NOTES
Chapter One: Weet-Bix Māori
1 Te Mika Show ran two seasons on Māori TV during 2006–7. For a taste, see the opening credits: YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stm6mEYaj3A.
2 More precisely, Pākehā is a linguistic legacy of colonisation, used primarily to refer to New Zealanders of British descent.
3 Baldwin’s essay ‘Here Be Dragons’ first appeared under the title ‘Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood’ in Playboy, January 1985.
4 My use of the term ‘prismatic’ here has been sparked by April Sizemore-Barber’s discussion of queer political theatre in ‘A Queer Transition: Whiteness in the Prismatic, Post-Apartheid Drag Performances of Pieter-Dirk Uys and Steven Cohen’.
5 Carlyon & Morrow, Changing Times, 2–3.
6 Malone, ‘Big Cheeses Turn Mild Row Tasty’.
7 Schuster, ‘Small Town, Big Success: MIKA’.
8 Mika, ‘Mika’, in Allan (ed.), Growing Up Gay, 143.
9 Markby, ‘Lovelock Link to New TBHS Oaks’. See also: ‘Lovelock Wins 1500-m Gold at Berlin, 6 August 1936’, New Zealand History. David Geary’s play Lovelock’s Dream Run (1993) seems to take inspiration from Mika’s story, insofar as it is set in a school much like Timaru Boys’ High and revolves around the (homo)sexual awakening of a pair of adolescents – one Pākehā, the other Māori; but the resemblance is oblique and the character of Nick a watery reflection of the fierce young man Mika remembers being.
10 Mika, ‘Mika’, 144.
11 Mika, ‘Bunga in a Bucket’, in Ihimaera (ed.), Growing Up Māori, 268.
12 Historians Carlyon and Morrow describe the policy of ‘pepperpotting’ in the 1940s as ‘dispersing Maori families amongst Pakeha – to avoid large concentrations of Maori in one area, and to encourage them to live as Pakeha’ (36).
13 Mika, ‘Mika’, 143.
14 Mika, ‘Bunga in a Bucket’, 268.
15 Mika, ‘Discovering the “Māori Way of Life”’.
16 Ibid.
17 Much of Mika’s archive is now held in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, as well as in the Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand (Te Pūranga Takatāpui o Aotearoa), and by the New Zealand Film Academy.
18 Mika, ‘Discovering the “Māori Way of Life”’.
19 Ibid.
20 Mika, ‘The Low Down on a High Life’, excerpt from the ‘biography’ page on Mika’s official website, accessed 1 December 2010. This excerpt has since been deleted from the ‘biography’ page which has been updated with new content.
21 See Mazer, ‘Performing Māori’. For another view on Mika’s queer Māori performance history, see Mark James Hamilton’s PhD thesis, ‘Martial Dance Theatre’.
22 Thanks to Te Rita Papesch, prominent kapa haka performer, judge, commentator and scholar, for these (and so many other) insights.
23 See also Mazer, ‘Skirting Burlesque’.
24 Allen (ed.), Growing Up Gay, 145.
25 Bruce Leadley is, at the time of writing, president of the Timaru Old Boys’ Association.
Chapter Two: Spoof Dancing
1 Mika may love the music, but he condemns the singer, whose disrespect for her gay fans, he says, is legendary: ‘Homophobe!’
2 According to Mika, ‘spoof dancing’ is best defined, for the purposes of this narrative, as overt (and messy) sexual behaviour while dancing.
3 Ellis was caught in the wave of daycare sex abuse hysteria that began in the USA in the 1980s, most notably with the McMartin Preschool trials in California, and washed up in Christchurch in the early 1990s. Having been convicted, imprisoned and released, he continues to pursue justice.
4 The echo of Mary Douglas’ influential study of the concepts of pollution and taboo in Purity and Danger, first published in 1966 as a reflection, in part, of the way ideas of ‘them’ and ‘us’ are imprinted in Western societies, is intentional.
5 Quoted in Carlyon & Morrow, Changing Times, 92–93.
6 Mika took a gleeful turn when he decided to make sure I understand these terms, employing pantomime for emphasis. ‘Cottaging’ refers to having gay sex in a public toilet.
7 Brickell, Mates and Lovers, 308, quoted in Carlyon & Morrow, Changing Times, 244.
8 See Bharucha, ‘Notes on the Invention of Tradition’. Bharucha takes this phrase from Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, who in their introduction to The Invention of Tradition state: ‘“Invented tradition” is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. . . . However, insofar as there is such reference to a historic past, the peculiarity of “invented” tradition is that the continuity with it is largely facetious’ (1–2). The notion of kapa haka as an invented tradition is explored at length by Te Rita Papesch in her PhD thesis, ‘Creating a Modern Maori Identity Through Maori Cultural Performance’. See also: Mazer, ‘Performing Māori’; and Hokowhitu, ‘Haka: Colonized Physicality, Body-logic and Embodied Sovereignty’.
