My name is Talia Pua and I was born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau, and I’m still based in Tāmaki. My parents immigrated here about 39 years ago from Malaysia. My Dad’s from Klang (home of Bak Kut Teh!) and my Mum is from Muar (home of big pork buns!). Can you tell that I love food? In short, I am a story teller who works predominantly in theatre. I love to make theatre that pushes the boundaries of how we tell stories. Theatre that brings together striking imagery, clever design, and ensemble work.
When I’m not performing on-stage as an actor, you’ll find me behind the scenes hustling as a playwright, set designer, director and as the creative director of Hand Pulled Collective. I have also discovered a new found passion for puppetry. In 2020, I co-founded independent theatre company Hand Pulled Collective, with Natalya Mandich-Dohnt. Together we aim to bring stories from our communities to the stage through powerful visual theatre.
Here is my Shameless Plug:
My guilty pleasure is cheese platters! I have been (mostly) dairy free the past few years because my tummy and lactose don’t really see eye to eye. But, if I’m at an event or a get-together, and there’s a cheese board, you know your girl is gonna be digging into that camembert and blue. I just love the variety and all the little stack combos you can make on your crackers. My family never buys these sorts of cheeses at home because it’s expenny, so cheeseboards feel like a special treat. Yes, I may be a bit uncomfortable for a wee while, but hey, as my Mum always says: no pain, no gain!
The most fun I’ve ever had on a project was playing Ellen, an 8 year old girl who goes to space in a show called The Valentina by Anders Falstie-Jensen. Just everything about this project was so much fun. Playing a kid means you get to inhabit this mindset of innocence and wonder all day. I got to work with such a fun and hilarious bunch of actors: Bronwyn, Ross, Wesley and puppet master Jon Coddington! The design is phenomenal, the writing is brilliant, the adventure is literally out of this world, and the humour is very Danish (I mean, in what other kids show do you have a dog’s leg amputated by an alien butcher and then put back again with some futuristic high tech? Very Danish).
My hottest career hack is organizing your emails! Not sure if that’s very hot, but it saves you so much time! If you’re on Gmail I recommend using labels to categorise and filter your emails as soon as they come in. I colour code my labels and that brings me a lot of joy. This little bit of admin makes looking for emails so much easier because you can filter by project label! If you want to level up, I would also pair this hot hack with sorting your emails by Unread and Read. That way, all your unread emails can be found in one place at the top of your inbox (no more looking for rogue unread emails!). If I need to reply to someone but haven’t got the time straightaway, I leave it as unread and it stays at the top, creating a pseudo to-do list and reminder for myself. The only catch is, in order to do all this, you need to clear all your unread emails. Scary I know! BUT TRUST ME! The effort is worth it! For me, if I have less than 15, I feel like I’m winning.
I can’t really pinpoint a singular time that I wanted to be an artist, but I do remember when I decided to take the plunge and try this artist freelance thing ‘full time’. It was back in 2022 and I was working at a game design company designing educational games for Augmented Reality and Desktop. I’d spend all day on the computer in meetings, managing trello cards, writing game design docs and testing the games we were making. While I enjoyed the work and the people I was working with, I realised that this wasn’t what I really wanted to be doing with my time. I was the only non-gamer in the team, so it was kind of a weird fit to begin with. After two years, I decided to throw in the towel, and pursue my dreams!
The place I feel most creative is in the room devising with other actors and creatives. Devising is such a juicy process, in which anything is possible. I love brainstorming and exploring ideas with my body and as an ensemble. It’s crazy how much you can generate in a short period of time. That’s why I love learning with Massive Theatre Company. I feel like they have got such a great process for facilitating the devising process and empowering their actors to make work from scratch and tell their own stories. Also, who doesn’t love a game of four-square at the start of every session?
My favourite arts space is John Verryt’s home studio in Mt Albert! John’s been my set design mentor for the past few years and I just love visiting him at his little creek-side home studio. It’s filled from top to bottom with scale models of old and current productions. He’s got his “old school” drawing board (goals!) and boxes of miniature furniture and people at different scales (one of my favourites being a paper mache hedge in the shape of a chicken, which I believe he made for the NZ Opera). It’s just a really magical place, and whenever I go to visit him, I feel so grateful that someone with the experience like John decided to open up his home and share his practice with me. He also makes a really nice cup of tea.
My all time favourite album is Vows by Kimbra! I’ve been a huge fan of hers since I was in high school. I used to watch youtube clips of her performing live as a motivational treat for studying hard haha. I just love the way she experiments and blends together different genres, and live-mixes when she performs. When she performed at the Power Station a few years back, you know I was at the very front. Most people only know her for Gotye’s Somebody that I Used to Know and her single Settle Down, but for some lesser known tracks from her first album, I recommend Wandering Limbs and Call Me. But tbh, they’re all really good.
My favourite TV show is Aotearoa’s very own Brokenwood Mysteries! All the girls in my family are big Agatha Christie fans and so we love a good small town murder. Lowkey, it would be a dream come true to one day be in Brokenwood Mysteries! Another favourite of mine is Pushing Daisies, which also involves solving mysteries! Except this time we’re in a whimsical and stylised world á la Amelie, where a pie maker and a private investigator solve mysteries by waking the dead for one minute, and one minute only. Love watching this when I need a boost of creative inspiration!
My shameless plug is I wrote and am acting in a play called Pork and Poll Taxes! You may (or may not) remember its first outing in 2021, but she’s back baby! This time the indomitable Chye-Ling Huang is directing it and if you are familiar with her work, you’ll know that she’s gonna be taking this show to a whole another level! The show sold out a week before opening back in 2021, so if you missed it GET IN THERE. If you saw the 2021 version, GET IN THERE.
We’ve done a lot of reworking of the design and the script, so it’s not the same version as last time. The themes are theming harder than ever, the tragedy is more harrowing, the design is more epic, and the cast and crew are literal FIRE. With what’s been happening in parliament and around the world recently, Pork and Poll Taxes is urgent, it’s relevant, and it is gonna leave you reeling. So if that sounds like your cup of tea, please come along and support! It’s on at the Herald Theatre from 16–19 September!
