Premiere Season of The Mooncake and the Kūmara Live Performance

INFO

Name	The Mooncake and the Kūmara
Year	2015
Playwright	Mei-Lin Te Puea Hansen
Start Date	5 March 2015
End Date	10 March 2015
Organiser / Venue	Q Theatre Loft
Director(s)	Katie Wolfe
Presenter(s)	Auckland Arts Festival
Producer(s)	Auckland Arts Festival The Oryza Foundation Betsy & Mana Productions Ltd
Key Cast	Waimihi Hotere Kip Chapman Chye-Ling Huang Yoson An Awhina-Rose Ashby Charles Chan
Creative Team	Set Designer: John Verryt Sound Designer: Drew McMillan Costume Designer: Elizabeth Whiting Lighting Designer: Paul Lim
Artform	Theatre
City	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

ABOUT

Presented and co-produced by Auckland Arts Festival 2015, the sold-out premiere season of Mei-Lin Te Puea Hansen’s The Mooncake and the Kūmara was the first play in Aotearoa by a Māori-Chinese playwright exploring Māori-Chinese relationships.

Weaving together three languages — English, Māori and Cantonese — it is loosely based on the story of how Hansen’s maternal goong-goong, Joe Kum Chee, travelled to Aotearoa from Guangzhou in the 1920s and met her nan, Alice Williams (Tainui) in the market gardens in the Stratford area.

Reviewers responded positively to the premiere season, with the NZ Herald describing it as “a compelling challenge to the stark black and whites that have dominated the officially sanctioned bicultural version of New Zealand history” and Maria Ji from Tearaway describing it as “the cutting edge of social progress”, praising the show for resisting translations and instead allowing context to give clarity to the trilingual play.

Following its premiere, The Mooncake and the Kūmara was supported by Performing Arts Network New Zealand (PANNZ) through its National Touring Programme to tour through Aotearoa.

Length: 1 hour 40 mins (no interval)