‘My work for me is like a h¯ıkoi’
Lemi Ponifasio has never been one for pontificating on the past.
‘‘I’d rather talk about now,’’ the Sa¯moan-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 NZ Symphony Orchestra, soprano Rhonda Browne and various Pacific communities including Kiribati, Tokelau, Cook Islands and Sa¯moa.
‘‘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, 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 AustroBohemian 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 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. 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. Song of the Earth explores the climate crisis and challenges the theatre world to move beyond its Western hegemony to value non-Eurocentric performance.
Ponifasio says all communities need to be part of figuring out the answers. The work allows the orchestra to continue to reach beyond the confines of its traditional audiences and move towards more genuine dialogue with New Zealand’s Pacific communities.
‘‘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’s work can 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 non-Western communities, so 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 violent words. It’s stopping someone expressing who they are.
‘‘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.’’
And Ponifasio wants audiences to really, truly understand they are flesh of the earth – 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 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 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.’’
‘‘Our job [as artists] is not to support the culture, it’s to break it up and scandalise it.’’ Lemi Ponifasio