Pacific Performances

Pacific Performances

Studies in International Performance Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research General Editors: Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that define nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between and among nations and cultures as well as genres, identities and imaginations. Inter-national in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to the panoply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces Culture which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternate, and treats Performance as either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural within nations. Titles include: Christopher B. Balme PACIFIC PERFORMANCES Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas Judith Hamera DANCING COMMUNITIES Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City Joanne Tompkins UNSETTLING SPACE Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre Forthcoming titles: Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case (editors) PERFORMING GLOBAL FEMINISMS Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo PERFORMANCE AND COSMOPOLITICS Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia Adrian Kear THEATRE AND EVENT Studies in International Performance Series Standing Order ISBN 1 4039 4435 0 (hardback) 1 4039 4436 9 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Pacific Performances Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas Christopher B. Balme

Christopher B. Balme 2007 S o f t c o v e r r e p r i n t o f t h e h a r d c o v e r 1 s t e d i t i o n 2 0 0 7 9 7 8-1 - 3 4 9-5 4 0 5 1-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. I S B N 9 7 8-1 - 3 4 9-5 4 0 5 1-8 I S B N 9 7 8-0 - 2 3 0-5 9 9 5 3-6 ( e B o o k ) D O I 1 0 1 0 5 7 /9 7 8 0 2 3 0 5 9 9 5 3 6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

This book is dedicated to my parents Brian and Pamela Balme in gratitude for a Pacific childhood

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Contents List of Illustrations Series Editors Preface Preface ix xi xii Introduction 1 Definitions 2 Mimetic capital and exotic commodities 7 Performance in Paradise 9 Fishing grounds 12 The passage 13 1 Pacific Overtures: Trumpets, Beaches and Women 19 Trumpets and hornpipes 20 Landings and beaches 24 Shocking spectacles 29 Venus observ d 36 Wanton dancing 38 Becoming the other 42 2 Staged Authenticity: The South Seas and European Theatre, 1785 1830 47 Spectacles of emotion: Cook o sia Gl inglesi in Othaiti 48 Restaging first encounters: La Mort du Capitaine Cook 56 La Perouse and the imaginary Pacific 61 A royal revue: their Sandwich Majesties 67 3 Comedians and Crusaders: Anti-Theatrical Prejudice in the South Seas 74 Plato s legacy 76 Arioi te fenua: comedians of the land 79 Ocular proof: baptisms and idols 85 Plays and heroes 89 4 Dressing the Hula and Taming the Haka: Performing Identity in Hawai i and New Zealand 95 Performative metonymy 96 Reinventing the hula 98 vii

viii Contents Hula kahiko (ancient hula) 102 Iconography of the hula 104 Taming the haka 115 5 Kindred Spirits: Spectacles of Samoa in Wilhelminian Germany 122 A place in the sun 123 Anthropological anxieties 126 Samoan troupes and the politics of the colonial gaze 129 Impressing the natives : colonial ceremony in Samoa 134 Tenth anniversary celebrations 139 Mixing ceremonies 142 6 Birds of Paradise: American-Pacific Dramas of Displacement 146 The Bird of Paradise 148 Rain 155 Pacific and Oriental lines: South Pacific 164 7 As You Always Imagined It : The Pacific as Tourist Spectacle 174 The Polynesian Cultural Center and tourist performance 177 Staging Polynesian culture(s) 179 Mimicry and resisting the tourist gaze 181 Framing authenticity 186 8 Translocations and Transgressions: The Postcolonial Pacific 191 Pacific diasporas 192 The play of memory 194 Ritual reincorporation 196 The Pacific is burning 200 Dystopic paradise 213 Notes 218 Selected Bibliography 245 Index 251

