Christopher Balme-Pacific Performances - Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in The South Seas (Studies in International Performace) - Palgrave Macmillan (2007)

Pacific Performances
Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the

South Seas
Christopher B. Balme
10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-05
Studies in International Performance
Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research
General Editors: Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton
Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that define
nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between

and among nations and cultures as well as genres, identities and imaginations.
Inter-national in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International
Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to
the panoply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces
‘Culture’ which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternate, and
treats ‘Performance’ as either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural
within nations.
Titles include:
PACIFIC PERFORMANCES
Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas
Judith Hamera
DANCING COMMUNITIES
Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City
Joanne Tompkins
UNSETTLING SPACE
Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre
Forthcoming titles:
Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case (editors)

PERFORMING GLOBAL FEMINISMS
Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo
PERFORMANCE AND COSMOPOLITICS
Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia
Adrian Kear
THEATRE AND EVENT
Studies in International Performance

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(paperback) (outside North America only)
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Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in
the South Seas


© Christopher B. Balme 2007
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This book is dedicated to my parents Brian and Pamela Balme in
gratitude for a Pacific childhood

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Contents
List of Illustrations ix

Series Editors’ Preface xi
Preface xii
Introduction 1
Definitions 2
Mimetic capital and exotic commodities 7
Performance in Paradise 9
Fishing grounds 12
The passage 13
1 Pacific Overtures: Trumpets, Beaches and Women 19

Trumpets and hornpipes 20
Landings and beaches 24
Shocking spectacles 29
Venus observ’d 36
Wanton dancing 38
Becoming the other 42
2 Staged Authenticity: The South Seas and European Theatre,

1785–1830 47
Spectacles of emotion: Cook o sia Gl’inglesi in Othaiti 48
Restaging first encounters: La Mort du Capitaine Cook 56
La Perouse and the imaginary Pacific 61
A royal revue: their Sandwich Majesties 67
3 Comedians and Crusaders: Anti-Theatrical Prejudice in the

South Seas 74
Plato’s legacy 76
Arioi te fenua: comedians of the land 79
Ocular proof: baptisms and idols 85
Plays and heroes 89
4 Dressing the Hula and Taming the Haka: Performing Identity

in Hawai‘i and New Zealand 95
Performative metonymy 96
Reinventing the hula 98
vii

viii Contents
Hula kahiko (ancient hula) 102

Iconography of the hula 104
Taming the haka 115
5 Kindred Spirits: Spectacles of Samoa in Wilhelminian

Germany 122

A place in the sun 123
Anthropological anxieties 126
Samoan troupes and the politics of the colonial gaze 129
‘Impressing the natives’: colonial ceremony in Samoa 134
Tenth anniversary celebrations 139
Mixing ceremonies 142
6 Birds of Paradise: American-Pacific Dramas of Displacement 146

The Bird of Paradise 148
Rain 155
Pacific and Oriental lines: South Pacific 164
7 ‘As You Always Imagined It’: The Pacific as Tourist Spectacle 174
The Polynesian Cultural Center and tourist performance 177
Staging Polynesian culture(s) 179
Mimicry and resisting the tourist gaze 181
Framing authenticity 186
8 Translocations and Transgressions: The Postcolonial Pacific 191

Pacific diasporas 192
The play of memory 194
Ritual reincorporation 196
The Pacific is burning 200
Dystopic paradise 213
Notes 218
Selected Bibliography 245
Index 251

Illustrations
1 The Landing at Middleburgh, One of the Friendly Islands 26

2 The Landing at Erramanga, One of the New Hebrides 27
3 ‘Captain Wallis on his arrival at O’Taheite in conversation
with Oberea the Queen, while her attendants are performing
the dance called the Timorodee’ 41
4 King Rheo Rhio [Liholiho] and Queen Kamehameha [Ka’ahumanu]
delighted at the performances of Punch (1824) 69
5 The king and queen of the Sandwich Islands, and suite, at
Covent Garden Theatre (1824) 71
6 Destruction of the idols at Otaheite 88
7 Jacques Arago: Les Isles Sandwich: Femme de l’isle Mowi
dansant 106
8 Bathélemy Lauvergne: Scène de danse, aux Iles Sandwich. Hula
dancing with a solo female dancer 108
9 Two Hula dancers. Ambrotype, 1858 109
10 The ‘Honolulu Dandy’ Ioane Ukeke with his hula troupe,
c.1880 112
11 Hula dancers in a forest setting, c.1899 113
12 Backyard hula dancing in informal setting, c.1900 114
13 Premier Richard Seddon attending a haka performance at the
Holborn restaurant, London, 1897 116
14 Hosts of the Ngati Kahungunu tribe welcome visitors to a
wedding at Taradale, East Coast, North Island, New Zealand 118
15 Haka party at Rotorua during visit of the Duke and Duchess of
Cornwall, 1901 119
16 Programme for the 1901 tour 131
17 Postcard of Samoan performers in Hagenbeck’s zoo in
Hamburg-Stellingen, 1910 133
18 Arrangement of spectators for flag-raising ceremony, Apia,
Western Samoa, 1 March 1900 137
19 Sheet music cover featuring Laurette Taylor 151
20 Poster for Federal Theatre Project presentation of Bird of
Paradise at the Belasco Theatre, Los Angeles, showing a
woman wearing a bikini top and skirt, standing next to a palm
tree 152
21 Jeanne Eagels as Sadie Thompson dancing to her gramophone 161
22 Tourist drinking coconut milk while being filmed by Samoan
chief at the Polynesian Cultural Center, Hawai‘i 183
ix

