Ariana Tikao is Performing at London’s Café OTO This July
Ariana Tikao is Performing at London’s Café OTO This July
July 22nd, 2025
New Zealand Arts Laureate Ariana Tikao is set to play at London’s legendary Café OTO in Dalston on 27 July.
Tikao is a renowned practitioner and composer of taonga puoro, Māori traditional instruments. She is a New Zealand Arts Laureate who has gained recognition as a soloist with Aotearoa’s principal orchestras and chamber groups such as Stroma and the New Zealand String Quartet. Her arts practice is rooted in her South Island Māori identity, with a palpable connection to place, and ancestral narratives. Ariana’s live performances move between realms, beyond time, and enable audiences to feel like they are being “bundled up in a big feather cloak and transported to another world”.
Theo Seffusatti – co-director of Tikao’s publisher Heard and Seen and former Warp Publishing exec – facilitates the Café OTO gig, at the venue described by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore as “a clubhouse for people who love music from the margins”.
Tikao, who is from the Kāi Tahu tribe of the South Island of New Zealand, is one of Aotearoa’s most versatile and sought-after players of taonga puoro. These instruments almost died out as a result of colonisation, but have been revived over the last few decades. Tikao has been creating her evocative and immersive music for over thirty years and has played with the likes of Marlon Williams, Alien Weaponry, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Her most recent engagement was in one of the leading roles for the world premiere of Dame Gillian Whitehead’s opera Mate Ururoa alongside US-based Māori baritone David Tahere.
For her Café OTO performance, Tikao will collaborate with London’s Rothko Collective, whose motto is “Classical music. Unboringed”. They will perform award-winning composer Karl Sölve Steven’s newly commissioned works based on two of Tikao’s Māori chants: a lament and a freedom song. She will also accompany video works created by Dunedin-based Good Company Arts, led by fellow Arts Laureate Daniel Belton. Finally, she will perform ‘pūāwai’ (which means ‘to blossom’) with Rothko Collective’s director Dominic Stokes. This piece was written by composer Luka Venter for Tikao and violist Sophia Acheson to play at last year’s International Viola Congress in Brazil. Tikao’s set will also include improvisations and spoken word elements.
“I’m looking forward to introducing the unique sounds of our ancestral instruments to the Café OTO community, and to sharing the new pieces that have been written specifically for the occasion,” Tikao writes.
Tikao will also appear at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford on 29th July, to build on the collaboration she began there last year. As part of her performance she will read the poem she was commissioned to write as part of the museum’s Making the Museum project, which connects important taonga (treasures) with their originating communities.
Tikao has received a Creative Impact Grant from Creative New Zealand, and an Outward Sound Grant from the New Zealand Music Commission for this trip. Tikao started performing in 1993 with the folk group Pounamu; has released three solo albums, and has been involved with many collaborative projects, including art music quartet Tararua, and duo Muriwai. She also works in experimental music in gallery spaces and site specific locations, collaborating and improvising with various artists particularly in the Christchurch and Wellington music scenes. Ariana has been mentored by key members of Haumanu, a group who worked over decades to revive the voices of taonga puoro after colonisation all but rendered them mute. She was a featured singer in John Psathas’s epic international collaboration No Man’s Land in 2016. In 2021 Ariana performed taonga puoro and sang with Māori thrash metal band Alien Weaponry and the NZSO, and again with the NZSO in the Ngā Hihi o Matariki symphony that she also collaborated on with composer Gareth Farr, and singer Mere Boynton.
Buy tickets to see Ariana Tiako in London.
Listen to ‘Hinewai’ by Ariana Tikao and Karl Steven here.
Check out all things Ariana Tikao below:
Photo credit: Ebony Lamb