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Abstract
The Modern Māori Quartet (MMQ) has been a significant ambassador of Aotearoa music, theatre and indigenous culture in the contemporary global live performance marketplace. Initiated by James Tito in 2010 with founding members Maaka Pohatu, Matutaera Ngaropo, Matariki Whatarau and Francis Kora, MMQ is a musical group with a theatrical focus, bridging contemporary Aotearoa music and entertainment with the Māori showbands phenomena of the 1960s and 70s. MMQ has navigated a range of local and global live performance markets, touring extensively throughout Aotearoa and internationally across Australia, Rarotonga, UK, USA, Germany, Uzbekistan, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and China. Utilising MMQ’s archival records, press interviews, and an audience survey collected during MMQ’s performance at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, this chapter offers an account of the evolution of the Modern Māori Quartet and the importance of whakawhanaungatanga (establishing relationships and connections) in their performances.
Abstract
This essay applies theoretical concepts to do with journeys, beaches, islands and star paths to analyse two interdisciplinary, trans-cultural, group-devised theatre works created in Ōtepoti (Dunedin), Te Wai Pounamu (the South Island of New Zealand). Like star navigators, the creative ensembles who produced these pieces traversed the complex waters of creating cross-disciplinary theatre works in which mātauranga Māori and global scientific discourses co-exist on-stage. The essay analyses the creation of the devised theatre works that resulted from these collaborations, Fission/Wēhenga (2019) and Wairua (2020), in particular exploring the process of cross-disciplinary and transcultural devising, implementing both Western and kaupapa Māori methodologies. Devising privileges both Indigenous and Western discourse whilst at the same time challenging an ascribed sense of legitimacy assumed by Euro-centric ways of knowing. It allows for and encourages multiperspectivism, where more than one discourse co-exists in the time and space of the stage. Thus, these projects opened up performative conversations between Māori understandings of the cosmos and globalised scientific theories, mediated through a collaborative theatrical process.
Abstract
This essay and embedded interview explores how the work of Auckland-based Pasifika, queer, interdisciplinary art-performance collective FAFSWAG has, over the last decade, forged a new understanding of creative space making/taking that challenges many of the existing hegemonic art and theatre structures in Aotearoa. The queer spaces they birth and occupy can be understood as counterpublics, a term made popular by Nancy Fraser and later Michael Warner. Counterpublics offer a space for disruption and resistance against the cultural, societal and institutional hierarchies they inhabit. This writing, which has grown from an interview with founding member Elyssia Wilson-Heti, attempts to document their national and increasingly international importance by looking at their diverse creative practice which spans galleries, theatres, community centres, nightclubs, film and online spaces. Within all this work remains a commitment to invoke social change through creative practice by activating spaces that are cutting edge, culturally responsive and socially relevant.
Abstract
This introduction, besides outlining the map navigated by the different contributors, lays the theoretical premises and methodological foundations underlying this critical anthology. Following in the wake of Diana Looser’s Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific, the goal of this volume is to offer a vision of Oceania as a complex region in which globalisation is negotiated through a myriad of fluid pathways. A first section outlines how Oceanic is defined in this anthology, as comprising both Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands. The cultural diversity of Oceania as a whole is described with the help of theories drawn from commentators such as Hauʻofa (his notion of a “sea of islands”), Wendt, Hereniko, Allen, DeLoughrey, Glissant (his concept of creolisation), and Domínguez et al. (their vision of an “imparative” comparative poetics.) A second section of this introduction focusses on the dynamics of globalisation, studied according to the tri-partite opposition between the local, the global, and the glocal. A third section sets forth how Indigenous literary and performance material can best be approached by insiders and outsiders alike through Clery et al.’s “relational” methodologies. This corresponds to the stance of a “Multi-Perspective Culturally Sensitive Researcher (MPCR),” who can engage responsibly with different cultures. This flexible approach mirrors Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizomatic model, which privileges heterogeneity and non-hierarchical links.
Abstract
This chapter will explore the genealogical connections of Kānaka Maoli to Oceania through Kūkulu o Kahiki. As a point of ancestral origin, Kūkulu o Kahiki, the pillars of Kahiki/South Pacific/Oceania and the many islands therein, anchors the Hawaiian archipelago to Oceania. Through analysing traditional mo‘olelo (narratives) adapted for the stage in the modern era of Hana Keaka (Hawaiian-medium theatre), this contribution reveals the deep-rooted sense of Oceanic belonging and connectivity. This positionality for Kānaka Maoli instills a collective responsibility to nurture our sea of islands. Mo‘olelo serves as a highway across Oceania connecting Kānaka Maoli to Tangata Whenua (Māori), to Maohi, and to many other Oceanic genealogies. The mo‘olelo of Kamapua‘a and Lā‘ieikawai illustrate shared genealogical ties and obligations of Kānaka Maoli in Oceania, as well as frequent transpacific travel and partnerships in traditional times. Each Hana Keaka production then illuminates the relationships that exist in Oceania and the maintenance of these connections.
