You are Fierce, You are Full
Nāu te rourou, nāku te rourou ka ora ai te iwi
Tempo Dance Festival is the longest standing annual dance event of Aotearoa and in previous years was held in Tāmaki Makaurau, on the land of Ngāti Whātua ki Ōrākei. In 2020 and due to Covid-19, Tempo went online through the use of their website and social media platforms. These played the part of the stage for each of their Seasons, including Putiputi, still showing here.
Cat Ruka (Ngāpuhi, Waitara) is the Artistic Director of Tempo and co-founder of Heart Party, an equity-minded and community focused clothing and accessories shop, who donate 50% of profits to live performance-makers in Aotearoa. Bella Waru (Ngāti Tukorehe, Te Ati Awa) was one of the artists in this latest Tempo season, an interdisciplinary artist who speaks through voice and movement. In this piece we hear from Cat and Bella as they share with us their experiences of the arts sector and being a part of Tempo Dance Festival.
Kia ora Cat. Tell us the journey of your creative career and challenges you've faced as a wāhine Māori artist?
Cat Ruka: I have been really blessed and anointed in my creative career but I’ve also had to work my arse off through many challenging circumstances. I can always trace these challenges back to the stronghold that Pākehā culture has on our sector and the systemic and institutional white supremacy that still very much exists in all corners of our industry. Since leaving university my mahi has been about trying to de-centre that stronghold so that wāhine Māori coming after me can enjoy making work in equitable, fair, and culturally intersectional environments.
What advice would you give to an emerging wāhine Māori artist, who may feel excluded or whakamā about participating in the creative arts sector in Aotearoa?
CR: Whenever I am feeling whakamā about making contributions (which is still frequent), I remind myself that my tīpuna didn’t weather the gross hardships of colonisation for me to not step up to the kaupapa in my full potential and full force. I remind myself that it’s not about me, it’s about the whakapapa of artistry that my tīpuna and the creator have woven me into. I decolonise my thinking around what the sector is, to instead perceive it as a domain that is looked after by particular atua and to whom I am responsible to serve. We are spiritual beings having physical experiences in this small lifetime, so a lot of that worry and fear is irrelevant and a waste of time.
Kaha tō auahatanga e hine mā. You are fierce, you are full, you are more than our wildest dreams.
Toi Māori is a very broad subject and each form is attributed with atua, who are the atua/tūpuna you bring into your creativity and how?
CR: I love this question so much because I’ve just recently started to bring much more consciousness to the invoking of atua in my work. Since becoming a kaitiaki in the arts sector I have come to understand my work as service to Hine Raukatamea; I see her as one of my bosses to whom I am responsible for helping to protect and service the domain of entertainment and performance that she presides over.
In addition to this, my spiritual guide Chelita Kahutianui Zainey (who like me has whakapapa to Waitaha), recently named Hine Pukohurangi as one of my allies in the wairua world. Both my daughter and I are deeply and poetically moved by mist and the shapeshifting dance that she does for us in the mornings, so Chelita’s naming of her to me made profound sense immediately. I call on our tupuna whaea Pukohurangi in a number of different ways in my leadership and in my arts practice. If I ever have to enter into a challenging conversation with someone, she reminds me of the power of stillness. When I am searching for fierce choreography, she reminds me that ferocity can be gentle, light and silent.
Cat and Bella, can you please share with us your experience with confidence and self-worth in your practice? How do you build up and maintain the self-esteem it takes to share your art?
CR: Wāhine Māori are devastatingly under-represented in contemporary dance. When I was training and coming up as a dancer, I had insecurities about my body type and became worried about what it couldn’t do when put in comparison to the celebrated cis-white female bodies I was surrounded by. Thankfully I came across the writings of indigenous activists very early on in my practice, which really functioned as rongoa for those negative thoughts. I was able to ditch the time-wasting practice of trying to achieve a western ideal of strength and beauty quite early on, which meant that I could focus on the ancestral magic that my body could do. To our young wāhine Māori artmakers who struggle with self-esteem, I say I see you, I hear you and I know that fight. Be critical of the colonial thought patterning that distracts you from the ancestral kaupapa you were born into. There are goddesses inside of you, waiting patiently to be shared.
Bella Waru: I experienced a fluctuation in confidence throughout a process, just as in life. There's something in not defining ourselves by those feelings, because they change all the time. That makes space for nourishing and growing a consistent pou (self worth) that isn't reliant upon good feelings or good mahi. To recognise our inherent worth as separate to and not entangled with the things we spend our time on. There's a line between confidence and self worth. We can experience a dip in confidence about something but in a way that doesn't diminish our worth. And that is important.
As well as this, I recognise the ways that my doubts/self criticisms can be growth indicators. Rather than feeling defeated by them, I see them as expressing to me the desires that I have for improvement, for developing skills and capacities, for encouraging me to stay in motion and not stagnate in my learnings, expansions and evolutions. So, sometimes, however frustrating, I welcome these feelings because they indicate to me my belief in myself as being capable of more than what I am offering in this moment, and a deep commitment to my own 'becoming' - which is a beautiful and loving thing. It's a form of self-dedication.
Centrally to the way we experience and view our work, we recognise that our mahi is something that moves through us. So in some ways, we don't own it and it's not entirely ours to judge or to withhold. We create work in communion with many - for example tūpuna and whānau. This knowing overrides any personal feelings of doubt or insecurity even when they are present, because in the end, it's not my place to withhold something beyond me, for something as changeable as my feelings.
What is your vision for the future of toi Māori and dance in Aotearoa (if you have one)?
CK: My vision for toi Māori is that it becomes more like a spectrum of intersectionality. I want our funding bodies to recognise that to be Māori today also means to be many other things and that there is no singular Māori experience. I want our industry to take on the perspective that contemporary practices of toi Māori can sit alongside our traditional practices and be just as valid. That the minute a Māori person makes an artwork - regardless of what it looks like - it is Māori art and should be celebrated as that.
BW: For me, the future of toi Māori and dance in Aotearoa is dependent on the future of Aotearoa. I envision a future where our home, our whenua is addressed with the mana it deserves, as are our people. In this world, toi Māori is reinstated with the inherent value, mana and recognition that is inherent in Te Ao Māori, on a communal, Aotearoa-wide scale. In a future that respects and upholds Indigenous sovereignty, the arts, dance, all of these forms are regarded as the cultural navigators and knowledge keeping vessels that they are - an integral part of community wellness and connectivity.
In this Aotearoa, manaakitanga is practiced holistically and therefore the needs of all individuals are met through collective care. Security is not only possible but is unquestionable. Toi Māori and expression in all its forms is made accessible, acknowledged and encouraged in and for all people, and not made separate from life or the people. It is made with, among and for our communities, grounded and founded relationally, and therefore has no space for elitism or exclusionary practice.
Many people struggle just to become embodied in their movements, so dance becomes a frightening experience. What advice do you have for everyday people who are finding it hard to move with total embodiment?
BW: Try radically only doing things you want to do. Maybe for an hour. Maybe for a week. If you're tired and it's 2pm, sleep. If you're not hungry but it's 'lunchtime' don't eat. Try to listen for the voice of your tinana rather than dictate to your tinana what it should be doing based on external voices. Show yourself that you are listening. Then, if you want to, move. It could be 30 seconds of jumping or half an hour of dancing in your bedroom or lying on the floor and drawing patterns in the air with your arms - if you can experience the combination of movement and desire, rather than movement and pain or movement and frustration, so much more becomes possible.
Image credit: Ralph Brown