{"id":957,"date":"2023-12-19T07:52:26","date_gmt":"2023-12-19T07:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/?p=957"},"modified":"2024-01-27T14:10:27","modified_gmt":"2024-01-27T14:10:27","slug":"fluid-dramaturgy-moana-nui-spacing-as-relational-performative-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/fluid-dramaturgy-moana-nui-spacing-as-relational-performative-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"Fluid Dramaturgy: Moana Nui<\/em> Spacing as Relational Performative Environment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dorita Hannah<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

As a spatiotemporal method for understanding and shaping performance, dramaturgy could be considered a form of evental spacing, recognising that performance environments themselves are resonant with environmental performativity. However, our globalised worldview still tends to regard time and space as separable and absolute, generally oblivious to spatial dynamics in daily environments, including the theatre itself. Considering Polynesia\u2019s navigational approach to the Pacific Ocean as a \u201cliquid continent,\u201d this article proffers Moana Nui<\/font> spacing as an emerging dramaturgical methodology\u2014spatiotemporally focussed, ecologically calibrated and specifically oceanic\u2014applied to the conception and realisation of Performance Studies international\u2019s Fluid States<\/font> project in 2015.

Keywords<\/strong>: spacing, performance design, T\u0101-V\u0101 theory, scenography, event dramaturgy, decolonising theatre, Pacific thought<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLUID DRAMATURGY: Moana Nui <\/em>Spacing as Relational Performative Environment<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This century\u2019s innovative \u201ctheatre\u201d (as dramatic artform) has essentially embraced interdisciplinarity to explore hybrid modalities, leading to a general refusal of \u201cthe theatre\u201d (as an architectural built form), which, in turn, confronts dramaturgy\u2019s conventional role of analysing and orchestrating compositional constructions between text, bodies, space and time in live production (Turner and Behrndt 4). Such a challenge was initially enacted by the Twentieth Century\u2019s avant-garde and embraced by sociologists, particularly Erving Goffman who utilised theatre as a metaphor for explaining human behaviour: expanding the dramaturgical stage beyond the well-written play. Leaving its traditional sites of performance over the last two decades, dramaturgy is increasingly applicable to our highly mediated quotidian reality, which structures and sustains a globalised apprehension of the world that inherently serves neoliberal Western-centric capitalism as a direct legacy of European colonisation. However, by critically engaging with the spatiotemporal structures, settings, systems and sociocultural performances of everyday life, a more culturally emplaced dramaturgical approach can help us radically re-think and re-practice how the world itself is built, both actually (through physical constructions and landscapes) and virtually (by way of cultural, mythical and existential conceptions).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taking up Maaike Bleeker\u2019s claim that \u201cdramaturgy can be performed by others than dramaturgs\u201d \u2014particularly as a means of \u201cthinking through practice\u201d (4)\u2014spacing<\/em> is here introduced as a form of event dramaturgy for understanding, discussing and enabling environmental performativity within performance environments. It allows me, as a theatre architect and scenographer, to articulate my own critical spatial practice<\/em>[1]<\/sup><\/a> that appraises, challenges and reveals our prescribed conceptions of how environments perform through performance design. Such a practice has involved collaborating on a number of interdisciplinary multi-ethnic events, particularly those operating within a deliberately \u201cinternational\u201d arena where differing worldviews challenge limitations of received Western-centrism. It has led to a developing articulation of spacing<\/em>\u2014an act of both designing and experiencing performance environments\u2014as a form of event dramaturgy that recognises a diversity of cultures, continents and cosmologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article therefore focuses on Moana Nui<\/em> spacing, which underpinned Fluid States: Performances of UnKnowing,<\/em> a yearlong globally distributed festival of events that I co-curated for Performance Studies international (PSi) in 2015. Widely dispersed across fifteen locations, the overall project was influenced by what Albert Refiti calls \u201cPacific thought\u201d (267), specifically from the Polynesian triangle within the Pacific Ocean\u2014te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa<\/em> (the Great Ocean of Kiwa)\u2014a vast and generally disregarded expanse that tends to be bifurcated on the world map in order to centralise the major geopolitical regions defined through continental land masses. Informed by navigational practices that interconnect landforms, Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa\u2019s<\/em> fluid relational spacing was further applied to Sea-Change: Performing a Fluid Continent<\/em>, a three-day event on the island of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands that constituted the Oceanic region\u2019s contribution to this experimental project, which I co-directed with