Motuhake

A career in other people's shows, then a company

Justin Haiu had a long list of other people's credits before he had a company of his own. The Tāmaki Makaurau choreographer, director and performer was a runner-up on So You Think You Can Dance, toured in Disney's stage production of The Lion King, danced for Michael Parmenter and for Black Grace, and was a founding dancer and choreographer with the New Zealand Dance Company. He co-pioneered the clowning ensemble The White Face Crew and worked with Red Leap Theatre. In 2012 Creative New Zealand gave him its award for a Pacific emerging artist.

The following year, 2013, Haiu and his wife Renee started Jandel J & the Funky Friends, with Haiu performing under the Jandel J name and co-producing and directing. The line-up drew on a group of Pasifika artists, several of them trained through the Pacific Institute of Performing Arts and Unitec's arts programme, and the brief was narrow and practical: dance, comedy and physical theatre made for children and their families rather than for an adult subscription audience.

The company has worked from community rooms, arts centres and primary school halls rather than from a home theatre. Its venues over the past decade read as a map of south and east Auckland plus the central-city venues Auckland Live runs: Māngere Arts Centre, Te Oro in Glen Innes, schools across the region, and the Aotea Centre. Since 2019 Haiu has also taken stunt work on international film and television productions, and the company's output has stayed deliberate — four full-length works in thirteen years.

Motuhake: an attic, five marionettes and an umbrella

Motuhake was the first of those four and remains the calling card. A young boy finds a set of dusty marionettes in his grandfather's attic and they come to life. Armed with a magical umbrella and a set of dance moves, the puppets take him on a journey out of his own fear and towards the stage he has been too frightened to stand on. The through-line is that the boy cannot get there alone, and the friendship between him and the puppets does the work that dialogue would normally do.

The telling is almost entirely non-verbal: mime, dance and song carry the plot, which is why the show travels easily across an audience of mixed ages and languages and why Auckland Live lists it as a highly visual work. It runs 45 minutes and is billed for ages five and up, though it has also been presented as an all-ages show.

Auckland Live first presented it in its Pick & Mix strand in 2013 — the company's founding year — and again in 2014 and 2020. In September 2021, with Auckland's venues shut, the full production was put online through the Pick & Mix digital workshops series and streamed free for one week, closing on 18 September. Te Oro Music and Arts Centre in Glen Innes staged it twice in a day on Saturday 26 August 2023, at 1pm and 7pm, at a flat fifteen dollars a ticket.

Not a repertoire, a series

The Perfect Gift was billed as the second instalment of what the company calls the Motuhake series, and it shows how far the work sits from ordinary children's programming. Alongside the performance ran a one-hour facilitated workshop for twenty selected children, and the results of that workshop were then folded into the show itself. The company brought Pacific Island actors, facilitators and role models and a drama therapist to deliver it. The story follows two brothers hunting for a gift worthy of their mother, through war zones and invented landscapes, and lands on the idea that what carries value is the feeling behind the gift rather than the price of it. Its refrain — don't give up, don't give in, you've got to hang on until you win — was the spine of the piece. Teacher feedback recorded by the trust that supported the programme credited it with making a vulnerable pupil feel safe enough to ask an adult for help.

Baggage, the third work, is about what people carry and how. It played the Guerrilla Collection at the ASB Waterfront Theatre in Wynyard Quarter at midday on 3 November 2018, and has also been presented free at Māngere Arts Centre through Pick & Mix with the same performance-plus-workshop shape, audiences being taught some of the company's physical theatre vocabulary afterwards. Its tagline — it is not the load that breaks a person down, it is the way they carry it — is delivered through storytelling, humour and dance rather than spoken argument. A fourth title, The Gift, completes the list.

Where they stand in late 2026

On 4 August 2026, Tātaki Auckland Unlimited announced the return of We The Young, Auckland Live's festival of arts, imagination and adventures for children, running from Friday 25 September to Sunday 11 October 2026. It spreads across the Aotea Centre, Auckland Town Hall, Aotea Square, Auckland Central City Library and the New Zealand Maritime Museum, with more than 25 shows and events and over half of the programme free. Daniel Clarke, the Tātaki Auckland Unlimited director at Auckland Live, framed it as bringing artists from Aotearoa and overseas together for tamariki and their whānau to explore, create and discover.

Motuhake is named in that announcement as the festival's uplifting physical theatre adventure, and it is the local company sharing a bill with several imported and larger-scale attractions: Mario the Maker Magician, whose act combines DIY robots and cardboard machines with magic; Suzy Cato's Animal Antics in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre; the Australian interactive light-and-sound installation Wonderverse; the te reo Māori circus show Kua Rewa Te Aihikirīmi; The Imaginarium, a sensory work made by disabled and non-disabled artists; and The Kids' Election, a free voting experience. The festival's access provision covers relaxed performances, language-free works, audio description and New Zealand Sign Language interpretation.

Motuhake's own slot is the Herald Theatre at the Aotea Centre, 8 to 10 October 2026, with five performances on sale and tickets between fifteen and sixty-five dollars. That makes it the company's first ticketed run in an Auckland Live theatre since the 2020 Pick & Mix presentation and the 2021 stream, and the show's largest platform so far — a festival headline position rather than a free community slot.

A thin critical record and a long booking record

There is no published review of Motuhake or of the company's other work that can be traced through the theatre press, which is the usual fate of children's shows programmed into holiday strands and community venues rather than into main-bill seasons. Nothing in the record allows a fair account of what critics make of it.

What the record does show is repeat booking, which for a children's company is the harder currency. Auckland Live has presented Motuhake in 2013, 2014 and 2020, streamed it in 2021 and has now given it a festival run in 2026; Te Oro brought it back in 2023; Māngere Arts Centre and the Guerrilla Collection have taken Baggage. Presenters who deal in school-holiday audiences do not re-book a 45-minute wordless show three and four times unless the room works.