Chapter Three: Tēnei Tōku Ure | Manhood
1 Quoted in Switzer’s review. Mere Boynton and Riwia Brown have carried on theatre, film and television careers; notably, both appeared in Once Were Warriors (1994).
2 Butler, ‘Festival “Elitist”’.
3 Moon, New Zealand in the Twentieth Century, 535–36.
4 See Carlyon & Morrow, Changing Times, 245.
5 See Gudsell, ‘The Winston Churchill Scholarship report’.
6 See Young, Colonial Desire; Torgovnick, Gone Primitive; and Bharucha, ‘Notes on the Invention of Tradition’.
7 Paora Maxwell is currently the CEO of Māori TV.
8 Butler, Gender Trouble, 91.
9 See Butler, Undoing Gender. Garber briefly touches on the Harlem balls as presented by Jennie Livingston in her 1991 film Paris is Burning: ‘“Realness” is indeed the issue here; realness not only in the drag world, but also in the world it mirrors and critiques’ (159).
10 Mika was fortunate, later on, to meet Goldberg’s early director, Ellen Sebastian, in pursuit of an opportunity to work with her directly.
11 See Grace Jones, A One Man Show, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHClmfeoXZs&t=256s. We have MTV to thank for bringing such performances, alongside the more conventionally pop, to the surface and YouTube for holding them where we can see them.
12 Episodes from the first season of Shark in the Park can be found on NZ On Screen, www.nzonscreen.com.
Chapter Four: I Have Loved Me a Man
1 See Clipone, ‘Poi E – Patea Maori Club’, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQLUygS0IAQ.
2 Dalvanius Prime’s achievement has been memorialised in the 2016 film Poi E: The Story Of Our Song. See http://www.poiemovie.co.nz/.
3 See Pickmere, ‘Obituary: Dalvanius Prime’; and Cartwright, ‘Dalvanius Prime: Musician Who Revitalised Maori Culture’.
4 For Durbin’s performance, see NZ On Screen, https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/i-have-loved-me-a-man-1968; for Mika’s, see YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luxH9hwNDgA.
5 One of the dancers was drag icon Miss Tess Tickle, whose first performances were orchestrated by Mika for tours in New Zealand and Sydney. See Miss Tess Tickle Productions.
6 Henry, ‘Te Wairua Auaha’, 29; italics in original.
7 Ibid., 60.
8 Gudsell, ‘Uncooked’, in Ihimaera (ed.), Te Ao Marama, 225.
9 Ibid., 226.
10 ‘Safe-Sex Campaigner Criticised’, 3 September 1992.
11 See Gudsell, ‘The Winston Churchill Scholarship report’.
12 See Elizabeth Kerekere’s recent PhD thesis, ‘Part of the Whānau’. For a contemporary collation of images and first-person accounts, including by Mika, see also Harris, Takatāpui.
Chapter Five: Do U Like What U See?
1 Torgovnick grounds her discussion of the noble savage in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Bronisław Malinowski, with serious nods also to Margaret Mead and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
2 See ‘Mika’s “Lava Lover” LIVE!’ The karanga was recorded for the performance by Hinewehi Mohi, herself a prominent Māori musician and supporter of gay rights.
3 The words in te reo were composed by pre-eminent kapa haka expert Ngapo Wehi with Rangi Chadwick.
4 Unlike much of this song, there is no proximate translation provided for ‘ko tāne mate tāne ko tāne mate tāne’ within the lyrics. In its odd echo of the famous haka Ka Mate, this phrase seems to be asserting male valour in the face of the AIDS epidemic. In general, Mika’s approach to learning and using te reo Māori is self-fashioned, idiosyncratic and fluid; he’s after the feeling of the words, their sounds and the emotions they generate for him (and his listeners) rather than something more literal.
5 ‘Lava Lover’, Pearl Harbour, Tutu and Carmen’s International Coffee Lounge.
6 See LIFEbeat, http://lifebeat.org/.
7 McDonald, ‘Process . . . Procession . . . Possession’.
8 Leonard, ‘Hello Darkness: New Zealand Gothic’.
9 See the ‘Pacific Sisters’ entry in Tautai: Guiding Pacific Arts.
10 See The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey. Also Diana Taylor, ‘A Savage Perfor mance,’ with a response by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘The Ethnographic Burlesque’.
