By Jennifer Little

Reading time: 12 minutes 

The poetry and rhythms of American rap and hip-hop were Samoan actor Shadon Meredith’s intro to the power and magic of language. He loved English as a subject at St Patrick’s College in Wellington, but it was the sound reverberating in cars where he’d hang out with schoolmates that led him to a discovery of how he might express his own experiences and cultural identity as a Samoan male.

Sharing amped beats through powerful audio systems, he and his friends rapped together, playing with words. Rap battles. Shadon started linking words, sounds, rhymes, and ideas in clever and funny ways for telling stories. “I remember thinking: ‘I’m really good at this’ but then keeping it private.”

Fast forward nearly a couple of decades and Shadon is now an award-winning theatre, television and film actor and writer with an impressive CV (including roles on Kiwi soap Shortland Street, American series Spartacus, comedy series Find Me a Maori Bride and Power Rangers), and his own theatre business. His latest production, Waiting, is set to tour arts festivals around Aotearoa, pandemic restrictions allowing. It has already won awards at three fringe festivals – in Nelson in 2017, Whangarei in 2020, and Auckland this year.

The solo piece, described as “an evocative coming of age story that celebrates beat poetry delivered through physical grace” is also a love letter of sorts to his son, Arlo, now aged six.

“It’s basically a story about my life right up to this moment now. I just kind of give him life advice, like where I’ve made mistakes, how I feel about life or showing my vulnerability or where my mental health is at – and that these are OK.”

He feels strongly that male vulnerability and mental health are important topics we need to talk about. Based on what he modestly calls his “musings”, the show came together four years ago when he and his actor/director wife, Amelia Reid-Meredith, were caring for Amelia’s dying mother, Robyn Reid, in Nelson. Robyn encouraged Shadon to turn his personal jottings into a theatrical form and helped the pair get the production launched. He and Amelia developed the script and came up with the idea of a love letter to their son, aged two at the time. Amelia asked Shadon who he wanted to connect to through the piece. He says it revolves around the specifics of his own life experiences and observations but has universal themes. The script has necessarily evolved – he has woven the life-changing experience of grief into the play following the deaths of his grandmother and Amelia’s mother since the original version was staged in 2017.

Polynesian essence

Contemporary American music genres may have been the initial inspiration, but Shadon’s artistic purpose was shaped by his Samoan upbringing and identity – although pursuing a career as an actor was not on the cards for a young Samoan boy.

“Coming from a Pacific Island family – a Samoan family – you are automatically in line to be a lawyer or a doctor, especially from immigrant families,” he says. “There’s the whole notion of you succeeding academically, so acting was out of the question.”

As a youngster, Shadon envisaged being a vet or police officer. Otherwise focussed on study, being a prefect and in school leadership roles, he did, however, audition and get the lead role in a five-minute drama, performed for the prestigious Catholic schools’ speech and drama O’Shea Shield award.

Friends heading for drama school encouraged him to join them – he did so after a year as an apprentice electrician. He completed a two-year drama diploma at Whitireia Community Polytechnic before successfully auditioning for Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School in Wellington in 2007.

Though in his element by that time, theatre had not been part of his life growing up. “We were always going to Polyfest or stuff like that, but I don’t remember being taken to the theatre.”

His most defining experience in 2008 was mind-blowing. It was Where We Once Belonged, adapted from Samoan writer Sia Figiel’s novel for the stage of the Auckland Theatre Company by Dave Armstrong. Shadon recalls the impact of seeing Polynesian actors telling a story of their own, especially with the likes of Robbie Magasiva and the late Pua Magasiva – Polynesian superstars in his mind.

“I realise now what a big moment that was for me – especially a play like that and seeing yourself and your culture reflected back.”

Shadon says that particular cohort of Polynesian actors is just starting to realise how much impact they’ve had in paving the way for future generations. “Now we have shows like The Panthers on TVNZ. It’s great to see a new wave of Polynesian actors coming through,” he says.

