Television documentary planned on Dame Kiri

Press, 4 August 1987, Page 11

Television documentary planned on Dame Kiri

By

TIM DONOGHUE

NZPA correspondent in Hong Kong

The opera star, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa will return to New Zealand later this month to make a television documentary film on her early life. Dame Kiri said in an interview with NZPA yesterday that the film would be produced jointly by a Canadian company, Filmtrax, and Television New Zealand. •'l’m going there to do a filming tour. The film is to be part of a 'Return Journeys’ series,” said Dame Kiri. She was in Hong Kong

for a one night City Hall recital.

Dame Kiri said the Canadian company had asked prominent people to participate in the series involving return journeys to their respective home countries.

Her New Zealand segment of the series would be filmed over five days later this month.

"I’ll be talking about my life in New Zealand when I was young. I have not lived in New Zealand for 21 years but it’s my roots,” she said. “I’ll be going to Gisborne and staying on the marae. I’ve not been there for several years.”

She expected to visit the King Country, Waikato and Auckland, as well as Gisborne, during the filming. “It’s a minute by minute schedule which I don’t really want to think about at the moment.” She and her husband, Mr Desmond Park, were scheduled to have a holiday on Australia’s Gold Coast before going on to New Zealand for two weeks.

“I’ll also be judging the Mobil Song Quest while I’m there,” she said. Dame Kiri and Mr Park will celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary when they are in Auckland,

“We were married in New Zealand 20 years ago on August 30. We’re actually going to be back in Auckland for our twentieth anniversary.

“It’s pure coincidence. Just bad planning really but Des has organised something for the occasion,” she said. Dame Kiri is booked solid with opera, recital and recording commitments until 1991. “I hate talking about my schedule because it just makes me depressed

“At the moment I don’t think I ever want to see another restaurant or a hotel room in my life again.”

Nevertheless her sense of humour came to the fore. “Half of my life is on a plane and, if I take out a score to read, people pass by and think they can sit down and talk about it. ‘“Are you famous?’ they ask me. “‘How do you pronounce your name?’ And they’ll call out ‘Oh look George, here’s that Maori girl’.” She said it was hard to keep fresh all the time. “But I don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t go to parties.

“Most of all what I don’t do — or don’t want to do — is bore my audience.”

Hong Kong music buffs seemed to think there was little prospect of that. Her recital was a postal booking sell-out in spite of the fact that many of the expatriate community were out of the colony during school holidays. The promoter, Mr John Duffus, said his company had expected to sell about 75 per cent of the 1480 City Hall tickets through postal bookings. “Not 100 per cent. Frankly we’re of course amazed and delighted ... not even Maria Callas got a full house when she performed here,” Mr Duffus said. Earlier this year, Dame Kiri took a week off to record “My Fair Lady” with Sir John Gielgud. Before that she made “West Side Story” with the composer and conductor, Leonard Bernstein. “It was a bit of a diversion,” she said. “But when I was growing up in New Zealand I started singing works like ‘West Side Story,’ so this was a big challenge.” Dame Kiri has just completed a month-long recital tour of Japan.