Theia is getting ready to hit the road in a show that combines her two recording alter egos, stripping her songs back to the basics.
The artist, Em-Haley Walker (Waikato-Tainui, Ngaati Tiipa), also known as Te Kaahu, performs and records in two entirely different styles. Walker describes the club-thumping music she makes as Theia as “challenging” and “confrontational”.
It’s “political, sassy, feminist experimental” pop, while Te Kaahu’s te reo Māori tunes are 1960s influenced, exploring cultural identity, the environment and spirituality.
Both of her ventures have proven critically successful. As Te Kaahu she was recently nominated for two Rolling Stone Awards, for Best New Act and Best Album.
And as Theia, Walker was a three-time nominee at the NZ Music Awards and a finalist in the George FM Awards and the Waiata Māori Music Awards.
While the projects are sonically worlds apart, they’re about to be combined in Girl in a Savage World, a show Walker is touring around New Zealand.
Songs from both projects
The result is a “relaxing, peaceful, uplifting, quiet and emotional” performance, weaving together songs from both projects and storytelling.
Theia arrived back on our shores around four weeks ago, having played at LA Pride, at Calgary and Yellowknife Folk Festivals, and Pine Crest, a festival in a forest three hours’ drive from San Francisco.
As an independent artist, she couldn’t afford to take her band on the road with her, so sourced musicians from Instagram, indigenous people who could “convey and nuture” waiata. Meeting others on their own reclamation and re-indigening journeys was “amazing”, and crowds were receptive in a way she found heart-warming.
“It really countered that very dangerous narrative that our culture is only relevant in New Zealand ... when you go overseas, you see that in America there’s so much music that’s in Spanish that’s all over the radio. Even in New Zealand we celebrate opera, which is predominantly composed in Italian,” she said.
“So why can’t our music that’s in our native language be appreciated overseas, just the same as other non-English languages?”
Raised in a conservative Christian household, Theia now has a different world view from that of other family members, and her recent releases touch on the intersection between indigeneity and religion.
Songwriting reclaims beliefs
Colonisation and proselytism, she said, stripped back the traditional beliefs that Māori were trying so hard to reclaim. Songwriting was a way of processing all of that.
“It’s not an easy thing to do to write music that is contentious and that does get a bit of kickback from my immediate family and I don’t enjoy that in the slightest.
“But I do it because I know that it’s healing for me, and there are a lot of people around who feel the same way. That’s a big motivator, and a reason for me doing this.”
Music is in the blood for Theia, whose great-grandmother Nanny Mite penned Kiwi Weka, an “absolute anthem for our people”. Her kui (grandmother) Rangirara Kukutai was the person who supported and pushed her on the path of music, she said, more so than her immediate family.
It was Rangirara Theia went to with her demo tapes and her publicity photos.
“I always think of her,” she said.
“She’d be in the front row if she could but I know she is standing beside me in wairua (spirit).”
- Tickets for GIRL, IN A SAVAGE WORLD by Theia x Te Kaahu at the Theatre Royal on Saturday October 28 at 6.30pm can be bought at nelsonartsfestival.nz.