Rua i Te

Rua i Te is a partnership project between Te Toki Haruru and international arts organisations. The project takes place in June -July 2026. I am seeking funding to support my attendance and facilitation of cultural and artistic activities in Canada and Poland. The funding for this project is intended for the preparation and participation in four distinct exchange events - performances, festivals, symposiums and workshops.

Event 1 - Performances of live digital installation work Ko Te Ākau, presented by Open the Door Festival, in collaboration with the Sarasa Performance Laboratory and University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland.

Event 2 - To attend the All is Spirit Symposium in collaboration with the Sarasa Performance Laboratory and University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland. Presenting a research seminar on Te Toki Haruru and facilitating a performance workshop. 

Events 3 - To facilitate a Rua i Te Performance Workshop, for practitioner creatives and researchers, to explore ideas of the ancestral body, material culture and the artefact. The workshop is on-site and hosted by the Museum of Anthropology, BC Canada, in collaboration with Vancouver International Dance Festival and the Dancers of Damelahamid.

Event 4 -  To present performances and facilitate community workshops at the Poundmaker Performance Festival,  in partnerships with the Sarasa Performance Laboratory, on-site at Poundmaker Cree Nation, Saskatchewan and the Sylix First Nation, Okanagan, British Columbia Canada.

Rua i Te was developed and launched in 2025, with four Canadian arts/cultural organisations agreeing to work in collaboration with Te Toki Haruru to explore indigenous creativity, cultural research, curatorial/presentation platforms and community outreach activities. This year our partnership has expanded to include new colleagues in Katowice, Poland and the Okanagan, British Columbia Canada.

As the founder of Te Toki Haruru, I am excited to share these new international connections with whānau, friends and colleagues, my community of arts supporters and I am looking forward to expanding the Rua i Te partnership framework within Aotearoa.

With your support I will be able to continue working alongside the Rua i Te partners to build capacity, achieve our respective goals for cultural and artistic inclusivity and reciprocity. 

The organisations and people I will be working with on the Rua i Te project June - July 2026.

Te Toki Haruru: Director - Charles Koroneho

Sarasa Performance Laboratory: Director - Floyd P. Favel

University of Silesia: Sabina Sweta Sen-Podstawska

Open The Door Festival: Aneta Głowacka

Museum of Anthropology: Curator - Amina Chergui

Vancouver International Dance Festival: Artistic Director - Deanna Peters

Dancers of Damelahamid: Artistic Director - Margaret Grenier

With your generous support, project funds will provide a focused period in Tāmaki Makaurau to prepare production and performance elements for Ko Te Ākau, facilitation development for the Rua i Te performance workshop and a time of writing and media collation for a comprehensive research presentation of the creative methodologies of Te Toki Haruru. Funding is also intended to cover travel costs of Ko Te Ākau production materials and performance elements.

• Project Preparations: Research, rehearsal, production and installation - Tāmaki Makaurau                                                                                                                          
• Project Performances and Workshops: Freight, installation, production, performance - Ko Te Ākau Installation Performance - Silesian Theatre,  Katowice, Poland. Rua I Te Performance Workshop - Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, BC Canada 

Campaign Funding Goal - $10,000

I am the founder, director and lead creative of Te Toki Haruru, a conceptual platform established in 1997 to explore indigenous creativity, intercultural collaboration and the intersection between dance, theatre, visual arts and design. After three decades of research and project development, Te Toki Haruru has become my creative home, a unique vision of conceptual approaches and methodologies that define the objectives of my work and aspiration for the advancement of indigenous creativity.

Rua i Te activities June 01-July 31

This project is the second stage of the Rua i Te partnership activities for 2026 and is centred on the unique indigenous research, cultural and language re-vitalisation program facilitated by Floyd P. Favel, theatre director and founder of the Sarasa Performance Laboratory on the Poundmaker Cree Nation, in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Ko Te Ākau Performances | All is Spirit Symposium and Festival

I will be travelling with an international group of indigenous artists, research facilitators and performance makers to attend to the Sarasa Performance Laboratory All is Spirit symposium and festival on indigenous knowledge, performance, ceremony and culture in Katowice, Poland. We are working in collaboration with the University of Silesia and Open The Door Festival. I will contribute live performances of my digital installation work Ko Te Ākau, presenting a research seminar on the creative methodologies of Te Toki Haruru, and facilitating a performance workshop. Following the All is Spirit symposium and festival we will participate in a shared performance workshop with Floyd P. Favel, exploring his theatre and directing practice with a showing of his latest play, and exchanging with Ewa Benesz, a director working with theatre processes originating in the Grotowski tradition. 

Rua i Te Performance Workshop 

I will be facilitating a week long performance workshop hosted by the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, in collaboration with the Vancouver International Dance Festival and Dancers of Damelahamid. The workshop will explore the ancestral body, material culture and the artefact. Facilitation will take place in various exterior and interior exhibition spaces of the museum, will include access to museum exhibitions with curators sharing their knowledge of specific collections and associated artefacts. The workshop also explores how daily work within the contemporary visual and material culture of a museum can reflect our most current ideas about cultural identity, continuity, and change. 

Poundmaker Performance Festival 

For the final event of the Rua i Te project, the Sarasa Performance Laboratory group will re-convene at the Miyawata cultural site for the Poundmaker Performance Festival and Plains Indian Sign Language Workshop. Each summer festival events include local and international artists and activities are open to local communities and a limited number of spectators and visitors, due to the remote location. This year Sarasa Performance Laboratory events will take place on the Poundmaker Cree Nation in Saskatchewan and the Sylix First Nation, Okanagan, British Columbia.

Rua i Te, came from the desire to develop an exchange and partnership structure to match the new hybrid works I was creating during the covid health crisis. I realised the importance of creating future forward approaches for Te Toki Haruru, to align potential regional and international contexts to the virtual networks I had developed during the pandemic.

Rua i Te was launched in 2025, with four Canadian arts/cultural organisations agreeing to work in collaboration with Te Toki Haruru. We now have a working partnership model and in our second year exploring what research, cultural collaboration and artistic presentation can provide as a basis for further development of navigating the nuances of a post pandemic arts and performance sector. 

The impact I have experienced with Rua i Te has provided many opportunities to explore abstract approaches to defined concepts of progress. The multi-faceted collaborative layers of this project requires time, a coalescence around these dialogues, and a system for arranging knowledge, disciplines, elements of performance and those who underscore it, the creative practitioners. arts supporters and communities I have the good fortune to work with.

Rua i Te approaches collaboration as cooperation and discussion as a redistribution of power to find balance. I have found it necessary to release the responsibility of being a knowledge holder in favour of learning how to shape a space of trust. Not leading can bring about a space of cooperation and partnership, and those shared responsibilities and directions help define an emergence of a leadership model based on ecosystems and environments.

With this project and context, I aim to learn from my international colleagues the means by which I can develop a network of Aotearoa based Rua i Te partners, with the expressed intention of building future regional and international exchanges that reflect an ecological and environmental approach to the arts sector.