Illustrations 1 The Landing at Middleburgh, One of the Friendly Islands 26 2 The Landing at Erramanga, One of the New Hebrides 27 3 Captain Wallis on his arrival at O Taheite in conversation with Oberea the Queen, while her attendants are performing the dance called the Timorodee 41 4 King Rheo Rhio [Liholiho] and Queen Kamehameha [Ka ahumanu] delighted at the performances of Punch (1824) 69 5 The king and queen of the Sandwich Islands, and suite, at Covent Garden Theatre (1824) 71 6 Destruction of the idols at Otaheite 88 7 Jacques Arago: Les Isles Sandwich: Femme de l isle Mowi dansant 106 8 Bathélemy Lauvergne: Scène de danse, aux Iles Sandwich. Hula dancing with a solo female dancer 108 9 Two Hula dancers. Ambrotype, 1858 109 10 The Honolulu Dandy Ioane Ukeke with his hula troupe, c.1880 112 11 Hula dancers in a forest setting, c.1899 113 12 Backyard hula dancing in informal setting, c.1900 114 13 Premier Richard Seddon attending a haka performance at the Holborn restaurant, London, 1897 116 14 Hosts of the Ngati Kahungunu tribe welcome visitors to a wedding at Taradale, East Coast, North Island, New Zealand 118 15 Haka party at Rotorua during visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, 1901 119 16 Programme for the 1901 tour 131 17 Postcard of Samoan performers in Hagenbeck s zoo in Hamburg-Stellingen, 1910 133 18 Arrangement of spectators for flag-raising ceremony, Apia, Western Samoa, 1 March 1900 137 19 Sheet music cover featuring Laurette Taylor 151 20 Poster for Federal Theatre Project presentation of Bird of Paradise at the Belasco Theatre, Los Angeles, showing a woman wearing a bikini top and skirt, standing next to a palm tree 152 21 Jeanne Eagels as Sadie Thompson dancing to her gramophone 161 22 Tourist drinking coconut milk while being filmed by Samoan chief at the Polynesian Cultural Center, Hawai i 183 ix

x Illustrations 23 Tatau Rites of Passage, 1996. Tattooing ceremony at the beginning of the play 198 24 The lesbian fa afafine brother performs a Maori poi dance 212 25 Dancer from Paradise by Mau ensemble, directed by Lemi Ponifasio 214

Series Editors Preface In 2003, the current International Federation for Theatre Research President, Janelle Reinelt, Pledged the organization to expand the outlets for scholarly publication available to the membership, and to make scholarly achievement one of the main goals and activities of the Federation under her leadership. In 2004, joined by Vice-President for Research and Publications Brian Singleton, they signed a contract with Palgrave Macmillan for a new book series, Studies in International Performance. Since the inauguration of the series, it has become increasingly urgent for performance scholars to expand their disciplinary horizons to include the comparative study of performances across national, cultural, social and political borders. This is necessary not only in order to avoid the homogenizing tendency to limit performance paradigms to those familiar in our home countries, but also in order to be engaged in creating new performance scholarship that takes account of and embraces the complexities of transnational cultural production, the new media, and the economic and social consequences of increasingly international forms of artistic expression. Comparative studies can value both the specifically local and the broadly conceived global forms of performance practices, histories and social formations. Comparative aesthetics can challenge the limitations of perception and current artistic knowledges. In formalizing the work of the Federation s members through rigorous and innovative scholarship, we hope to contribute to an ever-changing project of knowledge creation. International Federation for Theatre Research Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche Théâtrale xi

Preface In March of every year in Auckland, New Zealand, Pasifika, a large-scale festival of the performing and material arts attracts tens of thousands of visitors and hundreds of participants from Auckland s huge Polynesian community. A month later the Merrie Monarch Festival, a week-long celebration of hula, takes place on Big Island, Hawai i, where it is literally the talk of the islands with live broadcasts on prime-time television and heated debates on local buses. On Oahu, the commercial and political centre of Hawai i, tourists can visit seven different Polynesian cultures (on six days of the week throughout the year excepting Sundays) at the Polynesian Cultural Center and witness highly elaborate performances ranging from Maori haka to a high-tech Broadway-style night show. Every four years the Pacific Arts Festival is organized at a different venue throughout the region, in which representatives from over 20 island cultures gather and perform in a variety of genres encompassing traditional dances, literary readings and experimental theatre. On most nights in Apia, the capital of Western Samoa, tourists and locals can gather to watch night club acts featuring transvestite performers. An outrageous comedy show by New Zealand-based Pacific Islanders, The Naked Samoans, is sold out when and wherever it is performed. This list documents, among other things, the astonishing vitality and variety of performance genres cultivated in the Pacific region. While most outsiders associate with the conjunction of Pacific and performance the undulating grass-skirt clad hips of hula girls, designed primarily for the tourist gaze, they would probably be surprised to learn of stand-up comics, both traditional and modern, of avant-garde theatre performed at international arts festivals, or indeed of hula not directed at the tourist market. Apart from palm trees and sandy beaches, the primary association with this region is performance: the said dances and music. In fact, no region in the world has been more closely associated with performance than the Pacific. It is this still largely unexplored conjunction that is the subject of this book. It seeks to examine from a historical perspective the question of cross-cultural encounter through modes of performance. The central thesis is that these cross-cultural contacts were theatrical as much as they were economic, sexual or political: that is, much took place, and still does, in modes that we generally subsume under the term performance. The narrower argument to be explored is that theatrical performance in a cross-cultural context is fraught with particular difficulties, even doubts and suspicions. This contested, doubtful history rests on the conjunction of two extremely powerful discursive histories: colonialism and theatricality. The broader argument proposed is that theatricality, or the discursive practice xii