11 See Mazer, ‘Skirting Burlesque’.
12 Mark James Hamilton discusses Mika’s performance of the ‘safe savage’ in ‘Martial Dance Theatre’.
13 Young, Colonial Desire, 85.
14 My darling / I am only / asking a question / being of the tribe // My spirit is / flying away / My heart / stays close / My sacred being / like wings / is a powerful sign / of my freedom // To the whole world (I ask) / Do u like what u see? (Two versions of this song’s title exist: ‘Do U Like What U See?’ and ‘Do You Like What You See?’. Mika says ‘Do U Like What U See?’ was what he wrote at the time, inspired by Prince.)
15 With apologies to Ray Stevens.
Chapter Six: Tribal Hollywood
1 Hamilton, ‘Martial Dance Theatre’, 24–25. Mark introduced me to Mika at the Pao Pao Pao Māori Performing Arts Festival in Hamilton, November 2004.
2 Wilson, ‘Mika’.
3 Jolliff, ‘Edinburgh Festival 1997 Review Sheet’.
4 Reading an early version of this chapter, Paul Moon pointed out that the headline almost certainly can be read as a take on Jeanette Winterson’s lesbian coming-of-age novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985).
5 Levene, ‘Edinburgh Festival 97 / Maori, Queen of Scots’.
6 See Gareth Farr, http://garethfarr.com.
7 Raymond, quoted in Leonard & Vercoe, ‘Pacific Sisters’.
8 Bowron, ‘Mika Romps and Stomps for His Fans’.
9 Brennan, ‘Home on the Raunch’.
10 Mika, quoted in Brennan, ‘Home on the Raunch’.
11 ‘Stonewall Equality Show’, http://www.lifeofbryan.co.uk/page378/. Please note that at the time of writing, the link marked ‘Mika’ connects, erroneously, to images of the Lebanese-English Mika (Michael Penniman Jr).
12 See Husband, ‘Hinewehi Mohi – and that Anthem at Twickenham’. Also Tahana, ‘Te Reo Outlasts Critics’.
13 Mika – Ahi Ataahua (Beautiful Fire). See also Fala Media, http://falamedia.com/whetu-fala/.
14 Beautiful fire / Since my first breath / On the first day / I was a man who loved the people / A man with a feminine side / I am a strong man / True and strong / A strong man / A chief.
15 These movements were being developed, he says, for a Māori dance syllabus, which later was incorporated into the new NCEA curriculum.
Chapter Seven: Plastic Māori
1 See, for example, the 2005 L&P advertisement, at http://www.visit4info.com/details.cfm?adid=20954.
2 Mika Haka Kids was nominated for a Qantas NZTV and Film Best Documentary Award (2009). The opening sequence can be viewed on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-RJx18Daf4.
3 Auē ko te pō, te pō nei: this darkness, this night.
4 Patupaiarehe refers to fairy folk who live in the underworld. Mika draws on the notion of a magic sort of people emerging from the darkness into the light of the stage.
5 There are some very real resemblances to The Couple in the Cage performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco (performed around the world in the early 1990s), but these similarities probably have more to do with the zeitgeist than they are a matter of influence. Regardless, Mika’s performances are directly about pleasing rather than confronting and confounding audiences. For perspective on The Couple in the Cage, see Taylor, ‘A Savage Performance’, and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘The Ethnographic Burlesque’.
6 For a discussion of the poetics and politics of bringing native performance practices, particularly the martial arts, into the dance arena, see Hamilton, ‘Martial Dance Theatre’.
7 Jacques Lacan was a twentieth-century French psychoanalyst who, following Freud, proposed a theory of development, called the mirror stage, in which infants come to create a sense of identity by seeing themselves reflected in the people and objects around them.
8 See Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’.
9 For a sharp repudiation of both Sontag and Ross, see Meyer, An Archaeology of Posing, especially 37–52.
10 Ross, ‘Uses of Camp’, 315, italics in the original.
11 For a pre-opening puff piece, see Hewitson, ‘Steak, Chips and Maorioke with Suzanne Paul’. See also Johnson & Bieldt, ‘Suzanne Paul: Scandal, Celebrity and the Selling of an Infomercial Queen’.
12 See, for example, ‘$1.2 Million Deficit for Unsecured Creditors of Suzanne Paul’s Rawaka’. Also, ‘Suzanne Paul Creditors Still Waiting’.
13 Mika, quoted in Perrott & Kiriona, ‘Accountant Has Mail for Suzanne Paul’s Troubled Venture’.
Chapter Eight: Mika’s Magic Garden of Aroha
1 One of the more egregious incidents was the violence done by the National government to actors who protested Peter Jackson’s suppression of the unions during the making of his Hobbit movies. See Kelly, ‘How the Hobbit Dispute was Used to Justify Curbs to the Actors’ Union’.
