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Rutene Spooner finally brings all of himself to stage in Thoroughly Modern Maui. (Photo: Supplied, Image Design: Archi Banal)
Rutene Spooner finally brings all of himself to stage in Thoroughly Modern Maui. (Photo: Supplied, Image Design: Archi Banal)

ĀteaSeptember 13, 2022

Powerful, like Māui: Rutene Spooner’s thoroughly modern Māori cabaret

Rutene Spooner finally brings all of himself to stage in Thoroughly Modern Maui. (Photo: Supplied, Image Design: Archi Banal)
Rutene Spooner finally brings all of himself to stage in Thoroughly Modern Maui. (Photo: Supplied, Image Design: Archi Banal)

After a decade of performing in musicals and cabarets across the world, Rutene Spooner finally brings all of himself onto the stage.

You might not have heard of Rutene Spooner, but you’ve probably heard his voice. He’s performed in musicals across New Zealand and Australia for over a decade, including Chicago, Billy Elliot, Jersey Boys, and most recently Jekyll and Hyde in Sydney. He has performed with the highly successful and critically acclaimed Modern Māori Quartet, several times. He even sang back-up for Adele at Mt Smart in 2017.

Now he’s poured that experience into a show of his own, Thoroughly Modern Māui, which opens in Wellington this week before going on tour around the country, including to the Auckland Live Cabaret Season. Fronting a four-piece band, Spooner channels Māui-Tikitiki-A-Taranga (Māui for short) into an entertaining hour of songs and comedy about the issues that Māori face today, including racial profiling and the challenges of code-switching. 

“I’ve always been thinking, How does a Māori man make contemporary cabaret?” Spooner says. “How do we use our traditional forms and our tikanga to inform how we make cabaret?” Having seen a number of cabaret shows overseas while touring with the Modern Māori Quartet, he says he realised that cabaret performers could explore social issues while also putting on a wildly entertaining show.

“It’s a great chance to tickle the heart, visit those issues and then punch the gut,” Spooner says

Rutene Spooner in Thoroughly Modern Māui. (Photos: Jack Barry)

Rutene Spooner was born in Wellington and spent his teenage years in Gisborne, where he lived with his aunt and immersed himself in tikanga Māori, became an avid performer of kapa haka, and developed an interest in musical theatre.

By the time he went to the National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art in Christchurch, Spooner was more than ready for the stage. He’s rarely been out of work since. He’s had major roles in productions of Broadway shows on either side of the Tasman and was a mainstay of the Shakespeare productions at the Pop-Up Globe. He also wrote and performed in his award-winning solo show Super Hugh-Man, a tribute to Hollywood star and Broadway leading man Hugh Jackman.

During rehearsals for that show he remembers discussing with his director Jennifer Ward-Lealand an article about a Māori man who clapped back after being racially profiled in a shop. Ward-Lealand found the description of the profiling the man had experienced shocking, Spooner says, but he saw it as a reality of life for brown kids.

He told her that being racially profiled was an everyday occurrence “to the point where I don’t own plain black hoodies, and won’t go out in a plain black hoodie, won’t even put my hands in my pockets,” he remembers. The discussion had started as casual rehearsal room banter, but to his surprise he found himself tearing up. “I had no idea that I’d conditioned myself to go into a shop and essentially tell the security guard, ‘I’m OK, don’t worry.’”

He realised that those were the sort of things he wanted to write songs about. That specific conversation ended up being the genesis for his song ‘Goodie in my Hoodie’, a playful way of exploring a form of prejudice that remains sadly endemic in Aotearoa.

That playful side of Spooner is something many of his collaborators respond to. Miriama McDowell, who has directed him in two shows and is in development on a third, calls him a true artist. “He’s deeply curious, playful, intelligent, bilingual and such an amazing singer,” she says. “He’s one of those actors that I would put in every show I ever make, ‘cause he’s so bloody good.”

“Plus, he teases me a lot which I need!”

Rutene Spooner in Thoroughly Modern Māui. (Photo: Jack Barry)

Spooner has had particular success in the world of musical theatre, which has undergone its own cultural shift in the past decade. When Spooner opens Thoroughly Modern Māui, he’ll have just finished up a stint at Sydney’s Hayes Theatre in Jekyll and Hyde. He’s understudying the very British lead role, one he almost certainly wouldn’t have been considered for back when he graduated from drama school.

While musicals like Jekyll and Hyde draw on the same theatrical skills as Thoroughly Modern Māui, Spooner says they require different approaches. “I live in, and come from, this very Māori world, and have been very blessed with te ao and tikanga Māori, but I essentially work in a world that isn’t predominantly Māori. This show is probably a product of that.

