An almost sold-out performance for Matariki is educating hundreds of Auckland school students about vulnerability and leadership, resilience and joy.
Youth worker, choreographer and dancer Hadleigh Pouesi challenges troubled youth to turn from crime and live a better life by expressing themselves through dance as a physical expression of culture.
His dance-theatre work MĀUI is being presented with three shows at the Aotea Centre Friday, as part of the Matariki Festival and Pacific Dance Festival programme.
Photo: Supplied
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Hadleigh tells Kathryn Ryan the show is an extravaganza of creative arts, bringing the story of the Pacific demigod to life.
“Like I said we’ve got dance and that’s a range of genres, whether it be hip-hop dance, contemporary dance, Pacific movement, kapa haka, as well as that we’ve got live music throughout the show, we’ve got some original songs as well as some chart toppers, we’ve got some spoken word in there, we’ve got some beautiful animation that pushes the narrative of the show.”
The story breaks down the characteristics of this legendary character, he says.
“We go through the tales of Māui and the sun, Māui fishing the islands up from the sea, we go through the stories of Māui capturing fire from the underworld and bringing that back to Earth.
“So, we go through a lot of the tales that we’ve grown up listening to.”
Ushering in the new official holiday will be a cast of more than 30 performers, including Hadleigh, who is also participating as director and choreographer.
“For us, it is massive to be at the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, one of New Zealand’s biggest if not the biggest theatre in New Zealand, that’s huge.
“It’s huge for an indigenous show made by Pacific and Māori young people to be taking a space as prestigious as that on a date that is historic, given that it is the first Matariki public holiday.”
The MĀUI project has been put together by the Fresh Movement Arts Trust and Freshmans Dance Crew, of which Hadleigh is also a director.
“We were really lucky early in my career to go over to the World Hip Hop Championships in Las Vegas. We were able to bring back New Zealand’s first gold medal from that prestigious event but at that point, I was like well now what do we do?
“So we thought well why can’t we start a trust, why can’t we start an organisation that creates careers for young people and for young dancers that want to do this at full-time capacity?”
As well as school and community programmes and mentoring in tertiary education, they help create employment opportunities for more 100 young performers.
“So we’ve got a couple of dancers who now dance fulltime in Japan, we’ve got a couple of dancers who are teaching in Melbourne and in Brisbane.
“We’ve been able to basically launch a lot of young people into careers that don’t only give them national success but international recognition as well.”
Hadleigh believes creative arts gives youth a positive method of engagement, and ties in with his work as a manager at the youth centre Zeal West Auckland.
“For some young people, they need to be connected to sports programmes, arts programmes, music programmes, or just having a good adult role model alongside them to keep them occupied and keep them participating in positive engagement.
“For us, our language is dance and we’ve seen a lot of young people change their lives, turn their lives around, be able to tell a different narrative, because they get involved with our programming instead of getting up to mischief which is what we’re seeing a lot of in the media at the moment.”
Lockdowns deprived developing youth of such positive engagements, and the spare time was instead spent on mischief, he says.
“They’re taking their social cues off what they see on their phones and what they see on their laptops and if they’re able to get that kind of attention by outworking these ram raids or outworking youth crime, I understand why they are using this as a way to get attention – I don’t agree with it, but I can understand how we’ve got into this space.
“We’re getting a lot of young people who have been forced out of school and have been forced to make a living due to the Covid lockdowns and due to the high price of living at the moment, and so if you need to make ends meet, I can understand why some are doing this out of pure survival as well.”
Mainstream media have a role to play too, he says.
“Every day that you turn on the television or every time that you turn on the radio, this stuff is getting coverage and so it’s not a social media problem alone, I think it’s mainstream media dedicating so much time to telling a negative image of youth culture.”