x Illustrations
23 Tatau – Rites of Passage, 1996. Tattooing ceremony at the

beginning of the play 198
24 The ‘lesbian’ fa’afafine brother performs a Maori poi dance 212
25 Dancer from Paradise by Mau ensemble, directed by Lemi
Ponifasio 214

Series Editors’ Preface
In 2003, the current International Federation for Theatre Research President,

Janelle Reinelt, Pledged the organization to expand the outlets for scholarly

publication available to the membership, and to make scholarly achievement
one of the main goals and activities of the Federation under her leadership. In
2004, joined by Vice-President for Research and Publications Brian Singleton,
they signed a contract with Palgrave Macmillan for a new book series, ‘Studies
in International Performance.’
Since the inauguration of the series, it has become increasingly urgent
for performance scholars to expand their disciplinary horizons to include
the comparative study of performances across national, cultural, social and
political borders. This is necessary not only in order to avoid the homo-
genizing tendency to limit performance paradigms to those familiar in our
home countries, but also in order to be engaged in creating new perform-
ance scholarship that takes account of and embraces the complexities of
transnational cultural production, the new media, and the economic and
social consequences of increasingly international forms of artistic expression.
Comparative studies can value both the specifically local and the broadly
conceived global forms of performance practices, histories and social form-
ations. Comparative aesthetics can challenge the limitations of perception
and current artistic knowledges. In formalizing the work of the Federa-
tion’s members through rigorous and innovative scholarship, we hope to
contribute to an ever-changing project of knowledge creation.
International Federation for Theatre Research

Fédération Internationale pour la
Recherche Théâtrale
xi

Preface
In March of every year in Auckland, New Zealand, Pasifika, a large-scale fest-

ival of the performing and material arts attracts tens of thousands of visitors

and hundreds of participants from Auckland’s huge Polynesian community.
A month later the Merrie Monarch Festival, a week-long celebration of
hula, takes place on Big Island, Hawai‘i, where it is literally the talk of the
islands with live broadcasts on prime-time television and heated debates
on local buses. On Oahu, the commercial and political centre of Hawai‘i,
tourists can visit seven different Polynesian cultures (on six days of the week
throughout the year excepting Sundays) at the Polynesian Cultural Center
and witness highly elaborate performances ranging from Maori haka to a
high-tech Broadway-style night show. Every four years the Pacific Arts Fest-
ival is organized at a different venue throughout the region, in which repres-
entatives from over 20 island cultures gather and perform in a variety of
genres encompassing traditional dances, literary readings and experimental
theatre. On most nights in Apia, the capital of Western Samoa, tourists and
locals can gather to watch night club acts featuring transvestite performers.
An outrageous comedy show by New Zealand-based Pacific Islanders, The
Naked Samoans, is sold out when and wherever it is performed.
This list documents, among other things, the astonishing vitality and
variety of performance genres cultivated in the Pacific region. While most
outsiders associate with the conjunction of ‘Pacific’ and ‘performance’ the
undulating grass-skirt clad hips of hula girls, designed primarily for the
tourist gaze, they would probably be surprised to learn of stand-up comics,
both traditional and modern, of avant-garde theatre performed at interna-
tional arts festivals, or indeed of hula not directed at the tourist market.
Apart from palm trees and sandy beaches, the primary association with
this region is performance: the said dances and music. In fact, no region
in the world has been more closely associated with performance than the
Pacific. It is this still largely unexplored conjunction that is the subject of
this book. It seeks to examine from a historical perspective the question of
cross-cultural encounter through modes of performance. The central thesis
is that these cross-cultural contacts were theatrical as much as they were
economic, sexual or political: that is, much took place, and still does, in
modes that we generally subsume under the term ‘performance’.
The narrower argument to be explored is that theatrical performance in a
cross-cultural context is fraught with particular difficulties, even doubts and
suspicions. This contested, ‘doubtful’ history rests on the conjunction of two
extremely powerful discursive histories: colonialism and theatricality. The
broader argument proposed is that theatricality, or the discursive practice
xii

Preface xiii
of theatricalizing other peoples and places, was a necessary prerequisite for

later colonial enterprises. While the intersection of these histories is by no
means particular to the Pacific region, the latter offers, I believe, a particularly
fruitful field of study because of remarkably persistent and recurring patterns
of perception and representation.
Like most books, there is a great deal of personal investment in this one.