M\u0101ori architectural theorist, Amanda Monehu Yates, and local artist, Ani O\u2019Neill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Focusing on an Oceanic rather than continental model, Fluid States<\/em> and Sea-Change<\/em> were designed to destabilise Western-centric approaches to performance discourse in favour of re-centrings through what has long been regarded as peripheral action. While this article frames Moana Nui <\/em>spacing as an emerging oceanic spatiotemporality influenced by Pacific thought, it\u2019s necessary to first establish spacing itself as performative dramaturgy, which is rhythmic, unfolding and responsive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Towards a Practice and Theory of Spacing<\/em><\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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But one can say that there is no space, there are spaces. Space is not one, but space is plural, a plurality, a heterogeneity, a difference. That would also make us look at spacing differently. We would not be looking for one.<\/p>\nLibeskind 68<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Spacing <\/em>\u2014as a form of event dramaturgy\u2014 is an under-utilised term in the performing arts, despite the fact that \u201cspace\u201d\u2014a three-dimensional organisation best described by Paul Stock as \u201cthe emplacement, distribution and connection of entities, actions and ideas\u201d (1)\u2014 is central to how performance environments are professionally formulated, bodily experienced and temporally imagined. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Challenging any separation between space and time, spacing emphasises spatial action. Engaging with the event as a system of dynamic environmental forces and relationships, it denies any neutrality in the performance setting, which in conventional theatre is the black box stage. Yet, while this pervasive immaterial material we call \u201cspace\u201d is consistently referred to in daily life, it is often difficult to define due to the assumption we have a mutual understanding of its designation. Even in the so-called spatial arts\u2014including architectural, environmental, urban, landscape, exhibition, installation and scenographic design\u2014where it is taken as the primary element for creative engagement, any easy or uncontested definition is hard to find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, spatial geographers and cultural philosophers\u2014from Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault to Doreen Massey and Homi Bhabha\u2014have pointed to its relationship with constructions of power and temporal diversity, thereby challenging its classic perception as a static singularity. In Event-Space <\/em>I asserted that \u201cwhether a suspended pause, a blank area, an empty room, a discursive realm or a limitless cosmos\u2014space performs\u201d (xvi) and that \u201cspace precedes action\u2014as action\u201d (xxi). As much a sociocultural construction as a physical one, space is a performative<\/em> medium, and therefore an inherently active entity, which acts on, and is activated by, occupants who need not be physically present within it. Dimensional space is therefore experienced through the positional and durational action of embodied inhabitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While space has always been defined as both temporal action (verb) and physical demarcation (noun), the suffix \u2018-ing\u2019 emphasises time as its fourth-dimension, rendering environments performative through \u201cspacing\u201d, which Elin Diamond would call \u201cthat risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing… and a thing done\u201d (5). Describing both the act of designing and embodied time-based inhabitation, spacing multiplies and sets into motion that which is conventionally perceived as absolute, abiding and static, thereby challenging the continuous and uniform homogeneity of Newtonian \u201cabsolute space\u201d as being at rest \u201calways similar and immovable\u201d (77).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spacing is here posited as both speculative action and (dis)embodied practice, involving what Bhabha calls \u201crelational specificity\u201d (qtd. in Kwon 166), which considers the particularity of fluctuating relationships between objects, people and the environments they inhabit. This applies to how live performance is developed in direct relation to the locales in which they \u201ctake place\u201d. The term \u201cspacing\u201d\u2014emerging from both architectural and dance discourses \u2013 is yet to be fulsomely unpacked by either field in order to celebrate its dynamic qualities and performance potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In architecture, spacing has conventionally referred to a three-dimensional configuration of material elements, particularly the distance between construction features. Such dimensions were classically defined by the European male body\u2014from ancient Rome\u2019s Vitruvian Man to Le Corbusier\u2019s modernist Modulor\u2014as anthropometric measurement via hands, feet, reaches and strides. Land upon which architecture is sited was demarcated and claimed as property by pacing its surface, rather than understanding the indivisibility of its depths, heights and communal belonging as living ground tended for future generations. Paul Carter refers to this as colonialism\u2019s \u201ccartographic gestalt\u201d (189) in which \u201cthe ideal grid of the map is thrown