“At the end of the day, whatever, the show is. I’m still a Māori actor. I’ll be Māori actor in Jekyll and Hyde, and I’ll be a Māori actor in this.”

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Spooner says he’s excited that musical theatre in this country is changing the way it sees its talent. Companies are starting to value and honour the people they work with – whether they’re a performer or a behind-the-scenes creative – and everything they bring with them. It’s a huge change, he says. “When I first started, there was nothing. There were very few Māori and Pasifika actors in the commercial realm of musical theatre, and almost none in the cabaret world.”

While he’s been looking overseas for inspiration for his show, he says his team has been focused on learning from Māori forms of performance. “Our show isn’t structured like a typical contemporary cabaret show, but it’s using the same frameworks as whai korero as our step through.”

The show is, ultimately, a reflection of the way that Māori are perceived in a country built on the foundations of te Tiriti. Spooner’s taking the show around the country, to small towns and rural centres, and he says he’s looking forward to reaching audiences, and talking about race, in a relatively light and accessible way. “I hope in the long game that this whole piece is a conversation for both sides. We’re not changing the world with this show, but what we do need to do is start a conversation.”

He goes back to the show title: Thoroughly Modern Māui, a reference to the concept that Māui the demi-god – half human, half god – is a personification of Māori. “The traditional Māori idea is that we are as powerful as these Māori gods,” he says. “We talk, potentially from a Pakēhā point of view, about wanting to be like these heroes. But at the end of it, it’s an affirmation that we are as powerful as these heroes.

“We are as powerful as Māui, even today.”

Thoroughly Modern Māui tours across the country from September through to October. You can buy tickets here

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ĀteaSeptember 12, 2022

Meng Foon and the reo of tauiwi

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The new bilingual documentary Meng follows race relations commissioner Meng Foon over a year. For the film’s co-director and co-producer, tracing his story inspired her to reflect on her own experience as a Chinese learner of te reo Māori.

Meng Foon ​​is probably one of the most well-known and visible examples of someone tauiwi/non-Māori who can confidently kōrero Māori.

When Steven Chow, who would become my co-producer/co-director, first mentioned his idea of doing a documentary on Meng as a high-profile Chinese New Zealander, I was immediately interested as someone who is also Chinese and who has also been learning Māori for the last decade or so.

It is rare to find older tauiwi who are vocal about being tangata Tiriti. Many other Chinese people of Meng’s generation have grown up with a monocultural lens of Aotearoa, and a view of Māori that has been shaped over many generations by a Pākehā perspective – one that, I don’t think it would be untrue to say, was often racist. That is something that we see in the documentary too. In one scene at a Tiriti workshop for Chinese New Zealanders (particularly older NZ-born Chinese), a participant expresses some colonised whakaaro that Meng has to gently navigate. It’s difficult to unpack decades of learnt bias in one sitting but Foon gives it a go anyway. He doesn’t tend to shy away from difficult things. As he loves to say, “Just do it, man.”

Meng Foon performs hongi in a scene from ‘Meng’

In some ways, looking back, the documentary portrays a very rosy view of Foon, and it was hard to dive deeper into nuance with an observational documentary made in and around the Covid lockdowns. As a character, Meng is impatient, cheeky with an East Coast boomer sense of humour, and at times hypocritical and inconsistent with what he says.

But for all his potential imperfections and shortcomings, Meng Foon is a rarity among his generation, and the fact that he doesn’t shy away from being vocal about colonisation and calling for land back for Māori means hopefully more people of his generation will be ready to listen.

I can see how Foon symbolises the potential for tauiwi of the future – to grow up with te reo Māori and te ao Māori as a normalised part of their upbringing. He is someone who embraces his own Chinese heritage, who doesn’t try to be Māori, but simply makes connections within his local rohe, learns the local waiata and mōteatea, and picks up what he calls “te reo o Ngāti Porou” as well the mannerisms that accompany it.

I remember the first time I heard Foon speak on the pae one year at Waitangi and I couldn’t believe the ease and flow of his reo, how Māori it sounded even to my learner’s ears. I remember thinking wow, I would love to be as fluent as him one day.

Photos from Meng Foon’s life, from the documentary ‘Meng’

When people ask me about my reo Māori journey I often think back to my Sāmoan intermediate teacher Mrs Va’a, who had us do an opening and closing karakia every single day in class. She normalised te reo Māori for us even though she herself wasn’t Māori, and made sure it was an everyday part of our school life. This is one of my earliest memories of appreciating te reo Māori and wanting to learn more. I remember choosing te reo Māori as my language option in my first year of high school while most of my friends took German or Japanese. Then in my first year of university I took Māori 101 with Margaret Mutu and that impacted me so much it led me to do a diploma of language in te reo Māori.

