Just the trick: Conjuring up te reo magic
The trick of how he started was not a trick at all. And it was more than just magic.
Wainuiomata man Api Wairau-Mason had a simple, beautiful dream that he was at the kitchen table playing cards with his nan and koro, chatting in te reo Ma¯ ori like before they died. When he woke up he had an idea: He would become the world’s first te reo Ma¯ori magician. He just had to break it to his wife.
Wairau-Mason, aka Tangata Tumatarau, has spoken to Stuff about his year-long journey breaking into the world of magic.
Three years ago he was a parent ‘‘who spent too much time on his cellphone’’ but when it broke, he picked up a deck of cards to keep his hands busy.
He did not know it before he started working card tricks – ‘‘cardistry’’ – but he found it calming and got to the point where he split, fanned and shuffled almost unconsciously. Then one day he had a dream. ‘‘I actually got given a moemoea¯ . . . a kind of dream or a vision.’’ In the dream he was sitting at the kitchen table with his nan and koro, playing cards.
‘‘But, see, when we played cards back in those days we always ko¯ rero’d in Ma¯ ori.’’
When he woke up, he thought: why not combine his growing skills with te reo Ma¯ ori? As far as he knows, after researching the topic, there have been plenty of Ma¯ ori magicians but not one who works in te reo Ma¯ ori.
That was good news but he had to sell the idea to wife Helen Wairau-Mason, with whom he raises five children at home.
‘‘My wife gave me one year, last year, to make something and make an income of this.’’
Two days before the end of that year he found out he had won funding from broadcasting funder Te Ma¯ ngai Pa¯ ho to release a web series, Wairau-Mason said.
He was raised by his koro Emmanuel Mason and nan Eileen Mason in Wainuiomata. ‘‘That is where I would learn Ma¯ori. So inside my house . . . our first language was te reo Ma¯ ori.’’
It is the close magic he loves the most – the tricks where people are ‘‘kanohi ki te kanohi’’ – face to face. ‘‘In these states, we are personal-as, it is like a hongi – the mauri of the hongi.’’
Api Wairau-Mason’s web series can be found with a search for Tangata Tumatarau on Facebook.