Abstract
This chapter concentrates on two Indigenous plays from Oceania, Tammy Hailiʻōpua Baker’s Kupua (Hawai‘i, 2001) and Albert Wendt’s The Songmaker’s Chair (Samoa/New Zealand, 2003), which it reads from a “close together” rather than “equal” viewpoint, thus echoing the “multiperspectivism” called for in Allen’s theories of Indigeneity. Allen’s vision prefigures Domínguez et al.’s reconfiguration of comparative literature according to a non-Eurocentric understanding of the world akin to Panikkar’s “imparative philosophy.” As Domínguez et al. argue, “imparative” comparative poetics facilitate the negotiation of cultural difference. This chapter therefore foregrounds the diverse local themes and aesthetic devices these artists deploy in their attempt to undo their homogenising effect of globalisation. In their subversive efforts, both playwrights forge innovative forms of magical realism rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. This chapter thus examines the magical realist aesthetic of the two plays according to the recent theoretical models provided by Jeanne Delbaere (psychic, grotesque and mythic realism) and Kim Anderson Sasser (summation modus operandi). It further shows how Hailiʻōpua Baker and Wendt revitalise the global writing mode of magical realism through local concepts: the Hawaiian “mo‘okū ‘auhau,” which links all people and living things, as well as the Samoan Vā, i.e. “the space between […] that relates, that holds, separate entities.” All in all, considered together, Baker’s and Wendt’s plays illustrate the diverse, rhyzomatic re-articulations of Indigenous knowledge in an increasingly globalised Oceania.
Abstract
This chapter draws on a three-year international comparative study (2013–2015) investigating the every-day practices of Māori, First Nations, and Aboriginal Australian contemporary theatre makers from inside the rehearsal room. The focus of that research being on the role of the Indigenous women playwrights in the rehearsal process. This contribution highlights those moments in rehearsal when Indigenous women theatre makers from across different cultural contexts, places, and times, employed similar multiple creative and cultural activities to (re)position their knowledge and identity as Indigenous women at the centre of their practice and to imbue the sense of a culturally informed theatre making process. Whilst these case studies emphasise common approaches to theatre making, I also draw attention to the individual playwright’s actions, their play narratives, and the personal accounts disclosed in rehearsal, which reveal much about their experiences as Indigenous women. The aim is also to privilege the Indigenous woman’s voice within a broader global conversation on theatre making.
Abstract
The ancestral performative storytelling practice of Zenadh Kes (Torres Strait Islands), viewed through the Western lens, is often seen as a historical-cultural practice fixed to a place and time. For Saibai Islanders from the Top Western group of islands in Zenadh Kes, the custom of girel (dance) is an evolving cultural practice embedded in Saibaian cosmology. Saibai ancestral performative storytelling acts to transmit science between the generations and as a knowledge repository. The songs, dances, costumes, and apparatus of girel constitute an embodied mode of cultural practice that records the changing times, reflecting popular culture. Contemporary girel can be seen as a decolonial practice that contests the universalising tendencies of globalisation by affirming local culture and identity.
Abstract
In this chapter, I discuss three theatre productions created by high school Aldea Educativa in Rapa Nui. These productions were performed in the Rapa Nui language and were presented at the yearly Rapa Nui language day celebration, Mahana o te Re‘o. Through the production of these plays, students have been reflecting upon and responding to different issues arising through globalisation. The production Taŋata Tere Vaikava (2016) highlights the importance of fishing for the local Rapa Nui economy that today is threatened by international factory ships fishing in the vicinity of the island. The play Vakaroa (2018) reflects upon the arrival of the ship Nancy in 1804, addressing the historical alienation from cultural traditions suffered by the Rapa Nui people. Finally, this chapter will reflect on the global Indigenous repatriation movement through the production of Hoa Haka Nana I’a (2015), which discusses the commodification of Rapa Nui material culture such as the moai (stone statue), supporting the Rapa Nui campaign for the return of the moai from the British Museum. Theatre produced for Mahana o te Re‘o has been a powerful marker in the decolonisation of education in Rapa Nui as well as showcasing and celebrating not only the use of the language, but also cultural practices, stories and the way in which theatre is produced in Rapa Nui.
Abstract
We have been welcoming strangers to our home for over 250 years. The performative dimensions of the welcoming acts of the pōwhiri are recognised as expressions of contemporary Māori connection to ancestral forms, of manaakitanga (respect, generosity, hospitality), and a ceremonial ritual in unique, authentic, tourism packages. This chapter explores performances of welcome by Hātea kapa haka roopu to celebrities in the Auckland Airport arrivals lounge. These performances exemplify the dynamic evolution of pōwhiri even within traditional forms and frames. Yet, these displays also express – through their remixing of the artists’ own work in Te Reo Māori language – something more complex about welcoming as a reciprocal experience. In this discussion, I tease out concepts of affect through a te ao Māori lens, contextualised within the fraught history of arrivals (as more-than-performance) in Aotearoa. I connect my own emotive response to these performances with a not-so-local history of traumatic betrayals to Indigenous hospitality.