Falling into the memory: Nikita 雅涵 Tu-Bryant on fear, trust and making without an outcome
Photo by Serena Stevenson
For Nikita 雅涵 Tu-Bryant, making has rarely been a tentative process. An idea arrives and she follows it intensely: writing, composing, performing and gathering collaborators until the work exists.
“I’m not a procrastinator,” she says. “When I have an idea, I’m doing it already.”
Her residency at The Hannah, however, has found her in unfamiliar territory. Nikita is developing her first film into an immersive cinema-theatre experience — bringing together live music, dance, film and installation. Yet before she can expand the work across a theatre, she must confront something more intimate: her fear of allowing people to see it at all.
“This is like facing your fears, exponential,” she says.
As one of The Hannah’s 2026 resident artists, Nikita has been given time in the building throughout the year, followed by two weeks of intensive theatre development. There is no fixed outcome attached to the residency. For an artist accustomed to moving quickly and carrying much of the creative load herself, that freedom has required a new kind of courage: the willingness to slow down.
A storyteller off the page
Born in Taiwan and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau, Nikita moved to Pōneke at 18 to study jazz — an unconventional decision within her traditional Taiwanese family.
“I was very impressionable and I’m a very impulsive person,” she says. “I went home and said, ‘Mum, Dad, I’m moving to Wellington.’ At first they told me I couldn’t, but they came around.”
The move quickly opened doors into theatre and professional touring. While jazz did not become her primary artistic home, the training still underpins her work.
“What it did give me was the ability to be off the page, improvise music, and, all in all, I’m a storyteller.”
That storytelling now moves between forms. Nikita composes for theatre and film, acts on stage and screen, and performs with her band KITA. In a stellar example, in 2024 she appeared as the Dream Maker in WOW (World of WearableArt), singing, dancing and shape-shifting through the large-scale production.
She is often described as a multidisciplinary artist, a label she initially questioned.
“I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, but isn’t everyone a multidisciplinary artist?’” she says. “I just get the blinders and do the thing that I do. I dive deep on the music, and then I dive deep on acting.”
Her Hannah residency may be the clearest expression yet of how those disciplines meet.
When a short film becomes a beast
The project began with Love Lives Here, an EP created by KITA. Each song inspired a memory within what Nikita originally imagined would be a short accompanying film.
“It was only meant to be a short film,” she says. “But then it kind of became a beast of its own.”
The resulting 57-minute film follows a woman moving through memories and experiences of love. Each section was made with a different creative collective and carries its own visual style.
As the work grew, Nikita became its writer, performer, producer, location scout, set dresser and, at times, director. She sourced materials from the tip shop, drove between Wellington and Auckland and shot one memory after another over successive weekends.
Different co-directors helped shape each section, allowing Nikita to focus more fully on performing. Looking back, she can see the value of letting go.
“The one that’s popping off is the one that I delegated the most,” she says. “So that was a really big learning experience.”
A shorter cut of that section has since won an award at a festival in Brighton and been selected for a festival in Taiwan, a particularly meaningful recognition for Nikita. The full film has received repeated festival rejections, forcing her to look closely at its imperfections.
“I’m not being humble. It’s very flawed in so many ways,” she says. “Some of it is just… janky.”
But she is also wary of a creative landscape increasingly dominated by polish.
“I also like flaws, because everything’s so AI and perfect. Hell no, it’s not perfect.”
Making the fear bigger
The Hannah residency will transform the film into a live cinema-theatre experience. KITA will perform the score live, while dancers echo the most intense emotional shifts within the story.
Nikita does not want the film to simply play at one end of the room.
“I want the film to wrap around the audience, so they feel like they’ve fallen down the rabbit hole with us into a memory,” she says. “How can they feel like they’re experiencing it, rather than being a voyeur?”
It is an ambitious evolution for a film Nikita has barely allowed anyone to watch.
After finishing it, she realised the work was more autobiographical than she had understood. Although the imagery is surreal rather than literal, recognising herself within it left her feeling exposed.
“When I finished the movie, I realised that it was autobiographical and I got very fucking whakamā,” she says. “All of a sudden I didn’t want to show anyone the movie.”
Aside from sound designers, festival programmers and a technical screening at the Roxy Cinema, almost nobody has seen the completed work. Even many of the people who appear in it have yet to watch it.
The vulnerability comes from both the subject and the form. Nikita is comfortable performing music in front of thousands of people. Film is different.
“I can get up in front of 3,000 people and I won’t be nervous,” she says. “But right now, with this, I feel so exposed and very out of my depth.”
Yet the fear is also what compels her forward.
“The fear is what’s making me go, ‘You have to do this,’” she says. “The main thing behind all of this is I want to make this piece of art.”
Learning not to crash
Nikita’s usual creative mode is total immersion.
“I’m living it, breathing it, thinking about it 24/7,” she says. “I don’t take breaks, and I just go, go, go, go until I crash.”
Making the film showed her the cost of that process. The relentless schedule and the number of roles she carried led to severe burnout and panic attacks.
“The way I made the movie was so intense that I didn’t really get a chance to enjoy it,” she says. “It was really bad for my mental health.”
This time, she is trying to work differently.
She has allowed conversations and collaborations to emerge more gradually. To her, that has sometimes felt like laziness or procrastination. She is beginning to wonder whether it is simply a healthier process.
“It’s just been way more organic,” she says. “If not in an artist residency to try out a different creative process, then when?”
The slower pace does not remove the practical pressures. Nikita has received less funding than she hoped and feels uncomfortable asking experienced collaborators to work for reduced rates.
“I just want to pay people what they’re worth,” she says. “I’ve been doing this for so long that I feel like I should be able to pay people.”
She is also wary of absorbing every role herself. During an early technical meeting at The Hannah, the same answer kept coming up.
“Who’s doing this? I am. Who’s doing this? I am. Who’s doing this? I am.”
The situation reflects a familiar contradiction for independent artists: sustaining a practice often requires not only making the work, but constantly promoting, funding and proving its value.
The Hannah offers a small but meaningful interruption to that cycle.
A place to incubate
“Aotearoa is so safe for me because I have so many friends I can call who are great collaborators and super reliable,” she says. “I can make all these things, take them overseas, then come back and incubate again.”
The Hannah becomes part of that ecology: not only a theatre in which something must eventually be shown, but a place where the work can remain unresolved.
“Often, when we are making the work, we have to think about the outcome,” Nikita says. “But the outcome of the work is compromised when we’re thinking about the outcome, because we’re living in a space of expectation.”
For her, the most meaningful part of the residency is the permission to be present before deciding what the project must become.
“The fact that The Hannah has offered me a place to incubate and sit and have silence, and not think about the outcome — I’m really excited to see what that allows me to make,” she says.
At this stage, there are no neat conclusions. Nikita is still frightened of the film. She is still working out how to share it, how to pay everyone and how much responsibility she can safely carry.
But perhaps uncertainty is exactly what the residency is intended to hold.
Nikita describes making as “the most loyal relationship” she has ever had. Like any relationship, she believes it is damaged when the first question is what it can produce or deliver.
“When I think about, ‘What can I get out of you?’, it’s pretty damaging to the relationship,” she says. “Then the thing you make is never genuine and sincere.”
For now, The Hannah is giving Nikita and the work room to be together without demanding an answer. What emerges from that space is still unknown.
That, Nikita is discovering, may be exactly the point. We can’t wait to check in again with Nikita later in the year to see how her development period has affected her process and project.
We look forward to talking to Nikita again at the end of her residency, to see how her work has progressed, and how she feels about its development.