Actor and director Fasitua Amosa had never come across poetry until he was asked to help turn a piece of poetry into theatre. Now he is one of the forces behind a group highlighting Oceania poetry and championing Pacifika arts, he tells Rebecca Fox.
As an actor Fasitua Amosa knows what all actors seek — "really good text to perform".
"I feel like I’ve found a key code by finding poetry, because it’s like top-notch writing. You don’t have to do anything to it, but connect with it emotionally and perform it, and that’s what an actor does," Amosa, of television series Young Rock, says.
It took 15 years in the industry before Amosa, known for his work on stage (King Lear, The Seagull, Rendered, A Streetcar Named Desire, and To Kill a Mockingbird) and television (A Remarkable Place to Die and The New Legend of Monkey), discovered poetry. He had been called in as a devising actor to help turn a piece of Grace Iwashita-Taylor’s poetry into theatre.
"I’d never actually worked with poetry ever, really, and just basically just fell in love with poetry. I just sort of came to appreciate the power of poetry, especially when it’s put in the theatre context."
Amosa, who attended primary school in Dunedin while his father trained as a Presbyterian minister, had never before worked with material that was as nourishing for him as it was for the audience.
"This is the closest thing I think there is to sorcery, it is real magic, because some of these poems can look so innocuous, but then when you perform it, just when you can hear a pin drop, and everyone’s just suddenly gone into this world through these words, and then they come out the other side and go, well, what’s happened?
"I’ve literally watched people in the audience as they listen to a poem, and as the last line, the last word of this line hits, and then the whole meaning kind of unlocks in this line, people have doubled over in their chairs with emotion, like they didn’t know it was coming."
"I’d never come across poetry, and I feel like a lot of my theatre community probably haven’t either, and probably a lot like me, if they don’t read poetry, then they’ll never really come across it. So I thought, well, why don’t I bring those two worlds together, and, you know, dust off some of these old poems."
He asked Iwashita-Taylor to pull out poems she thought would be good to reconnect with New Zealand audiences, pieces that celebrated those Māori and Pacific "superstars".
"You know, whose work basically gets published and once it’s published, it sits on the shelf, and unless you’re the sort of person that goes and pulls these things off the shelf, you’ll never access them."
Amosa, who has been the voice of the Mitre 10 adverts and the Auckland Transport Network, thought while he was one of those people, he did go to the theatre. He had grown up performing in church, got the acting bug in a youth company and went to drama school at Unitech School of Performing and Screen Arts.
"I know lots of people go to the theatre, and some people might actually, instead of reading the poems, they’ll come and watch a show with poetry in it."
With plenty of poems to choose from, Amosa came up with a narrative to build around the theme of the poems. The poems cover a range of topics such as religion, colonisation, sex, themes of identity and some that are fun but also speak to a deeper colonial message.
Another favourite of Amosa is On Cooking Captain Cook by Brandy Nālani McDougall, of Hawaii.
"It’s a thing that poetry can do. It can connect you emotionally to something in a way that nothing else can."
They pulled together the poems and a group of actors — mostly Amosa’s friends who he convinced would have a great time — to perform them and had its development season at Basement Theatre in 2018 as part of Matariki celebrations.
"It kind of grew from there, and then in 2020, Silo Theatre sort of saw the potential of the show."
Those first shows were done "really low-fi" without a budget so when Silo offered the pair a set budget and a four-week rehearsal period to put on the show, they grabbed it — building it into what it is today.
"During rehearsal, you know, I had all the poem titles on cards, and it would be like survivor poetry. I’d be jiggling moving the order around because in my head, I thought it was this way, and then the guys were doing it, and I was like, actually, no, I think it’s this, you know, so we, after four weeks of sort of jumbling the thing around, we kind of landed on a flow. It’s definitely a rollercoaster."
It was not without its challenges.
"We found that poets are very lean with their language, and while in the theatre, we tend to sort of beat around the bush a bit, because it’s about sort of slowly revealing character, slowly revealing what’s going on with the poetry. I always say that poets can say more with one sentence than lots of people can say with, like, whole paragraphs."
Amosa was determined for the poetry to come first but wanted to bring an actor’s process to the poetry which is why the show is called Upu — it means "word".
"Their weapon is their pen, and actors, our weapon is performance, and so I’ll bring that process to the poetry. I found that a lot of poets perform their own work, and performance isn’t necessarily their strong suit."
So every time Amosa thought the lighting or performance aspects were getting in front on the poetry, he pulled it back.
Amosa, who acted in the piece for the first two seasons before taking up the directing role, admits it is not easy for actors, especially seasoned ones, to do that.
"They feel like, oh, I’ve got to do something and I was like, no, just enjoy the words and what we found is poetry’s really hard to perform. It takes a bit of skill to be able to articulate, some poems come across very naturalistic, and then some poems, like Albert Wendt’s poems, come across very Shakespearean, and so you have to be able to understand what’s going on and then be able to communicate that."
Some of the cast from 2018 are still with the show.
"Everyone’s still finding new things, and I feel like that’s because we’re all older now, people have had whole families since the time we started doing this, [so] things are hitting different, so the same words will hit different for whoever, whatever part of their life that they’re in."
Listening to the show last year Amosa and Iwashita-Taylor realised that some of the poetry was not hitting the spot any more.
"So it evolved that way sort of kind of naturally through what I thought how it went, and then on the floor, how the guys were, what they were picking up and things that they were touching on. You perform one way and then someone else will perform it, and you would hear completely different things, and you go, oh, that’s what this poem could be about."
Upu has been invited to Mexico to perform at a university theatre festival and also performed in Montreal in November. The interest in the work still surprises Amosa yet he is "stoked" they get to showcase Pacific talent internationally.
"I’m still telling myself that a theatre show that I made with my mates has been our ticket to international travel. So we come to Dunedin, and then we go to Wānaka, and then we go to Nelson, and then we go to the Sydney Opera House in May."
"I can’t believe that we’re actually going to be performing at the Sydney Opera House, so I’m still like, you often hear these stories happening for other people, you know, and it’s really cool that it’s happening for us."
For the southern shows Amosa, who now admits to being a lot more open to poetry — especially the ways it can powerfully capture a moment in history, is "getting back on the tools" and performing as the actor who usually plays his role is unavailable.
"I’m back on stage and I’m like actually, that’s right, I missed it."
Being able to marry travel with his "noble cause" to dust off poetry, take it off the shelf and connect it with audiences is a big bonus, he says.
"I’m stoked that it has a life beyond our little wee show."
TO SEE:
Upu Aotearoa NZ, Dunedin Festival of Arts, Mayfair Theatre, April 5, 6pm.
Festival of Colour, Lake Wānaka Centre April 6, 7pm.