Its author is a New Zealander working in theatre and performance studies
in Europe. Looking at Europe from a Pacific viewpoint and vice versa has
been an integral part of my professional life for the past 20 years so it is
hoped that this reciprocal perspective will resonate both thematically and
methodologically. It draws on methods and material from Pacific history,
culture and literature, colonial history, theatre and performance studies, and
postcolonial theory. While this list may seem to some ‘dangerously’ eclectic,
I would argue that the phenomenon of cross-culture performance requires
just such a multi-perspectival approach.
This study has been dependent on the cooperation and generosity of
scholars and artists from a number of countries. It would not have been
possible without the financial assistance of the German Research Society
(DFG), which funded the project within the framework of a larger research
initiative on theatricality. The latter was instigated and directed by Erika
Fischer-Lichte of the Free University in Berlin. Without her energy and
vision, the present book would have had a much more difficult genesis. Most
of the research and writing was conducted at the Departments of Theatre
Studies at the Universities of Munich and Mainz, where I was assisted by
a number of collaborators and research assistants. The first phase profited
from discussions with Astrid Betz (née Carstensen) who completed a doctoral
thesis within the framework of the same project, and from my indefatigable
Brazilian research assistant Nara Heemann. At the University of Mainz I was
assisted by Nicole Leonhardt and Christiane Brosius, whose own project on
early Pacific cinema will hopefully be published in the near future. Final revi-
sions were made in the intellectually salubrious atmosphere of the University
of Amsterdam.
In New Zealand I benefited from two sojourns at the Victoria Univer-
sity of Wellington, where I was welcomed and assisted by David Carnegie,
David O’Donnell and John Downie in the Department of Theatre and Film,
who took a keen interest in the project. The then chair of anthropology
at the same university, Niko Besnier, has remained an important dialogue
partner on all things Pacific. The material on the fa’afafine in Chapter 8
could not have been written without his generous assistance. Thanks as
well to Caroline Armstrong, manager of the Naked Samoans for providing
me with videos, the indispensable handmaidens of memory. The Alexander
Turnbull Library in Wellington was an invaluable resource for both written
and visual source material for the Pacific region. The National Archives
in Wellington provided access to German colonial records. The Hamilton

xiv Preface
Library at the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa, was a crucial resource at the

early stages of research, as was the Bishop Museum with its excellent visual
collections. Chapter 3 could not have been written without access to the
LMS archives of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University
of London. The bottomless resources of the British Library and its librarians
provided material unavailable elsewhere. Much of the research for Chapter 5

was conducted in the Nelson Memorial Library, Apia, Western Samoa. The
Library of Congress in Washington provided rare typescripts of forgotten
plays. The National Library of Australia collection of Pacific iconography
and the Mitchell library of New South Wales continue to be essential ports
of call for Pacific research.
Some of this material has been published previously in slightly different
versions in: Humanities Research (Canberra); Theatre Journal; Theatre Research
International; TDR: The Drama Review; and Paideuma (Frankfurt). I would like
to thank the editors and in some cases anonymous reviewers for engaging
with and supporting this research.

Introduction

When Louis-Antoine de Bougainville first glimpsed the high peaks and
luscious vegetation of Tahiti on 5 April 1768, probably only the second
European ship’s captain to do so, the metaphors that sprang to mind,
and that he recorded in his logbook, were theatrical ones: ‘The aspect of
this coast, elevated like an amphitheatre, offered us the most enchanting
spectacle.’1 For the next ten days, during which the two ships, La Boudeuse
and L’Étoile lay at anchor in Matavai Bay, Bougainville and his fellow ship-
mates and explorers encountered a seeming unbroken succession of theat-
rical or painterly scenes. The subjects represented in this ‘natural theatre’
ranged from the pastoral – two Tahitians lying under a tree with one playing
an air on the nose-flute, a scene ‘worthy of Boucher’s brush’2 – to the
erotic: the famous self-presentation of a naked ‘Venus’ on board ship to lusty
Phrygian shepherds (the French sailors). In all cases, the vocabulary is drawn
from the theatre: it is almost invariably a ‘scène’ or ‘spectacle’. Very often,
the scenes the early visitors witnessed were actual performances, ranging
from elaborate festivities to impromptu dances. They invariably tantalized
the senses and stimulated the fancy of hardened sailors and dispassionate
gentlemen alike.
The theatrical metaphors that abound in the written accounts of these
encounters are more than just rhetorical tropes. They are, it will be argued,
symptoms of deeper-seated, fundamental categories of perception that can
be best embraced by the term ‘theatricality’. It is, however, theatricality
of a special kind, occasioned by the encounters between different cultures.
The theatricality of cross-cultural encounter is located in a semantic field
of considerable breadth. These encounters could, and can, take many
forms, ranging from meetings on Tahitian beaches to Broadway musical
theatre. This study will endeavour to demonstrate the connections between
them, even though the bloodlines may be far from pure. The approach
proposed here is genealogical in the sense defined by Joseph Roach in
his magisterial study of circumatlantic performance.3 Genealogy refers to
‘the historical transmission and dissemination of cultural practices through
collective representations’ which form a network of interlocking discourses