The Panthers, a six-part series that screened this year and is available on demand, is set in 1974 during a dark period in New Zealand’s history when Pacific Islanders were racially targeted in the infamous Dawn Raids, resulting in mass arrests and deportations. The series is told from the perspective of the Polynesian Panthers, a group of young Pacific Islanders based in Ponsonby and working together to protest the unjust treatment of their people.

Being a Sāmoan actor is no longer the isolated place it once was, but his teen years were difficult in sorting his identity, Shadon says. “Are you Sāmoan enough? Are you palagi enough? Are you New Zealander enough? – these were my thoughts.”

He started to learn the Sāmoan language from his great grandmother and nana as a pre-schooler and was formally taught at school but vividly remembers starting to feel ashamed of going to Sāmoan classes when he was aged five and six. His nana held forth in Sāmoan at family gatherings, but many of that generation had succumbed to pressures to assimilate in the ‘70s and ‘80s due to active language suppression. “They [his grandparents] had come over from Sāmoa in the 1950s and they were really trying to make it work for their family. It was that real Sāmoan way of ‘be humble, work hard, keep your head down’,” he says.

As a parent now, he encourages his son to embrace his Sāmoan heritage and language and to be proud. Enrolling him in a Sāmoan language immersion pre-school, Aoga Amata PIC (Pacific Island Church) in Avondale, has allowed Shadon to reconnect with the language as well – even if it means being corrected on grammar and pronunciation by his son!

He has been encouraging the next generation of Polynesian artists and actors, too. He helped set up the theatre collective Polynesian Laboratory in 2011, co-directing their maiden production LeTonu: The Decision, about the dilemma facing a Pacific Island family about putting a relative with dementia in a rest home. Designed as a space for Pacific Island artists to connect and create, he said at the time, the lab provided another platform for the surge of new talent.

Shadon has traversed the range of European theatre legends, from Shakespeare to Pinter and Brecht, but a career highlight was being part of Upu Collective’s UPU – a theatrical presentation of Oceania’s most illuminating poetic voices. Curated by award-winning poet Grace Iwashita-Taylor and led by powerhouse director Fasitua Amosa, UPU includes poems by Ben Brown, Karlo Mila, Albert Wendt, John Pule, Hone Tuwhare and more.

“That was a nice feeling having your brown brothers and sisters from around Oceania, who you also look up to, and then the younger generation, and being able to flex with them on stage and do these amazing poems.”

The aim was to take poems and poets off the academic shelf and into the theatre, bringing them to life and making them accessible. “The emphasis was the idea of Te Moana Nui a Kiwa [the Pacific Ocean] not being disconnected islands but [seeing it from the perspective that] we are one big ocean. That’s what the play hangs off. It talks about colonisation, rising sea levels, language barriers, sexuality. It’s a lovely show, I loved being part of it.”

Shadon hopes to see more Polynesian stories and faces in mainstream media. Watching Disney’s computer-animated musical Moana filled him with so much joy. “Seeing your people being reflected on a Disney screen was phenomenal.

“It’s a great time for Oceania and for Polynesia. We’re just at the beginning of it and there’s more to explore. We’ve got our foot in the door, I can feel the Brown Wave coming.”

Still in ‘Waiting’

While the November show scheduled in New Plymouth at TAFT’S (Taranaki Arts Festival Trust) Reset festival has been postponed due to pandemic restrictions, Shadon hopes the tour to Taranaki and other centres, including Wellington, will resume next year.

Meanwhile, he and Amelia, currently based on Waiheke Island, are busy with their new theatre company, SOS & SHA Creative. You could say they have their heads in the clouds. Currently in the incubation phase, their next project, Clouds, is inspired by one of Shadon’s favourite authors, Sally Rooney, who wrote the bestseller, Normal People.

Buoyed by the awards for Waiting, their mission is: “To make intimate and meaningful stories that are universal.”

Photos: Sarah Marshall

Feature photo: Shadon Meredith, co-founder of theatre company Sos & Sha Creative, wants to create stories that are intimate and universal. Photo: Melissa Cowan

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