Preface xiii of theatricalizing other peoples and places, was a necessary prerequisite for later colonial enterprises. While the intersection of these histories is by no means particular to the Pacific region, the latter offers, I believe, a particularly fruitful field of study because of remarkably persistent and recurring patterns of perception and representation. Like most books, there is a great deal of personal investment in this one. Its author is a New Zealander working in theatre and performance studies in Europe. Looking at Europe from a Pacific viewpoint and vice versa has been an integral part of my professional life for the past 20 years so it is hoped that this reciprocal perspective will resonate both thematically and methodologically. It draws on methods and material from Pacific history, culture and literature, colonial history, theatre and performance studies, and postcolonial theory. While this list may seem to some dangerously eclectic, I would argue that the phenomenon of cross-culture performance requires just such a multi-perspectival approach. This study has been dependent on the cooperation and generosity of scholars and artists from a number of countries. It would not have been possible without the financial assistance of the German Research Society (DFG), which funded the project within the framework of a larger research initiative on theatricality. The latter was instigated and directed by Erika Fischer-Lichte of the Free University in Berlin. Without her energy and vision, the present book would have had a much more difficult genesis. Most of the research and writing was conducted at the Departments of Theatre Studies at the Universities of Munich and Mainz, where I was assisted by a number of collaborators and research assistants. The first phase profited from discussions with Astrid Betz (née Carstensen) who completed a doctoral thesis within the framework of the same project, and from my indefatigable Brazilian research assistant Nara Heemann. At the University of Mainz I was assisted by Nicole Leonhardt and Christiane Brosius, whose own project on early Pacific cinema will hopefully be published in the near future. Final revisions were made in the intellectually salubrious atmosphere of the University of Amsterdam. In New Zealand I benefited from two sojourns at the Victoria University of Wellington, where I was welcomed and assisted by David Carnegie, David O Donnell and John Downie in the Department of Theatre and Film, who took a keen interest in the project. The then chair of anthropology at the same university, Niko Besnier, has remained an important dialogue partner on all things Pacific. The material on the fa afafine in Chapter 8 could not have been written without his generous assistance. Thanks as well to Caroline Armstrong, manager of the Naked Samoans for providing me with videos, the indispensable handmaidens of memory. The Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington was an invaluable resource for both written and visual source material for the Pacific region. The National Archives in Wellington provided access to German colonial records. The Hamilton

xiv Preface Library at the University of Hawai i, Manoa, was a crucial resource at the early stages of research, as was the Bishop Museum with its excellent visual collections. Chapter 3 could not have been written without access to the LMS archives of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. The bottomless resources of the British Library and its librarians provided material unavailable elsewhere. Much of the research for Chapter 5 was conducted in the Nelson Memorial Library, Apia, Western Samoa. The Library of Congress in Washington provided rare typescripts of forgotten plays. The National Library of Australia collection of Pacific iconography and the Mitchell library of New South Wales continue to be essential ports of call for Pacific research. Some of this material has been published previously in slightly different versions in: Humanities Research (Canberra); Theatre Journal; Theatre Research International; TDR: The Drama Review; and Paideuma (Frankfurt). I would like to thank the editors and in some cases anonymous reviewers for engaging with and supporting this research. Christopher B. Balme