NO NO NO Te Waipounamu Tour 2025

Grammelot Productions is taking their NZ Fringe 2024 debut show 'NO NO NO' by Ella Yiannoutsos on a Te Waipounamu 2025 tour to Dunedin Fringe, Oamaru, Timaru, Christchurch, Kaikōura, and Nelson. We are crowdfunding amidst an arts funding crisis to help us with our production expenses - rehearsal venue costs, flights and tour transport, theatre venue hire, accommodation costs, marketing costs, and paying our amazing artists for their mahi!

Grammelot Productions is led by its founding members Ella Yiannoutsos (/Yiannett) and Reva Grills, two emerging theatre practitioners. Our company was nominated for the Most Promising Emerging Company category at the NZ Fringe Awards 2024.

Ella is an emerging artist, playwright, actor, director, producer, and visual artist. 

Reva is an emerging Māori artist, actor, director, producer, production manager, and musician. 

This theatre company was many years in the making, a dream held steadfast by Ella, and a long and rocky process to its inception amidst the Covid pandemic in our early careers, and resulting economic crisis that has made what was already a difficult industry that much harder to take your place in. 

Our NO NO NO Te Waipounamu Tour artists include our 2024 BATS debut season originals: Īhaka Martyn (actor), Indigo Paul (actor), Ella Yiannoutsos (actor, playwright, marketing manager), and Reva Grills (producer, productions manager). And we now welcome new additions: Gin Mabey (director), Daniel Martyn (actor), and Joseph Cooper (tech operator). 

Grammelot is a whānau made of brilliant multi-talented practitioners. Many of us have worked together in the past, Ella, Reva, and Joseph worked on various plays together in their last year of university in 2021, it was this experience that sparked the idea to start a theatre company. Ella, Indigo, and Gin, all met during their MA in Scriptwriting in 2022, it was there that a deep love of each other's work as playwrights and actors was discovered. 

On the contrary, many of us are also new to working together, and we've collaborated with many new faces over the course of our company's mahi.  

We are raising money to help pay our production costs! Specifically - 

• Rehearsal venue costs 
• Some set, props, costume costs
• Flights and tour transport 
• Theatre venue hire 
• Accommodation on tour
• Marketing costs 
• Our artists/ admins mahi

In January 2025, Ella, Indigo, Īhaka, and Dan rehearsed with Gin, our director, for a month in Te Whanganui-ā-Tara at Toi Pōneke. Our cast, director, producer/production manager (Reva), and our tech operator (Joseph) then fly to Ōtepoti, our co-founder’s hometown (and where many of our company artists graduated with their theatre degrees!) in March for Dunedin Fringe 2025 - March 20, 21, 22 7PM at the Globe Theatre. 

We then traverse to the following locations: 

Oamaru Opera House - March 25th 7PM in the Inkbox 
Timaru - March 26th 630PM at Pleasant Point Hall 
Christchurch - March 27, 28, 29th 7PM at Little Andromeda Theatre 
Kaikōura - April 4th 730PM at the Mayfair Theatre 
Nelson - April 6th 2PM & 7PM at the Red Door Theatre
 

We are doing this tour because this is what should happen with brilliant mahi always, it should be shared! The difficulty of our times is more the reason to make this happen and share our mahi. Humans need art in times of strife, it's what keeps us going! 

On a real note, as young theatre artists who've only experienced the theatre industry amidst Covid and the consequent difficult years to follow, our dreams (a tour being one of them) have been hard, hard fought. And to be perfectly frank, we are doing this tour because we needed to make this happen for ourselves. Many of us were born to do what we are doing, and it's soul crushing not being able to to do what you're meant to do. So here we are!

We are also doing this because we want to be a part of providing opportunities for other aspiring artists who are struggling to see viable pathways for their artistic careers and passions here in Aotearoa. Theatre is not an easy industry to break into, but there are other ways! Hence the creation of Grammelot. We are in our infancy as a company, but we are slowly growing, and we hope to keep working with other brilliant theatre practitioners, it's the best part of the work. Theatre needs people and community to make it happen!

Lastly, we are a company of neurodivergents (ADHD and autistic), Māori, queers, and allies. We deeply care to share stories and create mahi for those in our communities who are marginalised. Theatre is medicine. Not only for artists who need to express themselves, but for audiences looking to see themselves, and widen their humanity through the learning and discovery of other peoples and their experiences. This is a big part of why we do this mahi. Theatre is meant to be for everyone, and should be accessible to everyone. That's the vision, and that's the goal. 

Artists who are still managing to make work in this climate need support desperately! increasingly more and more of us are moving overseas, and the diversity of work that NZ audiences have access to grows smaller by the day. Aotearoa deserves a thriving arts scene, and those artists deserve to be able to make ends meet. This show is desperately relevant in the age of artificial intelligence, where our humanity is questioned and our relationships with each other, the world, and our very selves are tested. Artistic interrogation of what challenges us, is our best way of surviving - and this is a work that manages to take both the light and dark of our future, balance the fear on our palms and say yes; scary - now what?

To back this work is to support us as artists, but also to support your communities in providing them with access to high quality theatre making - NZ does not deserve to be left out!