ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the Aotearoa/New Zealand-based theatre company The Conch as a case study to explore definitions of theatrical modernism in the Pacific region. The Conch’s artistic director, Nina Nawalowalo, has developed a distinctively ‘Oceanian’ performance style, merging influences from her Fijian and English heritage. In the 1980s, Nawalowalo travelled to London for training in devised theatre, mime, and magic, working in a context whereby the aesthetic influences of European theatrical modernists such as Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and Jacques Lecoq were becoming mainstream through the work of high-profile physical theatre companies like Théâtre de Complicité, DV8, and Kneehigh.
The Conch has worked with Indigenous communities throughout the Pacific, teaching contemporary theatre techniques and staging productions that foreground the performing body in concert with striking scenographic imagery. The playful aestheticisation of Pacific women’s daily work rituals in Vula (2002) recalls Albert Wendt’s vision of the ‘Post-Colonial body’ as ‘a Body “becoming,” defining itself, clearing a space for itself among and alongside other bodies’. Vula has no conventional characters or narrative, and little spoken language, with meaning conveyed symbolically through stylised movement, lighting, and magical illusion. The production was critically acclaimed for its original form, fusing avant-garde theatre techniques with Oceanian cultural practices and imagery. Stages of Change (2013–2014) focusses on gender and family violence in the Pacific, featuring non-professional performers from the Solomon Islands enacting their own stories. Stages of Change features traditional cultural performance alongside key concepts of theatrical modernism, combining realist storytelling with avant-garde techniques such as fragmentation, irony, non-linearity, and symbolism. This chapter argues that as an innovative blend of Indigenous Oceanian arts with international modernism, The Conch’s work exemplifies and extends what Susan Stanford Friedman calls the ‘emergent modernities’ of the postcolonial world.