over the earth with such authority\u201d (229) and, even more nonsensically, cast like a rigid net on the Pacific Ocean and divided into territories by Northern Empires. These straight lines defy the boundless sea as an ever-changing fluid medium; contiguous with air, ground and mutually dependant living organisms within, above and below its mutable atomised surface. Carter\u2019s assertion that we need \u201can alternative way of imagining the place, one not predicated on the imposition of hard-and-fast lines, but alive\u201d (189), challenges the Westernised global understanding of space, defined through instrumental charting primarily affiliated with cartography, property and possession. It reinforces the Western-centric paradigm of environments as isolatable dormant terrain to be claimed for ownership, including the unfathomable ocean that binds territories and disturbs boundaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within dance discourse, spacing engages more overtly with positionality as inseparable from movement: denoting the action of performing bodies in relation to each other and the space they perform in, towards an overall effect apprehended by distanced spectators. In \u201cSpacing Events\u201d my long-term collaborator, choreographer Carol Brown, articulates this action as \u201cmarking the pathways of a choreography, recalibrating the scale of movement to different dimensions, or marking out the boundaries of an active zone for performance in relation to stage and audience.\u201d While predicated on a sensitivity towards registering and apprehending fluctuating corelations between dancers and their environment, such spacing tends to take place in a black box stage space that either imposed scenery or denies surroundings in favour of a featureless neutrality that privileges a gravity-defying body over the material site it inhabits. However, Brown is referring to our co-created site-specific \u201cdance-architecture\u201d events, where spacing is a means of \u201ccharting choreo-spatial dramaturgies\u201d through \u201cculturally attuned kinaesthetic remapping\u201d (76). She goes on to ask, \u201cwhat happens when we perform in dialogue with non-western understandings of spatial thought?\u201d (77). This question, applicable to both environmental and embodied practices, can be tested through the more open interdisciplinary field of performance design that operates beyond performance productions to include exhibitions, installations and urban designs as well as the formulation, curation and direction of festivals, symposia and other discursive public events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a fellow citizen of Aotearoa \/ New Zealand, I am also compelled to explore those \u201ccross-mappings [that] occur through collaboration and meetings between European and Pacific ways of knowing, perceiving, and moving\u2026.[as well as] the relational dimensions of experience\u201d (Brown 77). This constitutes a necessary recognition and decolonisation of globalised Western-centric spatial thought, especially in relation to navigating space both literally and metaphorically, through Moana Nui <\/em>spacing as specific to Polynesian culture in the Pacific Ocean in which Te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa<\/em> teaches, guides, provides for and connects Polynesian people through Moana<\/em>\u2014meaning \u201cocean, sea or an expanse of water\u201d in many Polynesian languages\u2014which is also described by T\u0113vita O.Ka\u2019ili as \u201cthe space between islands\u201d (23). Moana Nui<\/em> relates specifically to the Polynesian Triangle, an area of twenty-six million square kilometres defined by the three points of Hawai\u2019i, Aotearoa and Rapanui, within which lie thousands of islands initially settled by an identifiable group of voyagers who, generally sharing languages, customs, myths and tools, were once explorers and migrants voyaging vast distances in double-hulled sailing canoes: those who, as the agent of British colonisation Captain James Cook noted, seemed to be from \u201cthe same nation\u201d having \u201cspread themselves over all the isles in the Vast Ocean\u201d (Cook qtd. in Finney 8).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Fluid States<\/em> project was influenced by this immense and generally disregarded oceanic realm that has radically transformed over the last two hundred and fifty years through colonial encounter, settler culture, militarisation, migrations, global capitalism and climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As a liquid continent, the Pacific region tends to image itself through the ocean, te Moana-<\/em>
Nui-a-Kiwa<\/em>: a connective space of currents, vortices, drifts, suspensions, sediments, tides,
foams, and flows that resists fixity, while performing in-flux with human and more-than-
human actors.<\/p>\nHannah et al. 90<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Taking the Pacific Island region as the heart of borderless Oceania, a relational dramaturgy emerges that influenced the conception of Psi\u2019s Fluid States<\/em> project; leading to the proposition of Moana Nui <\/em>spacing\u2014relating to both ocean and Oceania\u2014in which we find ourselves, productively, \u201call at sea.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Sea<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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People think that we are separated by the sea. You could say that\u2019s true, but it\u2019s also false.
