Sharon Mazer

You Talkin’ To Me? Eavesdropping on the Conversation at Te Matatini Maori Performing Arts Festival

Founded in 1972, the Maori Performing Arts Festival – now known as Te Matatini – was instrumental in the development of kapa haka (literally group dance), which is now generally identified as a traditional or indigenous performance practice. Combining aspects of marae protocol – significantly, powhiri (the ritual of encounter) – with the concert party that still forms the core of Maori entertainments for tourists, kapa haka can be seen to work as repertoire (in Diana Taylor’s terms), serving as a repository for remembering and representing in performance essential elements of pre-colonial Maori identity in the (almost) post-colonial frame.

Coming together every other year for less than a week, over thirty groups of 30-40 people each compete for prizes and mana on behalf of their iwi (tribes) and hapu (sub-tribes) in front of a predominantly Maori audience composed of fellow practitioners, family members and connoisseurs. As such, the festival is an essentially private event held in a public arena. Outsiders such as myself are rare and isolated. Over time, Te Matatini has, almost by default, become one of the primary sites not only for reaffirming and, perhaps, redefining Maori cultural identity through song and dance; it also provides a vital meeting place for a conversation that is set apart from, and largely unintelligible to, the dominant culture. This paper looks at how, in performance, the Te Matatini Maori Performing Arts Festival may be seen to be engaged in constructing both a contemporary Maori identity and an effective Maori counterpublic (in Michael Warner’s terms).