From 2019 to 2022, Rob Kipa-Williams portrayed Ari Parata on Home and Away.
Rob Kipa-Williams is best known for playing the patriarch of the Parata family in the television series Home and Away. Fans were devastated when the actor who had played Ari Parata for two and a half years left the show in March 2022.
His on-screen family was destroyed when his character died in a heartbreaking scene from a rare form of cancer. The actor decided to return to Aotearoa and has kept a quiet presence on social media since his departure (New Zealand).
On one of his most significant initiatives to date, he has been working covertly, though. Rob says he left the soap because he felt a “calling” and tug to his Mori culture in a conversation with Yahoo Lifestyle.
The Kiwi actor is currently immersing himself in te reo Mori to become fluent in the language. He recently bought a 220-acre property in the Kaipara with three of his buddies.
There was undoubtedly a part of me that yearned to return to Aotearoa. Learning te reo has always felt like a calling to him, and in the last two years, he says, “it just bubbled up extremely forcefully, and then [I] really made the move to do it.
In spite of the fact that Mori were formerly punished for speaking their original tongue and that it wasn’t recognised as an official language of New Zealand until 1987, te reo Mori has recently experienced a revival. Rob admits this and gives an explanation of his motivation for reclaiming Te Reo.
A language is lost after one generation and is recovered after three generations, he says. “My grandfather… and grandmother were in that time period when they were physically punished for speaking Mori in class. And [Mori] was the only language he knew when he was younger, according to my grandfather’s older brother.
He continues by saying that as his grandfather aged, he lost the ability to speak Mori, which was passed on to his father and then to him. To be able to represent his family and culture “without having to prepare things,” Rob finds it essential to be proficient at te reo Mori.
He summarises, “It’s a tremendously significant component of the next phase of my life.
Rob’s large-scale new endeavour
The celebrity also discusses the HAAAA app he has been working on. He started capturing authentic Polynesian meditation sounds and fusing them with dramatic music. The app’s name, H, is a play on the term “breath” in the Mori language.
No matter what language we speak, we all create the sound “HAAAA” as we exhale. Moreover, each “A” stands for “atua,” which means “god,” and represents the gods of the elements of earth, air, fire, and water.
He tells us, “If I were to do nothing else in my life other than this, I would die a very happy person creating meditation music. “I wanted to make a kind of Polynesian meditation music that maybe wasn’t heard before,” the author said.
In six different languages, the app offers meditation tracks that are specific to the Cook Islands, Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga, Hawaii, and Aotearoa.
The actor’s enthusiasm for the proposal is evident, and Opetaia Foa’i, one of the major Moana music composers, leaped at the chance to write the score. When his Moana soundtrack was published, it spent 23 weeks inside the Top 10 on the Billboard Top 200 Chart and received a Grammy Award nomination.
The most intriguing aspect, according to Opetaia Foa’i, is that he wants to specialise in or work towards assisting Mori and Polynesian children with their mental health.
Then I returned to New Zealand and began recording sounds…
Putting these tunes together was a really interesting, creative process.
Rob wants to be allowed to converse freely and has plans to visit several Polynesian islands in the future, something that Covid-19 previously put a stop to.
I want to visit the islands so I can meet the individuals I’ve been wanting to meet in person and be able to speak my own language, he says.
When I interact with musicians and artists, “there’s a part of me that wants to thoroughly understand my own language so that I can do it credit.”
