Event
July | Monica Brewster Evening: Leki Jackson-Bourke
July | Monica Brewster Evening: Leki Jackson-Bourke
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Tuesday 14 July | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
General: $17:50, Friends of the Gallery: $13, Students: Free
What makes Taranaki rangatahi so special?
Working alongside Pasifika Programmer Theresa Tongi, Pacific Curator-at-Large Ruha Fifita, and the brilliant young leaders of the Lalaga Youth Ambassadors, award-winning playwright and actor Leki Jackson-Bourke has helped shape a powerful new performance that asks what it means to grow up Pasifika in Regional Aotearoa. In March 2026 the Ambassadors travel to Tāmaki Makaurau to reconnect with wider Pasifika arts communities, visit museums and creative networks, and take the stage at ASB Polyfest — the largest Polynesian dance festival in the world.
Join us for an intimate kōrero with Jackson-Bourke and two Youth Ambassadors as they reflect on this milestone journey: how a dream became reality, what it meant to represent Taranaki on a world stage, and what possibilities lie ahead for both the Ambassadors and their evolving creative practice.
*Partial proceeds from the evening will directly support future Lalaga Youth Ambassador projects.
Leki Jackson-Bourke has worked with performing arts companies around the world and is a freelance artist for the newly formed theatre company Strictly Brown. The award-winning playwright and actor is of Niuean, Tongan, and Samoan descent, and the recipient of the 2024 Bruce Mason Playwriting Award at the Playmarket Accolades in Wellington. Jackson-Bourke has been coaching and working with the Lalaga Youth Ambassadors as they prepare for their appearance at Polyfest 2026.
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Welcome to the 2026 Monica Brewster Evening Speaker Series — a year shaped by visionaries who remind us that dreaming is both a personal act and a collective experience.
This year, we’re thinking about visionary dreams not as distant ideals, but as layered conversations: shaped by place, ancestry, lived experience, and the work of imagining otherwise.
Each speaker brings a distinct perspective on what emerges when communities, artists, thinkers, and leaders choose to dream with clarity, courage, and care. Maria Lind invites us to consider what it means to ‘dig where we stand’ and to understand creative practice through the ground it grows from; Tusiata Avia shows us how truth-telling, poetry, and performance can unsettle power and carve space for vulnerability; Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa opens a window onto the Moana as a site of deep history and visionary future-making; Vince Ropitini demonstrates how design guided by mātauranga Māori can carry ancestral narratives into global contexts and Leki Jackson-Bourke with the Lalaga Youth Ambassadors reveal how rangatahi dreams can reshape regional, cultural, and artistic imaginaries.
Across the series, audiences are invited to consider how dreaming can be relational, grounded, and deeply local — as well as expansive enough to hold global entanglements.
As we gather for conversations that illuminate what becomes possible when we listen to where we stand, and to one another - Join us!
