Hinemoa Legend To Be Staged

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30759, 25 May 1965, Page 18

Hinemoa Legend To Be Staged

(New Zealand Press Association)

NEW PLYMOUTH, May 24. A Maori production, featuring the legend of Hinemoa and Tutanekai, is being planned for next year’s Festival of the Pines at the Bowl of Brooklands, New Plymouth.

The production, which is being organised by the Puke Ariki Maori Cultural Club, will be based on a play written in Maori. It will be produced by Mrs Nancy Leathern, of Hawera. Mr John Ford, a member of the committee, outlined the proposal to members at the club’s weekly meeting in New Plymouth yesterday. He said a cast of at least 200 would be needed and it was hoped other groups in Taranaki would take part. The Putiki Maori Club, of Wanganui, had also been invited to take part. Traditional Setting Mr Ford said the Bowl’s soundshell would be decorated as a meeting house and the rest of the stage area, including the woodland stage, would form the marae. The dramatisation of the legendary Maori love story would be set in pa life and would include traditional Maori art forms, such as weaving, stick games, action songs, carving and hakas. "It is an ambitious undertaking and is admirably suited to the Bowl,” the Bowl iof Brooklands Trust chair-

man (Mr D. V. Sutherland) said today. The proposal had yet to be discussed by the trust’s programme committee.