You can get an idea of how Kateia Burrows makes things happen when you hear that she and her husband took just four days to find two jobs, a flat in Wimbledon and a full-time nursery for their toddler daughter when they arrived in London in 2000. They planned to “stay 12 months, make some money and go home”.

Then you might ask yourself how many people — four years later, with two more children and a mortgage — would think it was a good idea for husband Karl to give up work as a commercial lawyer.
Kateia Burrows laughs: “We decided together. Work wasn’t doing it for him, so why not put that time and energy into something we’re both passionate about? It didn’t pay us anything at the time; it wasn’t easy, but it was just something that had to be done.”

That something is the UK’s only professional Maori performing arts company, Manaia, run by the Burrows, Kylie Ngaropo and Ria Epiha Anderson. Its work includes teaching Maori culture and traditional skills in schools from Slough to Glasgow, a performance at the New Zealand embassy in Warsaw and teaching the haka to hundreds of British men in suits every week. Manaia’s rate card ranges from £250 to £2,500 (NZ$680 to NZ$6,800).

The name Manaia means ‘spiritual guardian’ and the 32-year-old Burrows feels strongly about her responsibilities as one of the com-pany’s four directors, as well as her individual work teaching Maori language.

“I’m driven to teach as many people as I can about our language, our culture and our -beautiful country. I want people to know that Maori people are not all like Once Were -Warriors, always in the pub.”

Manaia grew out of a performance in 2003 at the cafeteria of the Shell building, a massive block of concrete by Waterloo station. At the time, Kateia says she “wasn’t doing much”, having given up work as a PA when her son was born. Both she and Karl had performed at a national level in kapa haka in New Zealand, and had become involved with Ngati Ranana, the London not-for-profit Maori cultural group.

After the Shell event, “some of us met over coffee at Waterloo to hui the idea of forming a professional group. I had to go home to pick up the children, so they filled me in later.” Manaia took formal shape in late 2004.

Manaia offers three strands: education ser-vices, performances and corporate workshops. The corporate aspect is a competitive field in the UK, with everyone seeking the edge to shake up jaded office workers, but “everyone can offer chocolate eating or paintball wars; they can’t all offer the haka”. Corporate clients include the likes of IBM, BP, Gillette and Adidas.

Why does Maori culture work in this context? Alistair Will of Creative Partnerships, an outfit that helps teach creativity in UK schools, used Manaia in a project for schools in Slough (think Lower Hutt with less glamour) as part of a drive to re-enthuse a group of disaffected students. “Involvement with the Maori artists led to increased confidence, self-esteem, higher attendance at school and an improved attitude to school in general,” Will says.

He puts this down to a pedagogy based on traditional Maori educational methods — fairly strict discipline and order, combined with lots of encouragement, patience and high expectations of students. The artists saw potential where others had seen problems.”

This transformation is familiar to Burrows from her experience of being the youngest in the only Maori family growing up in Green Island, just outside Dunedin. At the age of 11, she moved to Whangarei, where the statistics were reversed and there were only a couple of Pakeha children in the class. “We had to write down what Maoritanga meant to us, and this is shameful but the only way I could do it was by copying off my mates.”

She still feels Maori culture is undervalued in New Zealand. “The funny thing is that Pakeha people outside the country appreciate Maori culture more. When they leave Aotearoa they find out that the rest of the world is really interested in our own backyard.

“I love seeing New Zealanders here portraying this image of being proud of our culture, wearing the taonga or the ‘Kia Ora’ T-shirts. I’d just like to see it more entrenched back home.”