Gathered Islands: A Celebration of the Pacific

Bookings are essential.

Email bookings@aucklandmuseum.com or call +64 9 306 7048 to get your tickets.

Join us to celebrate the diversity and richness of living in one of the most inspiring and colourful pacific cities in the world.

We invite you to join us at a very special free performance from Va'a Hono and Ahutoru Nui. This group from Tahiti will be performing Tahitian song and dance, filling our Event Centre with sound, movement and celebration.

Over 50 performers will tell their story, A History of Tupaia the Navigator, from a uniquely Tahitian perspective.

Va'a Hono and Ahutoru Nui have been practicing for 2 years or 2000 years, depending on your perspective, and have come to Aotearoa to perform as part of the Tuia 250 commemoration.

Throughout the year we have hosted a number of Pacific island nations to celebrate their songs and customs for Pacific language weeks, we now invite these communities and the people of Tāmaki Makaurau to join us for the this very special performance.

Ahutoru Nui and Va’a Hono
The group Ahutoru Nui and Va’a Hono organised a project called “On the footsteps of Tupaia”, a historical and cultural performance on the theme of Tupaia Tuia in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Va’a Hono initiated this move to talk about the life of Tupaia and bring to fruition two years of research carried out in French Polynesia.

This October this historical and cultural performance was given in Aotearoa in the framework of the Tuia 250 for the commemoration of 250 years of first contact between Maori and Europeans.

A group of 55 people made their way to perform in Auckland, Te Kuiti, Hauiti and Gisborne and talk more precisely about “Tupaia the Mā’ohi, Tupaia the Polynesian”.

Through this performance, containing dances, songs, chants, recitations and korero, the message to send is unity between the Mā’ohi people, the Pacific people and Western people, the unity in ancestral values, the unity in western values.

Tupaia the High Priest, the architect, the High interpreter, the knowledge holder and defender of Polynesian culture, of traditional medicine, the Great navigator with ancestral knowledge, the Tahu’a (priest) left his “’Ai’a” (island) in August 1769 on board Captain Cook’s Endeavour.

He was entrusted by the Māori when he spoke to them in their mother tongue. 250 years ago, he was in Aotearoa with Cook and he was the tuia (link, unity) between Europeans and Māori, between Māori and Mā’ohi.

This collective wants to start discussions and debates in order to reach a more balanced narrative of our common history by associated oral tradition and written history through the meeting of Māori, Mā'ohi, Pacific and Europeans through the eyes of their ancestor Tupaia.

Ahutoru Nui and Va’a Hono have researched this performance with the objective of carrying out a deeper understanding of the knowledge on their country’s (French Polynesia) history, the customs and rites of Polynesian culture, culture in the Pacific and the transmission of their values.

To achieve such an objective, they have perused the information that could have been published and written about Tupaia but also, they have met his descendants who still live in Ra’iatea as to enrich their already received information.