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Kua Rewa Te Aihikirīmi
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The profile · researched 21 October 2026
Forty-five minutes to get an ice cream home: the te reo Māori circus built on a Pick & Mix commission
Kua Rewa Te Aihikirīmi is Te Pou Theatre and The Dust Palace's te reo Māori circus show for tamariki, a reworking of The Ice Cream is Melting! that toured Auckland and Northland in August 2026 and closed its run in the Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber on 26–27 September. Nothing is currently on sale.
A commission about a melting ice cream
The Dust Palace was set up in Auckland in 2009 by the actors Eve Gordon and Mike Edward, on the back of a burlesque piece Gordon made for that year's Auckland Fringe. Gordon has been artistic director since; Geoff Gilson, who joined in 2013, is executive director and performs. The company's output is devised work that puts spoken theatre, dance and circus apparatus in the same frame: Ithaca in 2015, a cirque-musical reading of the Odyssey; The Goblin Market in 2016, after the Christina Rossetti poem, which travelled to Vancouver and Montreal; Midnight in 2017, made with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. PULP followed in 2020 and HAUS of YOLO in 2021. Most of it was made for adult audiences and sold on apparatus skill as much as on plot.
The children's work came out of a commission rather than an instinct. Auckland Live's Pick & Mix programme funded The Ice Cream is Melting!, which the company dates to 2021 and pitched at four- to eight-year-olds. The premise is kept small on purpose: two siblings, Bonnie and Nikau, lose a race against a hot day, and the melt becomes the way in to talking about environmental change at a scale a five-year-old already has words for. The apparatus is the company's standard kit — aerial silks, aerial straps, contortion, chair stacking — and the show travels with a brochure and a story booklet so the material can carry on in a classroom.
The English-language version has stayed in work. It played Ellerslie Arts in April 2026, in the venue The Dust Palace moved into in 2025 after seven years in a Penrose warehouse; the building has an aerial truss rigged for both training and performance.
The circus school that had to exist first
The te reo Māori version was not a translation job dropped on an existing cast. It rests on a piece of infrastructure the two companies built in 2023. Tainui Tukiwaho of Te Pou Theatre was developing a work that needed circus and ran into the obvious problem, which he put as a question about where the Māori performers and crew with circus training actually were. Te Pou and The Dust Palace answered it by founding Te Kura Maninirau, described as Aotearoa's first kaupapa Māori circus school, administered through The Dust Palace Charitable Trust and aimed squarely at the barriers that had kept Māori out of the form: cost, availability and teaching methods that did not include them. It teaches silks, trapeze and aerial work, and Tukiwaho's pitch to students was portability — the skills travel anywhere.
Te Pou itself is a kaupapa Māori performing arts venue at Corban Estate Arts Centre in Henderson, west Auckland, run as a registered charity, with an annual Kōanga Festival and a sector development programme, Whakapuāwai, alongside the main bill.
The school's first production was Te Tangi a te Tūī, a cirque-theatre piece about generational trauma set in a forest of native birds and mythical figures, made by Te Rēhia Theatre Company with Te Pou and The Dust Palace. It premiered in Vancouver in October 2023 and ran at Te Pou Theatre through 10 March 2024. Amber Curreen, one of its co-creators, called it an allegory about te reo Māori and the choices made by those who came before; the Dust Palace producer Rachael Dubois called it a love letter to the language. Tukiwaho was explicit that the show carried no English at all — no subtitles, no surtitles. Kua Rewa Te Aihikirīmi inherited that position.
Miro, Nikau and the store at Te Kao
The adaptation moves the story north and gives it a map. Bonnie becomes Miro; she and Nikau set out from Tāmaki Makaurau on a hot day to fetch the biggest ice creams in the country from the store at Te Kao, in Te Hiku o te Ika, for the whānau at home. The outward trip is fast and magical. The return is the show: the ice creams begin to melt, the journey turns into a survival problem, the siblings get separated, and the characters they meet on the way back are drawn from te taiao. Aerial acrobatics, contortion and ice-cream juggling carry most of the narrative weight.
Tukiwaho directs. Curreen is credited as dramaturg and with the story adaptation, Maioha Allen as te reo Māori translator, and Geoff Gilson, Eve Gordon and Theo Gordon with the original writing. Rachael Dubois produced the Auckland Live season; Marianne Infante Khee Choy and Stormy Kay are credited as co-producers on Te Pou's own listing. The cast of five is Billy McCarthy, Joe Dekkers-Reihana, Mary Piggin, Eve Gordon and Mia van Oyen — Gordon performing in the work she helped write, which is one measure of how closely the two companies are stitched together here. Creative New Zealand supported the production.
