Looking Up Skirts (Te Hiki a Hine-Ruhi)

Abstract

New Zealand has never truly prioritised spaces for the performing arts of the Pacific, but has rather drawn theatre and performance models based largely upon known forms of British theatre. With the resurgence of traditional Māori performance arts today, such as the work of the late Hirini Melbourne in revitalising traditional musical instruments, it remains an anomaly that there is not an architecture that speaks of its rich, yet fragmented identity. The aim of this thesis is to address this anomaly through an investigation into the spatial and material conception of a contemporary Whare Tapere, conceived not from Western theatre models but through an exploration of the unique qualities and rituals that differentiate Māori performance space. The term 'whare tapere' is used to describe theatre and performing arts spaces in a Māori context. However in the move to physically establish place, and enter into the dialogue between particularity and possibility, words such as 'Theatre', 'Auditorium', 'Convention Centre' or 'Community Hall', cannot be applied to initiate the discourse about an institution that dates back to the ancestral stories of the Pacific. Charles Royal (Te Ahukaramū) posited that the traditional space for telling these stories was called Te Whare Tapere which he describes, whether in a building or not, as 'an island set aside for the collection of discrete activities whose overall description might fall under the title of entertainment'. This investigation approaches the "impossible" task of conceiving an architecture in which a material proposition will engage with an institution that exists for the most part in the collective experience of enjoyment; that is to give measure to the intangible potentials of an entity that has survived the condemnation of colonial imposition without a physical remnant to relate its history, but rather through its truest form of representation, the oral narrative. The title Looking Up Skirts references the ancestral narrative of Tinirau and Kae, in which a troupe of female dancers, led by Hine-te-iwaiwa, use their seductive charm to obtain Tinirau's revenge through the activities and performances of the whare tapere. Te Hiki a Hine-Ruhi, a proverb referring to the lifting of their skirts, is gestured in the performance of this investigation. The proposition is a hybrid model that enters into the dialogue of alternative performance places conceived in opposition to the influence of hegemonic euro-centric theatre models whose formal spatial relationships such as the proscenium arch or the non-contextual black box are disconnected from indigenous spatial constructs that are intrinsically connected with place and time.