Samoan artist opens up on art, anxiety and existence
Lemi Ponifasio tells Andre´ Chumko how he wants his work to prompt conversation and break down barriers to art, particularly for Pacific audiences.
Lemi Ponifasio has never been one for pontificating on the past. ‘‘I’d rather talk about now,’’ the Samoan-born artist says when asked about his childhood.
Ponifasio is back in Aotearoa speaking from a hotel ahead of a one-night-only show he directed at Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre, and which was performed last night with the help of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, soprano Rhonda Browne and various Pacific communities including Kiribati, Tokelau, Cook Islands and Samoa.
‘‘I’m very grateful [the orchestra] ... allowed themselves to be hired as the band for the evening,’’ Ponifasio says with a chuckle.
The work, Wellington Song of the Earth, is the second of four parts being performed across
Aotearoa and Europe, with the other iterations showing in Austria, Luxembourg and Italy.
Ponifasio describes Song of the Earth as neither a concert, play nor dance but a meeting between world views. It’s built around Austro-Bohemian composer Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) and traditional songs from Pacific cultures.
‘‘My work for me is like a hı¯koi ... you don’t go overseas to tour. You must have an important reason. I’m continuing this series of thoughts and meditations around the world. It’s just the way I work. I don’t make work to tour – you make a show and perform it in a city in conversation.’’
For Ponifasio, breaking down barriers to art, particularly for Pacific audiences, is front of mind. As are his work’s themes.
Song of the Earth explores how the planet is being affected by the climate crisis. It also seeks to challenge the theatre world to seek a bigger goal, and to move beyond its Western hegemony to value non-Eurocentric performance.
Ponifasio says all communities need to be part of figuring out the answers.
He hopes in showing the work, that the orchestra can continue to reach beyond the confines of its traditional audiences and move towards more genuine dialogue with New Zealand’s Pacific communities.
But no-one performance can make anything happen, he says. ‘‘You can’t change the world tomorrow. I’m part of the process of society, part of the process of Earth. I am contributing to collective consciousness.’’
Ponifasio tries to create an opening with his work, to help ‘‘peel back some of the layers we build up as civilisation that are stopping us from seeing what’s [really] there’’.
Performance art has historically excluded nonWestern communities, and therefore removed their access to the thoughts and creations of artists. One of Ponifasio’s aims is to subvert those systems, and encourage the search for new directions, forms, knowledge and feelings.
‘‘When people talk about theatre . . . they’re immediately talking about the European form. This is the problem. . . The rest of the world is locked out when you use words like symphony orchestra, dance or theatre. They can be quite
‘My work for me is like a h¯ıkoi ... you don’t go overseas to tour. You must have an important reason. I’m continuing this series of thoughts and meditations around the world. It’s just the way I work.’ LEMI PONIFASIO
violent words. It’s stopping someone expressing who they are,’’ he says.
‘‘Our job [as artists] is not to support the culture, it’s to break it up and scandalise it.
‘‘I want the community to be curious and think that their way to think can make a difference. That usually means to be at the table where things are discussed and decisions are made. The Michael Fowler Centre is that round table where you’re present, and you show your face.’’
And Ponifasio wants audiences to really, truly understand they are flesh of the earth – only players, only parts of the process.
‘‘How can we see the world not for something that’s there for human use or to manage?
‘‘How can we begin to find a living conscious relationship with everything in existence?’’
An avid traveller, the director is used to being around different cultures and conversations, and acknowledges his hopping around has likely contributed to his views about life being in a constant state of change.
Moving to Aotearoa aged 15, Ponifasio noticed the sexualisation of Pacific cultures with fantastical, ‘‘fake’’ paradisical images and idyllic dancers.
‘‘I always feel like society is trying to dismantle who you are.’’
But there was no road to Damascus moment with his becoming an artist. He was not interested in art in the beginning – Ponifasio was more concerned with making something real.
He refers to his creativity as a spirit.
‘‘I always want to ask if you’re sure of what you’re thinking – challenge certainty about things . . . . I’m making art, but I’m trying to rewrite culture and history.
‘‘Those kinds of questions [I explore] can appear too big and too deep, but to ask the question gives you pause for a moment.
. . . We are creating this anxiety world. It’s the disease of contemporary life – we don’t have a pause and think, what does it mean to exist?
‘‘That’s what I’m trying to do: create a poetic dimension to contemplate something higher than the everyday struggle of life.’’