2 Controversies have erupted periodically over Israeli spies. The first, in 2004–5, seems to have been warranted, while the second, in 2011, was most likely grounded in post-earthquake hysteria. See: ‘Israel “Admits” to NZ Spy Mission’; and Young, ‘Israeli Spy Story “Disgusting”’.
3 All have gone on to other successes, including co-star Rhys Darby with his recent internet series Short Poppies. See www.flightoftheconchords.co.nz and www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/short-poppies.
4 See Mika Live, opening credits.
5 See Matika on the Māori TV website, http://www.maoritelevision.com/tv/shows/matika.
6 See ‘Titiro Ahi Wai’.
7 In addition to performing, Pollyfilla, aka Colin McLean, designed the show’s gloriously camp costumes and props.
8 See the Matika page on the Māori TV website.
9 Matika, series 1, episode 8, Māori TV.
10 ‘Shakti in the West End Premiere of Her Acclaimed Edinburgh Festival Hit, The Pillow Book’.
11 Ibid.
12 See also ‘Erotic Shakti Debuts with Japanese Pillow Book’.
13 See Samudra: Center for Indian Contemporary Performing Arts.
14 These digital performances are available on YouTube. See ‘The Black Orchid’, ‘The Obsessive Orchid’, and ‘The Potato Orchid’. Also ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, ‘Rose Tango’, and ‘Queen of Roses’.
15 Pō / Beautiful Darkness, written by Mika, directed by Mark James Hamilton, performed 12 March 2010 at the Aotea Centre, Auckland. See the ‘Māori Boy’ video on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nwm6frRyfE.
Chapter Nine: Tohunga Matakite
1 ‘What the world is watching’ was the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) slogan in the 1980s and 1990s.
2 Mika’s Aroha Mardi Gras was sponsored by Māori Television, with two shows on 23 September 2011. Although the full video is currently unavailable for public viewing, one can see the promotional clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNUsjaFLfq0, and Mika’s performance of ‘Taniwha’ at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UFXRM7muFk. See also Jones, ‘Mardi Gras Celebrates Kiwi Love’; and Matheson, ‘Unity through Diversity’.
3 His local supermarket.
4 See ‘Kiri Nathan: The Real Story’.
5 Matheson, ‘Unity through Diversity’.
6 See the Rugby World Cup Opening Ceremony (9 September 2011) video on YouTube.
7 See Werry, The Tourist State, quoted in Gilbert, ‘Let the Games Begin’, 171. See also Mazer, ‘Performance: Ethnographer / Tourist / Cannibal’.
8 Here I am deliberately alluding to the famed British director Peter Brook, his notion of The Empty Space and the troubled interculturalism of his most well-known productions, in particular The Mahabharata.
9 See Dolan, Utopia in Performance.
10 High School Musical.
11 Matheson, ‘Occasional Stuff – with Regular Updates – about Auckland Pride Events 2014’.
12 Mika Haka Foundation, http://www.mikahakafoundation.co.nz.
13 See the Hip Hop Public Health website, hhph.org. Also Hu, ‘Using M.C.s and M.D.s to Promote Healthy Eating for Youths’.
14 See Edwards, ‘Native American Actors in Wellington Speak Out’.
15 See the invitation from Jim Donegan, US consul general, to the Ngā Aho Whakaari board and members.
16 See Allen, Trans-Indigenous.
17 Mika, quoted in Matheson, ‘Disturbing Truth in Action, with Great Production Values’.
18 Matheson bases her view of Mika on shared history that goes back to the 1970s in Christchurch, as she notes in her earlier review of Mika’s Aroha Mardi Gras: ‘I’ve had the good fortune to know Mika since we were both different people and have watched him admiringly as he’s morphed into the powerhouse he is today.’ (‘Unity through Diversity’).
19 Matheson, ‘Disturbing Truth in Action, with Great Production Values’.
20 See the Aroha Project Room 1334 page on the Mika Haka Foundation website.
21 See Joule, ‘Dan Savage to Headline University of Otago Science Festival’.
22 LaBruce, ‘Notes on Camp/Anti-Camp’. For information about Bruce LaBruce, see his eponymous website.
23 ‘Mika – Coffee – ft. Lavina Williams’. See also Mika and Robinson, ‘Coffee’, from the album Do U Like What U See, 1996.
Mika in his studio, storyboarding for his new Carmen film. New Year’s Day, 2016. Photo by Jay Tewake.