Õkāreka Dance Company took the stage for a full house at Portland State University’s Lincoln Performance Hall on November 7. The company—which was founded in 2007 and hailed from Aotearoa (New Zealand)—would perform Mana Wahine [Powerful Women], a work created ten years prior and presented by White Bird on this evening.
I learned this tidbit at the Center for Native Arts & Cultures during a talk with the artists titled “The Spirit of Mana Wahine: A Conversational Journey with the Õkāreka Dance Company,” and moderated by choreographer Christopher K. Morgan.
As I watched Mana Wahine, my thoughts ran back and forth between the action onstage and everything I had learned at the artist conversation, illuminating how Mana Wahine came to stand the test of time as its global context continues to shift, in no small part due to Õkāreka Dance Company’s unflinching commitment to Māori culture within a contemporary dance context. This made for a rare proscenium experience at once compelling and refreshing—a seminal contribution that uplifts women and feminine forces in the field of dance and beyond.
Upon entering the performance hall, the audience was greeted by scrims of two layered projections with the enlarged face of Tūī Matira Ranapiri-Ransfield, Õkāreka Dance Company’s Cultural Advisor, flashing a bit of pūkana, facial expressions that showed the whites of her eyes.
During the prior artist conversation, Tūī had introduced herself, first in Māori, then in English, describing her role in the company as the figure of the “old dog,” the “wisdom keeper,” and the “grandmother.” She spoke the most of all its members, sharing critical context for the performance, highlighting both its cultural specificity and also its archetypal familiarity to “all women around the world.” In fact, the inspiration for Mana Wahine originally came by way of a story Tūī shared with her cousin Taiaroa Royal, artistic director of Õkāreka Dance Company, about two of their brave women ancestors.
Fittingly, Tūī’s presence would continue to be threaded throughout the work in the form of projections, originally created by Rowan Pierce, echoing her presence with the company at all performances and rehearsals. Her voice filled the space at times, and, according to the program, “[s]he is the lyric and music composer of the karanga, waerea and pātere [chants, spoken word] for this piece.”
“Everything comes from creation,” Tūī explained in the artist conversation. Oxygen and breath exists between Papatūānuku Earth Mother and Ranginui Sky Father.
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Breath and vocalization held a central role in Mana Wahine at the inception of the performance, as the six dancers dressed in white lay under a sheer fabric on a hazy stage. They moved as if filling up with air, awakening and filling with life. Projections of the original dancers of this performance, more than ten years ago, cast over the present-day dancers.
As Royal had noted in the artist conversation, nothing had changed about the work except the dancers, and this change was only due to circumstance. He always invites the original cast back to perform out of care toward succession, but this time around, only one original member could join, Jana Castillo, who hails from Australia.
The dancers moved with quivering hands, wiriwiri, which represented the heat rays of the sun. They sat up making larger gestures, eventually shedding their womb-like covering. They walked, stirring at the earth. Tūī’s form flashed behind them. I recalled Tūī’s speaking to the way the movements of haka—ceremonial dances of Māori culture—as well as the sounds that come into this work have origins in the environment. Her insights from the artist conversation illuminated that intrinsic link between environment and embodiment in the construction of both aural and movement traditions by her ancestors. These elements become inseparable, palpably grounding the performance in place and lineage.
It begs mentioning that this work was performed by a spectacular cast of strong dancers representing a spectrum of identities and lineages, including both Māori and Pākehā (English and Irish). Several spoke to the ways their connection to their native culture had been nurtured through their artistry. Most of the dancers used she/her pronouns in their bios except Cory-Toalei Roycroft, who used they/them. As fellow dancer Abbagail Rogers elaborated in the artist conversation, this performance calls forth the parts of oneself that are Mana Wahine, including ancestors, even if one does not identify as female. In my experience, the work also calls forth many different presentations of femininity, ranging from powerful and fierce to emotional, coy, and even campy.
One of the most relieving aspects of Mana Wahine emerged through its return to repetition and duration, which allowed space and time for questioning and emotional ambivalence—all things uncommon to many virtuosic contemporary dance performances. As the work progressed, several dancers enacted a motif with long black skirts. The music grew heavy as they leaned forward with hands on the earth, reaching their legs up high, creating a sense of elastic resistance. They swished the skirts in a rhythmic motion on the floor before finally dawning them, as if to indicate gendered labor of colonizer culture. They continued this swishing motif, which waxed both upsetting and slightly playful, leaving the audience to draw their own conclusions.
Immense care and creativity imbued the use of props onstage. The dancers appeared several times with woven mats, used in a number of ways, e.g. to wrap their bodies as they squatted and performed pūkana, or to act as a water vessel that the dancers collectively scooted and slid on across the stage. At one moment, the dancers put on woven hats to accompany their colonial garb, waving with poise and propriety that read as slightly absurd, perhaps some colonizer drag mixed with authentic feminine elegance. Between the innovative work with costumes, projection, and choreography, Mana Wahine seemed like a tapestry in and of itself, suturing together threads of time and cultures with utmost care in transitional moments.
The dancers were afforded relationships to lineage and also space for their individual expression within this re-staging of Mana Wahine. The former was exemplified most notably in a section of the performance featuring projected portraits of powerful women from Tūī and Royal’s lives, including past dancers and crew members. During this moment, dancers took the stage with elaborate partner sequences and refreshingly nongendered lifts.
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Later, the dancers’ self-expression came to full effect in a moment filled with electronic dance music, maybe a call back to Royal’s own history with disco dance. Each of the dancers took a solo, performing movements influenced by social, street, and club styles—this brought to mind the undeniable connection between these popular dance styles and their roots in various indigenous cultures.
Mana Wahine felt meticulously and dynamically paced for the benefit of both dancers and audiences, without sacrificing exhibitions of endurance. The show concluded with Tūī’s voice filling the space giving the whakapapa, or genealogy of women according to Māori tradition, as the dancers worked toward a climax filled with haka. Two of the dancers, Rogers and Castillo, whirled their pūrerehua in the air, musical instruments of native wood and cord, creating exciting vibrations as they took turns advancing toward one another. Roycroft wielded the patu, a white club that Tūī had described as “most lethal.”
Roycroft began moving slowly toward the audience with whites of their eyes shining, both “fliratous” and “ferocious,” to borrow more of Tūī’s colorful description. All the other dancers joined Roycroft onstage, jumping, stomping, and gesturing toward the earth—they paused, all together, at the moment’s completion, a triumphant finish.
During the artist conversation, moderator Morgan asked the creators of Mana Wahine how they had handled the merging of Māori culture with western contemporary dance aesthetic. While Tūī and Royal both shared thoughtful replies to Morgan’s question that evening, my experience of the work also speaks for itself on this point, illuminating the creative team’s expertise in threading such a delicate balance of elements — the work of our time.
The obvious commitment to ancestors, to the succession of dancers past and present and to Māori culture, gave force to this work, which was brought to bear through the exacting skill of the company. Most of all, the respect and honor given to women and feminine power emerged for what it was in this production—a cultural value with plenty of applications for combating misogyny in all its forms.
