A River Runs Through Us All: Asian and Pacific Linkages in Contemporary Performance from Aotearoa

This essay seeks to broaden and diversify discussions of the transpacific itineraries that weave throughout Oceania by exploring artistic transactions among Māori, Pasifika, Chinese peoples are routed through Aotearoa New Zealand. I consider how Zealand-based performance artists move beyond US-dominated categories priorities expose new relationships between islands continents, Indigenous, diasporic, immigrant identities ways being. chart this terrain examining three collaborative, intercultural works. The multilayered, photographic series Red Coats + Indians: Games We Play (2019–20), created Zealand-born Sāmoan artist Greg Semu in collaboration with Indigenous Formosans Taiwan, uses iconic figure Captain James Cook as an allegory for colonialism. Renee Liang’s opera Bone Feeder (2017) choreographer Moss Te Ururangi Patterson’s choral dance ensemble piece Awa: When Two Rivers Collide trace geographical spiritual connections China, but do so into wider Pacific circuits crossings. demonstrates important role visual performing arts imagining mobilities, dispositioning, place-making, Oceania, highlighting alternative Asian linkages modes knowledge production.