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Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific
Diana Looser
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Moving Islands reveals the international and intercultural connections within contemporary performance from Oceania, focusing on theater, performance art, art installations, dance, film, and activist performance in sites throughout Oceania and in Australia, Asia, North America, and Europe. Diana Looser's study moves beyond a predictable country-specific or island-specific focus to encompass an entire region defined by diversity and global exchange, showing how performance operates to frame social, artistic, and political relationships across widely dispersed locations. The study also demonstrates how Oceanian performance contributes to international debates about diaspora, indigeneity, urbanization, and environmental sustainability. The author considers the region's unique cultural and geographic dynamics as she brings forth the paradigm of transpasifika to suggest a way of understanding these intercultural exchanges and connections, with the aim to "rework the cartographic and disciplinary priorities of transpacific studies to privilege the activities of Islander peoples."
Map 1. “A heuristic world regionalization scheme.” In contrast to earlier world regions schemes, the map acknowledges the presence of the Pacific, but its orientation obscures an integrated view of the Pacific world. Note the inclusion of “Melanesia,” but also the lumping together of “Micronesia” and “Polynesia” off to the right (with Polynesia placed inaccurately). From Martin W. Lewis and Kären Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 187. Reproduced with permission of the University of California Press.
Map 2. Steve Tillis, map of “Contemporary world theatre regions.” Figure 1 in his article “Conceptualizing Space: The Geographic Dimension of World Theatre,” Theatre Survey 52, no. 2 (November 2011): 310. Reproduced courtesy of Cambridge University Press.
Figure 1. Miguel Covarrubias, “Native Means of Transportation in the Pacific Area.” Plate VI, Pageant of the Pacific, for the Golden Gate International Exposition, 1939–40. Lithograph by H. S. Crocker Company and Schwabacher-Frey Company. San Francisco: Pacific House (SF Bay Exposition Company), 1940. Image reproduced courtesy of María Elena Rico Covarrubias and David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. https://purl.stanford.edu/xh131zd2127.
Figure 2. Huku, dressed in a “canoe” costume made from plaited coconut leaves, sights the coral upgrowth of Rakahanga in the nuku performance Huku the Discoverer, Cook Islands, 1929. In Te Rangihiroa / Peter Buck, Ethnology of Manihiki and Rakahanga (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1932). Photograph by Te Rangihiroa, reproduced courtesy of Bishop Museum Archives, www.bishopmuseum.org
Figure 3. Louis John Steele and Charles F. Goldie, The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand (1898). Oil on canvas. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of the late George and Helen Boyd, 1899.
Figure 4. Greg Semu, “The Arrival Full Cast Hero,” from Raft of the Tagata Pasifika (People of the Pacific), 2016. Rarotonga, Cook Islands. Type C transparency on transparent synthetic polymer resin. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
Figure 5. Jean-Louis Théodore Géricault, Le radeau de La Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), 1818–19. Oil on Canvas. Collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Figure 7. After surviving a tropical tempest and the doldrums, the voyagers are delighted to catch a first glimpse of their destination, in Te Feti’a ’Avei’a (2014), performed by O Tahiti E and directed by Marguerite Lai. Marae ’Ārahurahu, Tahiti. Photograph by, and courtesy of, Hélène Barnaud.
Figure 8. The ensemble honors the Fijian waqa drua (voyaging canoe) in the Oceania Centre’s Vaka: The Birth of a Seer (2012), devised by Vilsoni Hereniko, Peter Espiritu, and Igelese Ete. Japan-Pacific ICT Theatre, University of the South Pacific, Suva. Photograph by, and courtesy of, Naoki Takyo.
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