People have always used the sea to communicate with each other\u2026The ocean is the link\u2026
The Pacific is our \u201cliquid continent.\u201d We are larger than all the earth\u2019s land masses put
together.<\/p>\nPihaatae qtd. in Hamlyn 9<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

While the term \u201cat sea\u201d connotes a state of disorientation through loss of bearings, Sam Trubridge points out that being \u201cwithin a fluid, unfixed, or liquid condition\u201d involves submission to the sea\u2019s unsolved mysteries, dark secrets and fluctuating possibilities (6).  As one of nature\u2019s most terrifying objects, the ocean tends to sublimity in Western thought\u2014evoking both dread and awe through its unknowability. Yet this boundless, formless entity is more knowable to those Pacific peoples for whom it is, as Margaret Werry describes, \u201ca dominant fact of life: constant threat and sustaining medium, geography, and genealogy\u201d (91). As a web of undulating pathways, the Pacific Ocean has interconnected communities through a long history of ancient migrations and more contemporary diasporas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before colonial Europe developed instrumentation to negotiate the sublime sea, Pacific navigators long steered their course via an intimate understanding of the currents, swells, stars, sun, moon, clouds, colourations, wave patterns, and movement of fishing birds. What they cannot see with their eyes they feel with their bodies; lying in the bottom of the canoe in order to sense the macro-vessel on which their micro-vessel journeys. This embodied means of \u201ctaking place\u201d\u2014as temporalized space\u2014within an oceanic sublime, relates to what Tongan theorist, \u2018Okusitina M\u0101hina, names the \u201cGeneral T\u0101-V\u0101<\/em> Theory of Reality\u201d in which t\u0101 (time) and v\u0101 (space) are inherently bound to nature for Moana cultures as a spatiotemporal convergence of reality, order and conflict. T\u0101-V\u0101<\/em>\u2014entwining time and space\u2014resonates with Jacques Derrida\u2019s notion of \u201cSpacing[\u2026] the production of a space that no speech could condense or comprehend\u201d (237)..<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aligned to what Derrida calls an \u201cevent of spacing\u201d (335)\u2014in which space becomes time and time becomes space\u2014Pacific navigation is dependent on a symbiotic correlation between non-human and human involving a perceptual re-construction of and engagement with the immediate environment as turbulent, unpredictable, and variable \u201cbio-object.\u201d This is a term coined by Tadeusz Kantor for that which produces a \u201ctissue of action of a special kind\u201d (133), imparting agency to the non-human. Navigating the biotic bio-object also recalls that choreographic notion of spacing as a means of registering and apprehending a plethora of changing relationships between bodies in motion and the places they occupy. Human body and more-than-human environment become necessarily enfolded in order for both to survive: a spatiotemporal and improvised negotiation through navigation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In relation to the previous mention of T<\/em>\u0101-V\u0101 <\/em>as a time-space construction, artists and navigators are bound through the Pan-Pacific spatial notion of v<\/em>\u0101<\/em> <\/em>(or w<\/em>\u0101<\/em>)\u2014the space between\u2014as a siteless site of mobility, moving within, across and in opposition. Far from empty and inherently temporal, its interstitiality is one of identity through connectedness. Describing v<\/em>\u0101<\/em> as a social rather than territorial concept, Samoan scholar, Sa\u2018iliemanu Lilomaiava, maintains it resists binary construction, operating \u201cbeyond the geographic boundaries of nation-states or the dichotomies of origin\/destination, rural\/urban, core\/ periphery, and local\/global\u201d (22-23).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those \u201call at sea\u201d need to acknowledge that, within the seeming endlessness of an interconnected hydrosphere\u2014what Trubridge calls \u201ca performing subject in its own right\u201d (1)\u2014lie many isles, indiscernible on the world atlas, that offer safe harbour and new encounters. This is most prevalent in Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa\u2019s<\/em> immense body of water, dotted with nations made up of islands, reefs and atolls that present relatively stationary nodes (currently threatened) within the oceanic flux and flow of our climatically endangered planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fluid States: Performances of (Un)knowing<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

