planning a green tour
Nā Tānemahuta Gray
E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e ngā karangatanga maha.
Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
Creating the most sustainable touring environment, whilst supporting the team’s hauora on the road is a process of trial and error.
Taki Rua Production’s Te Reo Māori Season tours to schools and some community venues in the North and South Island of Aotearoa / New Zealand, running annually for a period of 10 weeks on the road with 5 weeks of rehearsals prior. This is one of only a few fully te reo Māori productions that tour to Kura Kaupapa (Māori language schools) and mainstream primary schools in New Zealand annually, whilst providing some public community performances held in public venues or marae (traditional Māori community venues) during the tour.
Photo Credit: Taki Rua
The tour utilises two vehicles including a cargo van for the set, props, costumes and sound equipment (no lighting in our school tours) and a Previa 5-seater for the touring cast of 4 actors and 1 company/stage manager. Keeping the team to 5 members means we only require two vehicles on the road, and can focus our accommodation to one Air BnB home for the cast and crew, to reduce the extra power consumption, rubbish and laundry requirements of 5 separate motel or hotel rooms. It also allows our teams to cook onsite, reducing the rubbish created from purchasing meals at take aways or dining in establishments, and making it more affordable.
With the tour extending from the top of the North Island to the bottom of the South Island, a decision was made to reduce our travel from next year so that we will alternate the years we tour to Northland and Southland. This will reduce our average tour distance down from 5,000 – 6,000 kilometres per vehicle by approximately 1000km.
Another focus to help us cut kilometres on the road is in the schools booking process. Taki Rua have always provided week long periods in respective regions that allow us to move up and down the country in a linear route on our travels. However the regions we tour to are large (and we have a commitment to try and reach rural schools) - this meant a lot of back and forth travel occuring within the regions. We realised we needed to start by asking schools what dates they can’t do. That way we could build our itinerary so that it made geographic sense. We had to have the power to join the dots ourselves and schedule the tour in a linear fashion up or down the region, rather than back tracking. This change has reduced our total tour distance by over 1,000 km per vehicle.
The Te Reo Māori tour is a tough tour, with 2 schools visited daily, including pack ins and outs for each of these shows within the schools 9am - 3pm school timetable. The 10 shows per week and sometimes an extra community show on top of that was too much of an ask on the touring team. After feedback from the 2018 touring team, we implemented a change for the hauora of the crew. This change provided the team with one week’s rest after 5 weeks on the road, returning them back to their home base or in Wellington. This required us to alter our route so that we would do the North Island for the first 5 weeks of the tour, finishing up in Wellington for the week’s paid recuperation break, and then undertake Wellington and the South Island for the final 4 weeks of the tour.
Photo Credit: Taki Rua
Hauora and sustainability are occasionally competing demands. In 2024, Taki Rua will provide an initiative to support the hauora of the cast further. We will be hiring drivers to get the cargo van and Previa up to Northland with the show gear and luggage for the start of the tour, with the cast and crew flying up there to commence the tour. We will also be doing that in Dunedin for the second portion of the tour. This will reduce the driving commitments of our team on the road by 2,000 km’s approximately, so that the team can drive their way down the North Island, and up the South Island on their tour. It will increase our carbon footprint unfortunately, but we have weighed up the benefits around being able to present to more schools (we were losing 4 performance days and up to 8 schools missing out due to the long stretches of driving up and down both ends of the Island). This allows us to continue to give the cast full weekends off where previously they had been required to drive on the weekends to get to the next region or ends of the islands.
In 2020 we investigated the potential of hiring EV vehicles for the tour. However with the lack of a fully integrated charging system around New Zealand presently, and the lower kilometre capacity of batteries for vans and cars at that time, this was deemed unviable, due to the rural areas the tour heads to. With the Government pledging to bring in a larger charging network, this would definitely be something to consider, especially as car and van range capacities have been increasing in the past 4 years.
We have been working to reduce the size of our sets and see what can be utilised from the previous years’ performances. Our sound system and curtain railing backdrop have been utilised for multiple tours and we reskin our show programme banners to get as many tours out of them as possible. We also have PDF versions of our education resource sent freely to schools to undertake other activities and provide information about the show coming to them. Finally, all of our marketing to schools is done both digitally and via calls to the schools. We do not print posters or flyers to promote this tour.
Photo Credit: Taki Rua. Te Kuia Me Te Pūngāwerewere in rehearsal.
In 2019, our production of Te Kuia Me Te Pūngāwerewere adapted by Jamie McCaskill and based on the children’s story by Patricia Grace and Robyn Kahukiwa did a very successful tour that spanned 14 weeks of touring. I could see the viability of this show being reduced to a 20-25 minute length production and re-developed for kōhanga and pre-school children in a new pilot programme called Te Reo Tatarakihi (the chirping of the crickets, being our younger audiences). There are no te reo Māori programmes offered for this 2-5 year age group, so this was a good show to test whether there was an interest from this pre-school and families with young children demographic. In 2022 we undertook a Wellington pilot production of free performances at Marae to garner feedback from our audiences and in 2023 we toured the show to community halls and theaters in Manawatū/Otaki, Hawkes Bay and Te Tai Rāwhiti.
This production allowed us to re-utilise the bulk of the original costumes, and the set from the 2019 performance, as a way to maximise the performance outreach of this wonderful set by Wai Mihinui and costumes by Charlotte Kelleher. In 2024, it will tour to the final 5 regions remaining in the North Island, to make the most of the production before it is retired. The potential is there for the future leadership of Taki Rua to adapt another Te Reo Māori production from the past 5 years to be re-developed for this new programme. Taki Rua usually hold onto the sets and costumes for at least 5 years of a show’s original season, in case future touring options arise. It’s lovely to have all the work put into a production have an opportunity to be revisited again with a chance to reuse the sets and costumes for the show.
Photo Credit: Taki Rua
Key points that have aided our touring to work towards more environmental consciousness.
Dictate the booking process so you can build a tour that moves linearly up the country, eliminating as much backtracking as possible.
Consider alternating tour years for the far North and far South of the Islands.
Consider EV transport hireage for touring vehicles.
See if previous sets that are retiring can be utilised within future show builds.
See if productions can have another life once the original purpose for the show has been completed.
Book accommodation in one home of multiple rooms rather than multiple single motel or hotel units.
Keep the marketing purely digital, and eliminate excess usage of paper.
Tānemahuta Gray (Ngāi Tahu, Rangitāne, Tainui, Scottish, English)
Tānemahuta recently held the positions of Kahukura / Kaiarataki Toi - CEO & Artistic Director of Taki Rua Productions Tānemahuta for the past 8 years and has 29 years professional experience as an event producer, theatre director and choreographer of over 30 events, festivals and productions including the Oceania work at the Shanghai World Expo Opening Ceremony. He has guest choreographed the South Pacific / Aotearoa Section for WOW – World of WearableArt Awards since 2010, as well as co-produced and artistically directed New Zealand’s largest scale bi-cultural productions including Māui – One Man Against The Gods, Arohanui – The Greatest Love and Tiki Taane Mahuta. In 2018 Tānemahuta choreographed the Broadway Musical workshop lab for Otherworld in New York, working with some of Broadways’ top designers and performers.
Tānemahuta sits on the CNZ advocacy panel Te Rōpū Mana Toi and is a member of the G8 who created Ngā Hua Pai to support the contemporary Māori theatre and dance independant artists in Aotearoa.
Tānemahuta’s performing career included him spending five years performing for Argentinean aerial theatre company De La Guarda’s production Villa Villa in London, Las Vegas, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam, Berlin, Seoul and Sydney.