The more I learnt the language, the more I understood how much language and culture are intertwined, how te reo Māori helps give you an insight into te ao Māori. It also helped me unpack my internalised racism about my own Chinese identity.

The author, photographed while co-directing the documentary

Around the same time, I started learning more about the history of this whenua and the ongoing legacy of colonisation that has resulted in the massive inequality that we have now. Learning te reo Māori can’t happen in isolation, and it necessitates an understanding of the context of how that language was lost in the first place.

But, like a lot of non-Māori who start learning te reo, I initially started learning the language simply because I was interested in the language, which I can appreciate now was a very privileged place to start from.

‘Like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, each member is vital to the whole picture. Join today.’
Calum Henderson
— Production editor

As many Māori have articulated far better than I can, the journey of learning te reo is a very different experience for Māori and non-Māori. Having a vital part of your culture systemically taken from you over generations is something non-Māori can only understand at arm’s length. I know many well-meaning tauiwi who want to work towards a journey of decolonisation for themselves and their communities. They see te reo as an important part of that journey, due in part to the immense amount of work by reo champions over many decades to bring te reo Māori to the stage it is now, where reo Māori flows fluidly through RNZ broadcasts and TV weather updates, not just during Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, but every week of the year.

Meng Foon being interviewed at home for the documentary ‘Meng’

But as tauiwi we also need to step back sometimes and reflect on how much space and resource we can take up in these arenas when te reo Māori classes are full and Māori are turned away or put on waitlists, when tauiwi voices dominate class discussions, or when Māori feel like they don’t belong in their own spaces. It feels hypocritical for me to say now because I’m sure I have contributed to this in the past. This was an aspect that we had wanted to explore through the documentary, to see if Foon had similar whakaaro over his own privileged position in being able to learn Māori, but I don’t think we were ever able to dig deep enough into it with Foon.

But I hope tauiwi consider the intention and impact of their reo journeys and remain humble all the way. That’s not to say there’s no place for tauiwi to learn, it’s just that we need to recognise how to centre the needs of tangata whenua first.

I love that reo Māori is becoming more and more a normalised part of Aotearoa. It feels like a tangible sign that the country is becoming more progressive. I used to get a lot of comments about learning Māori but it’s become less of a novelty to see tauiwi embracing reo Māori. I hope the changes we are seeing become more commonplace so that in the future non-Māori like Meng aren’t automatically celebrated for being able to kōrero Māori. I do think tauiwi often get a lot more praise and attention for learning or speaking te reo than Māori second language learners do. It feels deeply unfair and probably adds to the whakamā that many Māori feel about learning their mother tongue. I feel like I understand that on a different level as I am still very whakamā speaking Mandarin too.

It can be a tricky space to navigate. I still have doubts about how much kupu Māori or reo Māori I should use in certain contexts – whether it is beneficial for that space, or if I am still contributing to the whakamā of others, or if it feels like a showing off, or a tokenised use of the language. There is no one right answer or way to be, but if we can stay open to criticisms from Māori of where we may be falling short, and be ready to listen and change, I think that is the path for tangata Tiriti.

Tauiwi need to be aware of our own place and role here in Aotearoa and our complicity as settlers living on stolen land where sovereignty was never ceded. Te reo is only one facet on the journey of decolonisation for Aotearoa. Sometimes it can be a shortcut for us to make connections with Māori but I think whakawhanaungatanga or relationship building can take place in many ways. What most tauiwi long for is a sense of belonging to this whenua and learning te reo requires a learning of whakapapa, which in turn gives tauiwi a stronger place to stand from, in knowing who you are.

‘Like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, each member is vital to the whole picture. Join today.’
Calum Henderson
— Production editor

Making a bilingual documentary about Meng Foon felt like a good way to show that bilingual storytelling, or storytelling led through reo Māori can be the default mode of storytelling in Aotearoa. Whether we are Māori or tauiwi, this can be the future lens that all stories are told from in Aotearoa.

People who watch the documentary will see the potential that comes with learning te reo Māori; the relationships and opportunities that Meng has had because he is a reo speaker are huge. As someone who grew up among ngā iwi o te Tairāwhiti, who never formally learnt reo, Foon offers almost a vision of a future where reo Māori is so normalised that no one needs to formally seek out opportunities to learn, but where all tamariki are immersed and brought up with it.

Meng premieres Monday 12 September, 8:30pm on Whakaata Māori and MĀORI+.

 

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