One of my favourite things about kapa haka is that the actions in the songs are telling their own story. They mirror, match and extend the story carried by the words and the tune.

We were working on the song E Minaka Ana in class yesterday. The kids and I got talking about the different words and how they linked to the actions we had learned:

Kōrero: Our hands near our mouths.

Kai: Our hands by our bellies.

You get the idea. And its no surprise that their word/action retention went up.

But something else happened too- there was more ‘flare’ to their actions.

Suddenly because the tamariki had a deeper understanding of the meaning of each action and how they linked to the words, they leant harder into the theatricality and scale of them.

This is the same when rehearsing a play. We pore over every word of a script, touching, saying, trying, discussing each syllable many times. It means in performance, the script is lit up.

Touching each word and action with the kids does the same thing. It’s familiar ground; we’ve been here before and we know it.

And when we perform, we take great pleasure and pride in sharing this mahi with others.