First up, a little pronunciation, to make sure we’re going to enjoy the joke a couple of lines further down. We need to be saying Rutene Spooner’s name correctly by then.
‘‘Spooner’’ probably presents few perils. But just in case, Spooner rhymes with crooner, appropriately enough.
Right, then. Rutene, starting from the beginning. Think roo but roll the ‘‘r’’.
Next, ‘‘te’’. It’s not ‘‘tea’’. Maybe start to say ‘‘tear’’ but stop after the first two letters.
Finally, ‘‘ne’’. It’s not ‘‘nay’’. A bit like ‘‘te’’, start into ‘‘near’’ but stop halfway through.
You’re now ready to enjoy one of the songs in Rutene Spooner’s show, Thoroughly Modern Māui (note the macron, another guide to pronunciation).
The song’s called It's not Rutene like Poutine, it's not Rut-a-Knee like Chut-a-knee, it's Rutene - (poutine is a dish of French fries and cheese curds topped with gravy, ref. Wikipedia) - so it’s written with a view to getting plenty of laughs.
But not just laughs, also a few nods of recognition or dawning understanding.
Because just like poutine, and chutney, the cabaret of Thoroughly Modern Māui is no one thing.
After a debut season in Tāmaki Makaurau last year, Spooner (Ngāti Porou and Ngaruahine) is bringing his show to Dunedin next month as part of the Dunedin Arts Festival. He’ll be a good way into a national tour by then, having started at Te Hui Ahurei Reo Māori, the Māori language festival in Wellington - celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Māori language petition - last week. He’ll have also taken the show home to Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival, Gisborne, an event freighted with particular meaning.
That’s because, for Spooner, Māui is not just a hero of pūrākau (legend), he’s whānau.
‘‘Generally speaking, Māori have a connection to Māui as an ancestor,’’ he explains on a break from rehearsals. ‘‘But particularly for me, there is a genealogical connection that I can trace all the way back to Māui. And the fact that his boat, Nuku-tai-memeha, is at the top of my mountain.’’
That’s Hikurangi, the mountain Māui hauled up from the ocean depths when he landed the big fish, Te Ika-a-Māui, the North Island, using mātauranga passed down via his grandmother’s jawbone.
‘‘So there is a genealogical connection to Māui that we can trace back but also for me as a performer and a theatre maker, the whole show is ‘how do I become the next Māui’. Which is not far off the truth because what I like about Māui is that he is adventurous, he’s boisterous, he’s inquisitive and he’s cheeky and he’s mischievous, those are the qualities that I like to paint
in my work. Those are the qualities that I strive for and I think that’s what really connects me to Māui, and if I think of Māui as, for want of a better word, as a beacon, it’s those qualities of being inquisitive and mischievous.’’
Putting Māui, and those characteristics, at the centre of a piece of contemporary cabaret, means the fun can mix in with some more thoughtful content, he says.
‘‘So the show is like, ‘what would Māui do in a situation’, but it is taking those qualities and applying them to challenges that we as people from Aotearoa New Zealand, but mostly for us as Māori, the challenges that we face in the modern day - how can we apply those qualities that Māui possesses, to recontextualise them.’’
Specifically, the challenges Spooner is talking about are the likes of racial profiling and the incorrect pronunciation of te reo Māori, including place names but not just place names.
‘‘There’s a song that I have written, It's not Rutene like Poutine, it's not Rut-a-Knee like Chut-a-knee, and essentially it’s a song and a lesson in how to correctly pronounce my name.
It’s a playful way of signalling that Aotearoa still has a wee way to go on one or two issues.
‘‘I think that’s what I love about cabaret. At the end of the day contemporary cabaret is entertaining, right, that’s why we are there. We are going there for the entertainment, but in terms of contemporary cabaret we can entertain while speaking to some serious issues. We can have a frank conversation.
‘‘I think it is very Māori too. To welcome somebody in with love and have a really frank conversation. I hope that’s what we do.’’
Spooner is well equipped to bring all the necessary constituent parts of such a show.
Since graduating back in 2009 with a bachelor of performing arts in musical, he has been mixing it up, touring the country with the likes of Operatunity and helping to update a storied format with the Modern Māori Quartet. He also appeared in Dunedin last year in the Taki Rua play Sing To Me, a show that mixed pūrākau with the climate crisis. Most recently he’s been across the Tasman playing both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in a musical theatre production. Spooner’s also a kaihaka (kapa haka performer) of Whāngara-Mai-Tawhiti.
As far as pronunciation goes, the South gets a special mention in his arts festival show.
Spooner picks up on a talkback radio exchange that went viral a couple of years back, during which a caller from Dunedin insisted on her right to mispronounce the suburb of Ōpoho.
‘‘In that song Rut-a-Knee like Chut-a-knee, we talk about names and how simple they are if you break it down, about approaching it with care and love. And then, essentially, I go ‘let’s go for a tiki tour around Aotearoa’,’’ Spooner draws out the te reo Māori name for the country (or the North Island depending on your reo ā-iwi) into a hardly recognisable, yet all too recognisable,
Lynn of Tawa abomination.
‘‘And we go through some place names, you know, ‘stopped at the luge, Rotorua’,’’ Spooner quotes from the song, pronouncing the city’s name as Te Arawa do. ‘‘Lord of the Rings, Matamata’,’’ he continues, doing Ngāti Hauā proud. ‘‘We do this journey ... then we get down to Ōpoho,’’ he says, giving it its macron.