You show me continents \/ I see the islands (Bjork 1:33-34).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was this liquescent, rather than continental, condition that inspired the overarching 2015 Fluid States <\/em>project;a yearlong, globally dispersed event conceived as a one-off alternative to PSi\u2019s annual conference, which is invariably hosted by large institutions in well-established global centres. Devised as an alternative to the familiar corporatized conventions that gather five hundred to seven hundred delegates, the 2015 \u201cexperiment\u201d proposed smaller gatherings in regions yet to develop or unable to host local Performance Studies communities. As one of the project\u2019s initiating co-curators, I was interested in challenging the continental model, based on the terra firma<\/em> of a centralised nation state, with a more oceanic paradigm, establishing a buoyant platform for ostensibly marginalised regions as a strategy for de-centring and re-centring on multiple peripheries. This involved rethinking the constructed world map through distributed zones of action linked via a transitional dramaturgy where each autonomous zone constituted an island<\/em> with a themed program of activities unfolding specific to its own cultural environment. This chain of regional island events was interconnected through the dock<\/em> as a moment of encounter where the preceding event exchanged experiences by way of a linking vessel<\/em>\u2014as performance, publication, video, object, installation\u2014conveyed via sea, air, radio waves or visiting bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A spatially and temporally distributed project, Fluid States<\/em> acknowledged a continuous and encircling World Ocean <\/em>over the terra firma<\/em> nature of continents upon which territorial boundary lines can be arbitrarily inscribed and contested. The vast aquatic continuity of this briny body, conversely defined via landfall, is apportioned oceanic zones identified by the Atlantic, Arctic, Indian, Pacific and Southern Oceans as well as the smaller seas: all evading clear distinctions between climatic atmospheres, shifting shorelines, wayfaring currents, and abyssal depths. Utopian in its borderless unity\u2014where, as \u201cno-place\u201d, it is everywhere and nowhere\u2014this interconnected reservoir is also dystopian in its unpredictability and ability to diminish land mass by spectacular and more subtly invasive means, particularly as climate change asserts a fateful presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ocean is also home to seafaring craft, described by Michel Foucault as \u201cthe heterotopia par excellence<\/em>\u201d (356): navigating both the real and the mythological. The canoe, in the case of Pacific space, has been voyaging long before the European ships of discovery to which the philosopher refers. As vaka\/va\u2019a\/waka\/wa\u2019a<\/em> (in Polynesian languages) the canoe is rendered that \u201cfloating part of space\u201d (Foucault 356). Yet, far from Foucault’s \u201cplaceless place\u201d (356) of plunder (epitomised by Captain Cook\u2019s barque, the Endeavour<\/em>), it is mobilised to bridge the multiple territorial nodes within the fluid continent. In many Pacific islands (such as Aotearoa), tribes and their homelands are linked to the canoes that carried them to safe harbour where they settled and in the Cook Islands, which hosted the Pacific Region\u2019s contribution to Fluid States,<\/em> vaka<\/em> connotes canoe, tribe and tribal district. The canoe\/vaka<\/em>, as an abiotic bio-object, therefore operates as island, dock, and vessel all in one fragile cultural construction, necessarily bound to the biotic bio-objects of sea and body: navigating the utopic, dystopic and heterotopic through