, in those darkest moments, there's always lightness," she says.
"There has to be lightness, there has to be joy, there has to be love, because that's our lived experience. We experience all those in the moment of loss and trauma."
Kewene is now a Māori health lecturer at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington, and still performs Barrier Ninja in academic and training settings, while Edwards performs it at public events. They've both worked with Te Rākau Hua o te Wao Tapu, Jim Moriarty and Helen Pearse-Otene's Māori theatre company, and have integrated the company's theatre marae model into their kaupapa. It's evident in what Edwards calls "ngā kōrero", a facilitated discussion after each show that allows people to talk about what came up, and to bring everyone back to noa (being free from tapu).
Telling such personal stories is a privilege, and a heavy load to carry. "You protect it with lots of karakia. You can't do that sort of work without that – well, I can't," says Edwards. "It's like you go into this little trance, put in your earplugs, put your audio on and come out the other end, not knowing how or what happened or how anyone's going to react."
Being political wasn't Kewene's motivation in making the show – she just wanted to tell her community's stories – but its foundation lays bare the ongoing harms of colonisation. It also reflects the tension in Kewene's own background.
"I'm Māori. I'm British. I was born offshore, but raised and nurtured on this whenua. So I have a complex background, and I'm constantly trying to decol[onise] myself and understand what it is to be a colonised Māori wahine," she says.
Performing Barrier Ninja is only the beginning. Kewene and Edwards have developed workshops that deepen the play's conversation, and give healthcare professionals a chance to learn how to improve care for Māori and Pacific people. They're keen to deliver the workshops around the country.
Between the play and the workshops, they hope things will change, because this isn't an historic theatre piece – Kewene says what's in the play still happens today. Changing the system to give Māori the same treatment Pākehā often unconsciously enjoy is individual and structural: having a relationship with mana whenua in their community; knowing how Te Tiriti and its articles relate to healthcare; normalising Māori worldviews and values in everyday activities.
"For health professionals, that's about improving their practice. How can they be better clinicians, how can they be better at serving the community they've been trained to serve?"
Barrier Ninja, October 13–14 at ONEONESIX, Whangārei. whangareifringe.co.nz
When you walk past a house and see chalk drawings on the driveway, do you wonder about the games that went on there, the worlds that were created?
That echo is one of the inspirations behind Back to Square One?, a show by Anders Falstie-Jensen that's currently showing at Whangārei Fringe Festival as part of a nationwide tour.
It was originally designed to be performed in Falstie-Jensen's West Auckland driveway for his family and neighbours as the 2020 lockdown gradually lifted. "I really wanted to make something for them that would bring us all together once we were allowed to gather, and acknowledge what had happened. And also, without being too pompous, give them and us a chance to reflect on what the eff just happened."
There's no set. Instead, Falstie-Jensen uses street chalk to sketch out the play's world – his 95-year-old grandmother Inga's living room, in Denmark – as he tells a story of disasters, family and connections.
"One of the reasons for using chalk originally was also to leave a footprint, so in the neighbourhood you walk past afterwards and people say, 'Something happened here. What happened here, what is this?' I thought this was a really fun thing to do," he says.
Falstie-Jensen's varied career in the performing arts includes working as a technician, producer, stage manager and tour manager, and also producing and touring his own work through The Rebel Alliance Theatre Company he co-founded. This show won Best of the Fest at the 2022 Nelson Fringe Festival, and it weaves together conversations with his grandmother, interviews with his neighbours, and the apocalyptic Norse myth of Ragnarok.
"Ragnarok is a ripper of a yarn with big wolves, trolls with flaming swords, etcetera, and it ends with the world ending – but then after a time of darkness, the world is reborn, but with a twist. I use it as an anchor for the 'end' of the world as we knew it before Covid and the rebirth of whatever the mess we are in now is. People really respond to that."
It certainly seemed like the world might be ending for the performing arts, as the first lockdown wore on. "There was a practical thing as a theatre-maker and a human, where I thought, 'Either we're all going to die, or if we're going to live, I won't be able to tour for a long time because theatres are closed.' A/ how do you respond to that, and B/ how do you make something that's meaningful in that context? Then I thought, 'I'll just make something that's hyperlocal, for our neighbours.'"
Having made the show but unable to tour it, he offered it to other actors to stage for their neighbours. Five others, including Alison Bruce, Margaret-Mary Hollins and Ngahiriwa Rauhina, have performed Back to Square One? around the country. The show has been indoors and outdoors, in driveways, schools and theatres, shown for five people and 150 people.
As with all the best shows, there's coffee and baking on offer afterwards. Everywhere he goes, Falstie-Jensen bakes kringles (Danish pastries) from scratch following his grandmother's recipe. "I'm getting really good at baking. It's the most stressful part of the show," he laughs. "So baking aficionados should come along and they'll get a new recipe."
The after-match function is also a chance for people to talk about their experience of that first lockdown, and a large portion of the audience still do. As time goes on, he's encountered people who are angry or distressed too.
"I had to rewrite some bits to acknowledge that some people got incredibly angry, and what does this anger mean? I do try to respond to how the pandemic evolves," he says.
"Where do we stand now, and what does that mean to the world we are living in and the world we want to live in? That's the kind of conversation I think is really interesting."
Inga was an incredibly social, generous, astute person, says Falstie-Jensen. "She always went through this tremendous effort to be engaged and out and about. She described it as 'the tiring joys of life', because when you're old it takes energy to go out and about and she was really tired afterwards, but it's always a joy."
During that worldwide lockdown, she was as perplexed as everyone else, but also slightly fatalistic – perhaps one of the benefits that growing old confers.
"When you see it from the perspective of someone who's 95 and seen moon landings and world wars and mobile phones and all this stuff in one lifetime – where will this pandemic sit in our perspective when we're 95? What does all this mean, and what kind of world do we want after this?"
See Back to Square One? at Whangārei Fringe Festival (Sept 30–Oct 2, whangareifringe.co.nz), Dunedin Arts Festival (Oct 18–19), Hawke's Bay Arts Festival (Oct 21–22), and at Q Theatre in Auckland (Oct 28–29).
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