The infamous ZB exchange allows the Dunedin suburb to provide an ‘‘aha’’ moment, he says.
All of the songs in the show are spurred by occasions and incidents that have affected Spooner personally.
‘‘There is a song called Goodie in my Hoodie, and it is a song in which we explore the notion of feeling profiled,’’ he says.
Sample lyric: ‘‘I want my goodie-oodie-oodie-oodie profiling hoodie. Black, bold and beautiful.’’
‘‘Long story short, without giving away the show, I had a realisation in conversation once that I don’t actually own a black hoodie. And I try, consciously, not to go shopping in a dark hoodie, I try to shop with my hands outside my pockets. All these types of things that I have conditioned myself to do in order to not be profiled as shoplifting or that sort of thing.
‘‘That song, Goodie in my Hoodie, is sung in a very 1950s, 1960s doo-wop, Motown-esque style. Again, it is playful, but we’re talking about serious things.
‘‘For me personally, I often walk into a shop and I can tell the security guard is following me and I, essentially, have to say hello. So that they don’t follow me or they know that I come in peace.’’
Māori will recognise the moment, he says. For Pākehā it provides an insight into everyday racism and the toll it takes.
‘‘But because of the way we paint it and they way we deliver it, it is digestible, I think that is really important, and it’s a quality that my elders taught me.’’
There are further elements in the structure of Thoroughly Modern Māui that mark it out as specifically Māori story-telling, something Spooner has refined since last year’s Auckland outing.
‘‘For example, this show, for the cabaret, we are using the frameworks of whaikōrero (oratory), that is the structure of our cabaret. That is what makes this a Māori cabaret, and I don’t necessarily say we have got it right, bang on, but that is our working question. So that’s kind of been our focus from the last time we did it to now, going, what makes this uniquely Māori-slash-
cabaret from Aotearoa is by using traditional story-telling frameworks and recontextualising them.’’
It has not been an entirely straightforward process as whaikōrero is complex. For example, on the East Coast they commonly don’t use tauparapara, the opening flourish employed by kaikōrero (orators) elsewhere, he says.
‘‘We tend to just go ‘tihei mauri ora’ and then go straight into the guts of the conversation.’’
Nevertheless, for the purposes of show, tauparapara is in there.
Then the discipline of pepeha is brought to bear, to acknowledge the mountains.
‘‘That is how I introduce myself, I introduce myself by the mountain, so we are using those structures.’’
Fundamentally, it’s a meeting of culture that works, Spooner says, ‘‘and this is what I love about cabaret’’, because the frameworks of cabaret are very Māori, very whaikōrero.
‘‘You make a statement, you deliver your statement and then it is supported by a song, so to me that is cabaret. Cabaret is, ‘I’m going to tell a yarn, I’m going to say a yarn and when that yarn has been pushed so far that I can’t explain it any more, I’m going to move into song’. That for me is very much that whaikōrero process.’’
It’s special for Spooner to be touring the show now, as the 50th anniversary of the Māori language petition is marked.
‘‘I am a product of the revitalisation of te reo Māori. I am a graduate of the kōhanga reo movement, I am a graduate of the kura kaupapa movement, I was very fortunate to be given my language and it is so fitting that we actually start this tour at the [Te Hui] Ahurei Reo Māori, at the Māori language festival in Wellington, it’s fitting that we start the tour there because that’s
how I started, you know.’’
Born in Gisborne, Spooner’s family moved to Wellington for work but he missed the coast, so his mother let him move back, to live with an aunt, so he could continue to learn and be emersed in his culture.
‘‘And I am very grateful for that. As a new dad myself - well, relatively new, my daughter is 3 - I now realise that massive sacrifice. But also she made that sacrifice not just for our family but for the betterment. By letting her child go back it meant that the language continued in our family, and its customs. I think that’s a massive thing really.’’
Spooner now feels a similar responsibility towards his daughter.
‘‘It is my job as a father to instil her Māori language and customs strongly in her so she can not be wavered by anybody else. The battle was to revitalise our language, now the battle is to normalise our language, there’s a new level.’’
Similarly, the Māui that emerges from Spooner’s show is next level, drawing on East Coast dialect and insights from his elders.
‘‘I reintroduce some traditional haka from the East Coast into it and reuse those words in songs, so the idea is that when people watch it, Pākehā but also Māori, they know exactly by the dialect that I use and the references I use that this man and this story is from the perspective of Ngāti Porou East Coast.’’
It’s whakapapa.
‘‘Of course, I take some liberties in that my Māui wears a few sequins and rhinestones, but at the core of it, the qualities of Māui are what I have inherited and so as a story teller I have gone, ‘cool, I am going to tell the version of Māui that I have been taught and I am going to dress it in a new setting and in that way’. Like we said, it is going to have a few more complexities.’’
There’s a further quality of Māui that Spooner thinks is useful in terms of contemporary conversations.
‘‘I think also because he is a demigod, you know, and in that traditional context traverses two different worlds.’’
There are lessons there for the way our country is developing now, he says.
‘‘He straddled two worlds, I definitely think there are some qualities, some lessons in his work that we can use as we rebalance our country.’’
The show
Rutene Spooner performs Thoroughly Modern Māui, Knox Church, Dunedin, on Thursday, October 20, at 8pm as part of the Dunedin Arts Festival.
