That was then, this is now: Māori Performance Research Comes of Age

Abstract

Then. The way I see it, Māori Performance Research as it is coming to be practiced now started in the late 1990s at the University of Canterbury. Te Rita Papesch and I had been thrown together there as its only two female heads of school – she in Māori Studies, I in Theatre and Film Studies. Bonded by gendered necessity in a male-dominated academic environment, our chat ran along the lines of ‘You show me your research, and I’ll show you mine’. She started talking about Kapa Haka, I started talking about Performance Studies, and twenty years on (although we’ve moved on from Canterbury), we’re still talking. After all, not only is the personal political, it is also simultaneously academic and performative. This then is a personal account, my own version of the story of how we have come to be here now in this room discussing a field of study that I will, today, call Māori Performance Research: research focused on Māori performance, performance research from a Māori perspective, performance research by and for Māori academics and artists. These are not the same thing, but an evolving mix of old and new ways both of knowing about performance and of performing that knowledge.