Te Pou's listing is unusually frank about what sits under the sweets: it flags references to mental health, trauma and personal hardship, and themes of grief and emotional healing, inside a show otherwise sold on comedy and environmental awareness.
August in the Far North, September in the Town Hall
The 2026 run was short and front-loaded. Te Pou's own performance on 8 August 2026 sold out, with schools performances alongside it, and the production then toured Auckland and Northland through the month before finishing with two performances at Ellerslie Arts on 15 August. Tickets were priced between $5 and $50 on a pay-what-you-can basis, with discounted tamariki tickets — the same access-first pricing Te Pou applies across its programme.
The second half of the year brought the bigger stage. Auckland Live's We The Young, a festival for children aged nought to twelve, ran from 25 September to 11 October 2026 across the Aotea Centre, the Auckland Town Hall, Aotea Square, the Central City Library and the New Zealand Maritime Museum, with more than 25 performances and events and over half the programme free. Kua Rewa Te Aihikirīmi played the Concert Chamber at the Auckland Town Hall on 26 and 27 September, billed alongside Mario the Maker Magician and Suzy Cato's Animal Antics. Festival director Daniel Clarke framed the whole event as an invitation for tamariki and whānau to explore and make things together. The 2025 first edition drew more than 10,000 people.
Those Town Hall dates are now marked past, and Auckland Live's page states that tickets are no longer available. Te Pou's advertised season from late October into November 2026 — Tāke Kurī The Dog Tax Rebellion, a Unitec dance showcase, Ā Mua, a Hawaiian hula showcase — does not include it. There is no announced next season, which fits the pattern of a show that surfaces for a tour and then goes back on the shelf.
What the room gets
Forty-five minutes, no interval, performed entirely in te reo Māori and built so that the language is not a gate. Auckland Live rated it for ages five and over, with under-fives admitted free and no ticket required; Te Pou's own copy names four- to twelve-year-olds as the target and says the rest of the whānau will manage fine. The Town Hall season was listed as wheelchair accessible, highly visual, a relaxed performance, with a sit-and-watch option — a set of provisions that matters for a show whose plot is legible from physical action alone.
Published criticism attaches to the English-language parent rather than the te reo version. Theatreview's notice of The Ice Cream is Melting!, quoted by the company, credited the aerialists and acrobats and said the show struck a balance between entertainment and education; another reviewer picked out the ecological argument about protecting the natural world and supporting regeneration. The company's own collected audience feedback runs to the practical kind — a parent reporting a child trying the aerial shapes at home afterwards.
What is verifiable about the te reo production's reception is thinner and mostly commercial: the opening performance at Te Pou sold out, the Ellerslie dates ran twice, and Auckland Live put the show into a Town Hall room during the festival's first weekend. No full-length review of Kua Rewa Te Aihikirīmi has been published that could be located.
The show, now
The show runs 45 minutes straight through, performed entirely in te reo Māori with no English, no subtitles and no surtitles, and is built so the story reads from physical action: siblings Miro and Nikau travel from Tāmaki Makaurau to the store at Te Kao in Te Hiku o te Ika for the biggest ice creams in the country, then lose the race home as the ice creams melt and they are separated, meeting characters from te taiao on the way back. A cast of five — Billy McCarthy, Joe Dekkers-Reihana, Mary Piggin, Eve Gordon and Mia van Oyen — carry it on aerial acrobatics, contortion and ice-cream juggling, the same apparatus vocabulary The Dust Palace uses in its adult work, with Tainui Tukiwaho directing. There is no support act; it plays as a single standalone piece, and in August 2026 it toured Auckland and Northland with schools performances built into the schedule. Te Pou priced it at $5–$50 pay-what-you-can with cheaper tamariki tickets; Auckland Live's September season in the Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber was listed as a relaxed performance, wheelchair accessible, highly visual, with a sit-and-watch option and under-fives admitted free. Te Pou's listing warns that the piece touches mental health, trauma, grief and emotional healing beneath the comedy. Reviews published so far are of the English-language original, where Theatreview credited the aerial and acrobatic work and the balance it struck between entertainment and an argument about protecting the natural world; for the te reo version the evidence is the 8 August opening at Te Pou selling out and Auckland Live programming it into the festival's first weekend.
Researched from tepoutheatre.nz · aucklandlive.co.nz · aucklandlive.co.nz · paypanz.com · thedustpalace.co.nz · en.wikipedia.org · 1news.co.nz · nzherald.co.nz