Out the Gate - Art Murmurs

by Alia Marshall 16/11/2025

Brought to us by the brilliant Te Rākau Hua o Te Wao Tapu, Out the Gate is Theatre Marae that seeks to start a conversation about incarceration in Aotearoa. Legends of Aotearoa’s theatre scene Jim Moriarty (Director), Helen Pearse-Otene (Playwright), and Tānemahuta Grey (Choreographer) have come together with 16 performers and a musician (Rameka Tamaki) to create this mahi, and I find myself excited despite the show’s promised heavy subject matter.  

Cast members playing children greet us and invite us into the space as we arrive and take our seats. The performance space is lit in a hue that reminds me of sunlight after school when I would walk to the dairy to get a $1 mix and some bread. When everyone has taken their seats, the cast break into a beautifully sung and choreographed waiata, “Tākiri Mai He Haeta”, a song to the dawn. 

What follows is a mixture of devised performance, dance, waiata, haka, and kōrero about the harrowing stories from victims of incarceration. The performance is made up of a series of vignettes informed by the kaupapa māori research project TIAKI: Community wellbeing for whānau with lived experience of incarceration. Aotearoa’s prison statistics have been horrible for a long time, and this government has shown no signs of slowing down the prison industrial complex. I am a loud and proud abolitionist when it comes to prisons, so a lot of what is discussed in the show are things I am unfortunately all too aware of. 

Violence sits at the heart of many of the stories. The way this is dealt with onstage is at times difficult to watch, but at others incredibly beautiful, shown as more of a dance than a violent incident. This is supported by expert lighting design (Janice Chong, Yan Cheng) that is sometimes made up of explosive flashes, and at others soft and gentle, almost breathing with the performers. 

The cast is made up of a number of extremely dynamic performers, whose physicality and energy carries the show. You can see how passionate each member of the group feels about this kōrero, from the fire in their voices to the sweat on their brow. I will note that at times there were some issues with volume control, most of the time being too loud, but I can understand that the performers want to make sure they’re heard no matter where they are in the room. 

One of my favourite moments is towards the end, a vignette titled "Reconciliation: A dance with the inner child”, where the actors show us just that. Most people who have been through therapy will be familiar with the concept of the inner child, and it fits within the larger framework of IFS or Internal Family Systems therapy. For those unfamiliar, the concept of the inner child refers to the child within ourselves, and people who have experienced significant trauma can gain a lot from reconciling with that child and re-parenting them in order to heal. This moment where the actors dance with their inner children is so warm and full of aroha, and feels especially relevant for me since I’m doing IFS work in my own therapeutic journey. 

There are several points in the performance where the performers, as the characters they are portraying, describe in graphic detail the sexual violence they experienced at a young age. This is a clear reference to the fact that there is a lot of evidence suggesting that many people who end up falling into the prison pipeline are victims of sexual violence, particularly as children. However, the way this is portrayed in the show is, in my opinion, doing more harm than good. I have always felt that if those themes are to appear in a piece of art, especially theatre, it needs to be done with extreme care. The language you use and the images you choose to invoke can easily end up triggering and even retraumatising audience members who have experience with sexual violence, and I fear that this was the case with how it was handled in this show. I do not think it's appropriate to explain the explicit details of an assault, especially considering how many kids I saw in the audience. I think that if these scenes had been treated in the same way as the violent ones, where dance is incorporated to alleviate some of the weight, these moments could have felt more impactful, rather than just shocking. These moments did have an impact on me, but I am not sure that it was the intended one. 

While there are warnings in the online material for the production, there are less explicit content warnings in the programme, other than a list of phone numbers to various helplines. I want to acknowledge that these experiences being described onstage are likely from victims of incarceration, and their stories deserve to be shared, but I just wish there was more consideration put into how we as the audience may find it. It really makes me feel like the “friend who's too woke” when I get nitpicky about things like this, but as a survivor of a great deal of trauma myself, I don’t want to go to a show where I have to spend half of it trying not to disassociate. Even just a note in the programme stating exactly what will be discussed so people can choose whether or not they want to see it would be helpful.

All of this being said, I think this mahi has so much potential, and I want to see it developed further. The kaupapa of this show, and the message at its heart, is one of hope and perseverance and mana. It’s also important to note that I was unable to attend the kōrero following this performance as my friend and I felt that going home was the best thing for us at the time, but I know that that kōrero was an extremely important part of the show. I could not make another performance in Pōneke to attend that kōrero, so I do feel that I missed a very integral part of the show and my review is certainly impacted by that. 

Out the Gate closed on the 15th of November at Tea Gardens, Massey University. 

http://www.artmurmurs.nz/theatre/out-the-gate