Close Up: Jennifer Ward-Lealand

You can empathise with Jennifer Ward-Lealand Te Atamira when she says it feels like we've lived an entire lifetime during the past four months. It was only a matter of weeks before the New Zealand Government escalated the COVID-19 alert system to level four that the actress, advocate and te reo Māori champion was named the 2020 New Zealander of the Year.

Unsurprisingly, given the turmoil unfolding, the usual fanfare that would normally come hand in hand with the title was short-lived. As the virus spread around the globe, the performing arts suffered immensely, with limitations on gatherings quickly put in place. "Just before we went into lockdown, those first 24 hours and then into the first days of lockdown, I lost all of my work," Ward-Lealand recalls. "I think the record was losing five jobs in one day."

Overnight, all of the talks she had planned as New Zealander of the Year were canned, and her schedule was wiped clean. "It all toppled like dominoes. The next week, I wondered what my life would be like. I've always considered myself very versatile, I have a lot of strings to my bow - whether it's acting, directing, I have my own cabarets, intimacy co-ordination, I do a lot of MCing - but they all rely on large groups of people or being close to people, neither of which could happen."

But it didn't take long for Ward-Lealand to tap into her innate actor's resilience. "For 35 of nearly 45 of my years as an actor, I have been a freelancer," she says. "It's a miracle if I know more than a year ahead of what I'm going to be doing. Mostly it's six months ahead, and in this case, it's kind of three months ahead now. I just reminded myself of that"

Not long into the Level 4 lockdown, Ward-Lealand received an email from the Auckland Theatre Company to play a role in a lockdown-friendly take on Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. "I had four weeks of being an actor on Zoom. I just loved it and it was a wholly successful and wonderful thing that the ATC did because they very much wanted to support creativity. It really lifted my spirits."

A SOURCE OF SUPPORT

Although losing work was obviously tough for Ward-Lealand, she says lockdown gave her time to refocus. "I'm usually juggling about 25 balls at any one time, so to put down 23 of them was really great." Her role as president of Equity New Zealand - the industrial and professional organisation representing performers who work in our entertainment industries - is one of the many balls she juggles, and one she refused to put down over lockdown.

Actors are four times more likely to suffer from mental health problems, which is why Ward-Lealand says it was so important to do as much outreach as possible through Equity Foundation - the professional development arm of the organisation - over lockdown. "There were a lot of things for people to do at home if they wanted to be part of it." Ward-Lealand has always been fiercely passionate about advocating for actors - her "tribe", as she calls them - and the latest string she's added to her bow is training as an intimacy coordinator to help actors feel safe in their place of work.

Ward-Lealand says when you've been in the industry for a long time, you know where the exploitation happens. Although the Me Too movement undoubtedly shone a spotlight on aspects of the industry desperately in need of reform, Ward- Lealand says New Zealand has been ahead of its time. In fact, it was following an Equity New Zealand panel event in 2015 that was dedicated to sex and nudity on stage and screen that the first iteration of the Equity Guidelines to Performing Nudity and Simulated Sex on Stage and Screen came to be. It's just recently, after two years of hard work, that new and expanded guidelines, Intimacy Guidelines for Stage and Screen, have been released.

HER LATEST ROLE

Although intimacy may be part and parcel of an actor's career, navigating these scenes is often an uncomfortable experience for the parties involved. "Let's be honest, it's where the actor is the most vulnerable and the most exposed," Ward-Lealand says. "I couldn't talk to one actor that hasn't had a weird experience and I'm not saying they're all bad experiences, but the process is always problematic."

After being contacted by Ita O'Brien, an intimacy coordinator who has worked on the likes of Normal People and Sex Education, about Equity's guidelines, Ward-Lealand began her own training under O'Brien. It's somewhat startling to believe that the role of an intimacy coordinator only became commonplace two years ago when HBO adopted a policy of using them on all productions that featured intimacy scenes. Netflix's 2019 series Sex Education was the first show in the company's history to use an intimacy coordinator. But as Ward-Lealand says: "Ka huri huri te ao, the world is changing and we need to be moving with it." Ward-Lealand draws an analogy between on-set stunts and intimacy to highlight the importance of the role. While on-set stunts are well-resourced, rehearsed, broken down by scene and put into beats by an experienced stunt team, intimate scenes have traditionally been left for actors to extemporise and muddle their way through.

An actor wouldn't just be expected to jump in a boxing ring and fight another actor on set without any training, but up until very recently, actors have been expected to perform intimate scenes without any professional guidance. "It's always just been left for the actors to work it out and just go for it." An on-set intimacy coordinator takes the murkiness and discomfort out of such scenes.

As well as ensuring the actors' right to feel safe at work, Ward- Lealand believes it brings a new profundity to intimate scenes. "It's so creative," she says. "You're putting in the physical beats, the emotional beats and suddenly the scene has become so much more without the actors bringing their own sexuality into it."

When Ward-Lealand was named as New Zealander of the Year in late February, it wasn't only her contribution to the arts that was being honoured. It was her more than decade-long commitment to and passion for te reo that was recognised, too. Anyone who has tried to learn a language as an adult will know it's no walk in the park. Asked if she ever felt discouraged, Ward-Lealand laughs and says, "Every day".

"I'm very grateful for my performance skills that mean even in a worst-case scenario I'd be able to stand up and sing and that I had some good tools for learning because I have to learn scripts all the time," she explains. She recalls 2013, the year she did a full-time immersion course at Te Wananga o Aotearoa, as particularly challenging. "I'd gird my loins and go out to Mangere and I'd try. But it was a sensational year with sensational teachers," she recalls.

"There's so much fear of getting things wrong, like with any learning journey, but I would also say that an important thing is that I have the privilege of having no intergenerational trauma. I have a lot of privilege around that choice to learn."

It's not the first time that Ward-Lealand's commitment to the language has been recognised. At a te reo conference in 2017, Sir Timoti Karetu and Professor Te Wharehuia Milroy unexpectedly beckoned her over during a morning tea break and told her that they thought it was time she had a Mãori name, Te Atamira - the stage.

"They are incredible exponents and teachers of te reo Mãori. And I'd been on this journey since 2008 and I'd been taught by both of them at various times. I think they both realised I was in it for the long run. "They knew that when I was on the stage, te atamira, that I would use that platform to champion te reo Mãori. And I have always done that since I was able to string some words together and always will. So it was an acknowledgement of who I am as an actor, where I work on the stage and what I do with my time on the stage."

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

As New Zealand finally finds itself adjusting to a new normal, Ward-Lealand is looking forward to picking up where she left off. When we speak, she's about to head down to Gisborne to resume community-based talks as New Zealander of the Year.

"My favourite thing to do has always been the community talks to people who are interested in my life as an actor, the statistics around older women working in the industry and my te reo journey," she says. "It's kind of my one-woman mission to educate people about the life of a New Zealand actor and in a way, once the talks are back up and running, I will feel like I'm back out there doing what I want with this added moniker of New Zealander of the Year.

In the past few months it's all been about the virus and I don't think anyone needed me to stick my hand up and say, 'Hey everybody listen to what I've got to say' I hope I can make good use of [the award] in the second half of 2020, until I hand over that beautiful korowai [cloak] to the next person."

This feature was the cover story for the August 2020 issue of MiNDFOOD.