Geography: Oceania > Australia and New Zealand > New Zealand
Year: 2019
Produced by: FCC and Silo Theatre; presented by Auckland Arts Festival
Creative Team: Written by Tusiata Avia; directed by Anapela Polataivao
Synopsis: Wild Dogs Under My Skirt uses Tusiata Avia’s poetry to craft an ensemble performance about Samoan womanhood in Aotearoa. The production considers colonial history as well as the way Pacific women’s bodies are racialised and portrayed onstage. Using English and Samoan creates creates shifts between intimacy and confrontation, as use of the ensemble shows the breadth and complexities of diasporic representation. Several sequences address the demand that cultural identity remain pure even though it has been altered by colonial power and life in New Zealand. The production considered post migration identity as politically contested and physically embodied, connecting contemporary racism to wide histories of imperial movement across the Pacific. The piece offers an account of heavily gendered diaspora, where belonging is asserted through violence rather than from a dominant national audience.
Source: Silo Theatre, production archive: https://silotheatre.co.nz/show/wild-dogs-under-my-skirt The Coconet, production feature: https://www.thecoconet.tv/moana-arts/coco-performance/wild-dogs-under-my-skirt-adaptation/