Making a difference
Te Rongopai Tukiwaho is a producer, director, lecturer, actor, singer and community activist. He’s also one of the heavyweights behind Pua¯wai Festival in Auckland, centred around World Aids Day on December 1.
Pua¯wai Festival! We started three years ago as an intimate mini festival hosted at Te Pou Theatre. It stemmed from a conversation with Body Positive and Positive Women. The aim was to create an open safe space to reduce stigmas people living with HIV face, to allow honest and authentic representation and to raise HIV awareness through performance and education. This year is exciting. New Zealand Aids Foundation has come on board and we’re now being hosted across Auckland at seven venues and being supported by some amazing talent. Auckland Live is hosting our Cabaret Gala in the Wintergardens with Jackie Clarke and Jennifer WardLealand, the Aids Foundation has a great relationship with Briefs at Q Theatre, Caitlin Smith and Renee Liang are sharing their talents at Garnet Station and the Family Bar are mixing it up with an Ending HIV Red Party on World Aids Day. It’s going to be a good week!
I think I’m a perfectionist which in itself is oxymoronic. Personally, I think perfectionists are constantly trying to attain something that doesn’t exist. I’d settle for plain old happiness and, the older I get, it seems more and more evident it’s about balance of life. Doing the work you love, being around the people you care about and being in the place that feeds your soul.
I see the world around me and am lucky to meet a huge variety of people in my work with misunderstood communities. I am blown away by the resilience, the contributions to the world people give and incredible lives people outside of the spotlight have. I guess when I do come across someone like this I get to add them to the list because there isn’t just ‘one’.
Probably when I thought a lady was pregnant but she actually had a stomach cyst. #mortified
Do hearts count? BOOM!!!!!!! I clearly missed my comedic calling, right?
Arrogance because it leads to so many other things that I don’t enjoy.
Probably only back to the early 1990s. It seemed like it was so much fun. The world was still making a lot of discoveries and opening up, and besides being a brown guy, you don’t wanna go back too far in the past if you don’t want to have to fight every step of the way!
Psychologist or psychoanalyst. I’m a huge advocate of mindfulness, suicide prevention and wellbeing and, although I already work within these spaces, I’d like to be more educated in these fields. The ability to be able to travel anywhere in the world whenever I like (and if it had to be specific, enough money to be able to do it with friends and family on a private plane ... which probably changes it to really, really rich but I’m not materialistic in public, so let’s just say the first part). To be able to maintain an awesome state of fitness and health without having to gym it every five minutes and still eat and drink what I want. And for KFC to still taste like it did when the TV commercial was a fat family of four driving in a cartoon car. The good old days! – Mike Alexander ● Pua¯wai Festival, November 27-December 2.