aquatopic spacing: a fluid, yet arrhythmic, spatial negotiation that has been radically altered by climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sea-Change: Performing a Fluid Continent<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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Over three days, Rarotonga (the island and community) hosted a series of public events, in which performance acted as a lens through which to \u201csee change\u201d via a public presencing in which the ocean was explored as origin, immersive medium, life-support system and mirror. The event gathered together local and international performers, activists, academics, scientists, public servants and policy-makers, elders, community members, and experts on topics as diverse as coral farming, choreography and celestial navigation, to discuss Oceanic ecologies. An event-in-motion, participants walked, bussed, boated, danced, feasted, swam, performed, presented and talked across the three Vaka (tribal districts of Te Au OTonga, Takitumu and Puiakura) that ring the island.<\/p>\nHannah et al. 90<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Sea-Change: Performing a Fluid Continent<\/em> invited artists to consider \u201chow Pacific-oriented performance studies and practices can disturb, provoke and extend thought and action in relation to the seascape and its attendant social and biotic communities\u201d (Hannah et al. 90). A hybrid festival structured around a hui\/ta\u2019okota\u2019i\u2019anga <\/em>(ceremonial gathering\/summit\/meeting), Sea-Change<\/em> combined academic paper presentations and local panels with a string of performances: all interconnected across time and space; responding to the complexities and unpredictabilities of sites. In her observations of \u2018Conference as Confluence,\u2019[2]<\/sup><\/a> Una Chaudhuri refers to how the \u201cevent dramaturgy\u201d involved \u201csurprising\u2026displacements\u201d as the program moved participants through a range of varied spaces where the schedule was subject to fluctuations of weather, transport, mobility, and attention. The three-day journey was devised with O\u2019Neill who, playing \u201clocal event navigator,\u201d was essential to the overall dramaturgy in which spacing\u2014as a t\u0101-v\u0101<\/em> understanding of the island\u2019s time and space in relation to an inseparability between nature and culture\u2014is enacted for the delegates, local specialists, residents and tourists caught in its ambit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fluid dramaturgy of this extended narrative\u2014threading and looping performances, actions and transitions along the event trajectory\u2014was cognisant of unexpected spatiotemporal conditions and deviations rather than operating as an unobstructed flow. Its compositional frame was structured to involve processes of connectivity between material and immaterial elements of performance, the specificities of cultural expression, current socio-political issues and a continual and unpredictable permeation of random quotidian and environmental events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This involves a multi-dimensional awareness in which a sequence of (blind refereed) performances as well as the movements between them are viscerally experienced and perceptively \u201cread\u201d on manifold levels. The program for each day, spent in one of the three Vaka<\/em>, was determined by each district\u2019s physical and social characteristics as well as the specific alignment of terrain with performance: the first port of call being Te Au OTonga as a semi-urban environment of \u201clocal fluxes and flows,\u201d arrivals and departures; then on to east-facing Takitumu, popular with tourists for \u201cdreaming paradise;\u201d and finally, the grittier territory of Puiakura, where the sun sets, as a place for \u201cdivining real ground.\u201d What follows is an abridged description of Sea-Change<\/em>, which is more fulsomely presented in \u2018Fluid States Pasifika: Spacing Events through an Entangled Oceanic Dramaturgy\u2019 (Hannah 2017) and a video sent to the following event in Japan as connecting vessel<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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