Katherine McAlpine is an industrial organiser at Equity New Zealand.
Romy Hooper on tour in the Netherlands.
For 13 years, an Auckland theatre company with the motto “homelessness doesn’t mean hopelessness” has been providing opportunities for people to tell their stories. In April this year, five actors from the Hobson Street Theatre Company were privileged to perform at the International Community Arts Festival in The Netherlands. Tour manager Romy Hooper tells Katherine McAlpine what the experience meant personally and for the performers.
As an Equity NZ member, Romy Hooper wears many hats. A Toi Whakaari graduate, screen and stage actress, intimacy coordinator, voice artist and spoken word poet, she is also a community theatre practitioner.
In 2019, she started working for the Auckland Fringe Festival and, via Borni Te Rongopai Tukiwaho, became involved in volunteering at drop-in drama classes for the Flock Charitable Trust, which runs the Hobson Street Theatre Company (HSTC). Romy now takes on a variety of roles, project to project, with Flock, including as one of four facilitators on the Rotterdam trip.
HSTC has gone from strength to strength since it was started, in conjunction with Auckland City Mission, as a drama club for people with lived experience of homelessness. The five actorson the Rotterdam tour were Belinda Pollett, Kelly Tunui, Richard Turipa, Equity NZ member Joeli Thacker, who is now also Flock’s outreach and education coordinator, and Shadow, who opted to take photographs rather than perform..
In 2020, Romy directed a promenade show with HSTC called Let Me Tell You About Auckland. Based on writing exercises done in drama class, it included true and fictionalised stories, and the ‘promenade’ was designed to end up at St Matthew-in-the-City church. This format travels well to other cities and Flock Charitable Trust staff had a developing relationship with community arts practitioners in Europe, including Pauluskerk in Rotterdam (a city that incidentally has a cathedral). The idea was for HSTC to collaborate with that community, so they met with peers over there and fused what the groups had been working on.
The homeless community in Rotterdam is primarily made up of undocumented people from places like Nigeria and Iran. Some have been waiting for documentation for nine years and, without it, they can’t access such necessities as health benefits, work, accommodation or a bank account, so their struggles generally are different to those of New Zealand’s homeless population.
The theme of this year’s International Community Arts Festival (ICAF) was The Sound of Change. The groups did a bunch of writing and improvisation exercises, music improv workshops and theatre games exploring that theme. One of the local performers was an African fashion designer, so the group held a show wearing his creations. The NZ contingent taught their new colleagues how to sing some waiata and introduced them to Māori culture as part of the exchange. The collaboration resulted in a showcase that was performed once as part of the festival and had attendees from all over the world.
Romy says the key to supporting a lived-experience community in such an ambitious undertaking as a trip to an international festival is familiarity: “Trust is 90 per cent of the work done. We know them really well and they know us really well.”
There were logistical challenges: “Trying to get travel insurance for someone who has been stabbed seven times, for example, can be tricky, but that was the job of the support team to figure out, not the performers.”
It’s easy for these types of stories and life experience to be exploited but, Romy says, that is not the case with Flock, as evidenced by the work she does with them at the Ngawha prison. “We keep getting invited back there because exploitation is not our jam,” she says, “we offer something to the inmates in an artistic sense. They can play theatre games with us and we can perform something for them. We can take a workshop of a show that we are not sure is going to fly and ask their honest opinion about it. We get them to work with us, rather than taking from them. If they want to tell their story, we have the skills to support them, so it becomes an artistic and cultural exchange.”
As to what the group brought back from Rotterdam, Romy says ideas, heaps of them. The trip exposed the HSTC performers to lots of different versions of theatre making; they are now connected with an international circuit of people working in community theatre and they’re learning from each other.
When asked if being involved with this work makes the participants lives’ better, Romy responds: “Better is not the right word. This work exposes the participants to a richer version of their day. There are a different set of day-to-day challenges for people in this community, and being involved with HSTC provides a break and invites creativity. Any of their stories can be brought into the work and there is no judgement.
“There are people who come in for one class, appear to have the time of their lives and I never see them again, because that’s life within this type of community. Even in Rotterdam, there were local actors who were with us the whole week, all through rehearsals, then didn’t show up on the day of the performance. As a professional performer, I initially struggled to adjust to this, but it’s not a professional thing for them — they come to get what they need out of it.
“For some, it’s the chance to be part of a community, be busy and do something that has a sense of purpose and meaning. For a few, it’s a conduit to work. At the end of the day, it’s a universal language. Come as you are; go, hopefully, feeling a bit better about your day.”
Reflecting on her role as support person on the Rotterdam trip, Romy says: “It doesn’t take away the hardness of the work, the inherent difficulty of trying to get people from that community to commit. Yet [after the ICAF trip] there is an invigoration to continue the outreach in creative ways, tapping more deeply into what that community is post-COVID.
“For me, it’s less ‘how can we get more people involved?’ and more ‘how do we service what’s going to bring them joy in a performative sense?’. They are awesome people and their stories are incredible; they surprise and shock me all the time.”