2 Pacific Performances
and practices that establish continuities over long periods of time.4 These
(dis)continuities are not to be understood in the traditional sense of motifs
or myths. Genealogies of performance are rather to be detected in a
particular combination of corporeal and perceptual practices determined
by a high degree of reciprocity. The body, perhaps the most labile and
complex site of reciprocal exchange, is the place where this transmission is

enacted.
The performance genealogies of and in the Pacific can only function
through a consciousness of the past that links the place of performance
with the productive memories of performers and spectators. Cross-cultural
Pacific performances are therefore always citational practices in the sense
that performers and spectators both draw on common, but not necessarily
congruent repertoires of knowledge. As these grow over time, they begin
to intersect and form a citational domain, which permits a high degree
of reflexivity, in the sense of referring back to themselves. As we shall see
again and again, European encounters with Pacific peoples are invariably
correlated metaphorically with pre-existing perceptual matrixes that extend
from Greek mythology to Teutonic warriors. This book examines the ways
explorers, colonialists, missionaries and tourists tried to make sense of the
performances they saw. The performative response on the part of the local
people was to incorporate this ‘sense-making’ in their own performances
for the visitors, thus initiating a strategy of performative reciprocity that
begins very soon after first contact was made and which continues until the
present.
Although reciprocity is a two-way street, it is seldom a balanced state of
affairs, especially in the context of colonial history. Since we will be studying
representations of encounters, both written and iconographic, we are reliant
almost exclusively on a European perspective. Even when indigenous voices
are quoted in journals or missionary reports, they are by definition mediated.
This situation has of course long been recognized in historical anthropo-
logy, especially in the Pacific context. Scholars such as Anne Salmond, Greg
Dening and Marshall Sahlins, whose work is cited extensively in this book,
have demonstrated to what degree one can reconstruct an indigenous under-
standing of cross-cultural encounters.5 The early chapters of this book rely
predominantly on European perceptions of events and practices but include,
where possible, interpretations from an indigenous perspective. The final
two chapters, devoted to the postcolonial, present document representations
controlled predominantly from the local perspective.
Definitions
The cross-cultural encounters studied in this book were and continue to be

enframed by modes of perception that can be termed theatrical. Despite the

Introduction 3
tremendous upsurge in interest in the term, theatricality remains notori-

ously difficult to define. Its present popularity is doubtlessly linked to the
insight that contemporary culture manifests itself increasingly in transient
processes of staging and representation rather than in enduring works or
monuments.6 The evanescence of theatricality thus renders it especially
resistant to conventional hermeneutical analysis and requires a multifa-

ceted approach. Two recent collections of essays document the astonishing
semantic breadth of the term, which has prompted the editors of both books
to question whether it can be considered a concept in the narrower sense
of the term at all. As Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait note: ‘the domain
of theatricality cannot be located within any single definition, period, or
practice.’7 This does not mean, however, that it is ‘meaningless’. On the
contrary, the editors point to theatricality’s ‘protean flexibility that lends
richness to both historical study and theoretical analysis.’8 Similarly, Josette
Féral observes that the scholars and researchers contributing to her volume
‘often ascribe widely divergent – and at times diametrically opposed – mean-
ings, values and properties to theatricality’.9 Because of its conceptual slip-
periness but undisputed importance for both historical and contemporary
research, each scholar must outline his or her use of the term within the
bounds of the research questions to be examined. Like so many concepts
in contemporary theoretical discourse, theatricality is, to use Mieke Bal’s
term, a ‘travelling concept’. Such concepts, as Bal understands them, are
‘neither fixed nor unambiguous’, but processual and only of interest when
they can be attached to specific problems. Their semantic range and oper-
ative value change when they ‘travel’, that is, when they are taken up and
used in a historical context or within a discipline to which they were origin-
ally foreign. They become recharged with new meanings and develop new
potential as instruments for analysis.10 Theatricality is, as shall be shown,
just such a travelling concept whose ‘protean flexibility’ is a sign of fecundity
and not of limitation.11
The danger inherent in falling back on terms such as ‘travelling’ or
‘protean’ is that a concept becomes arbitrary and can be applied to almost
anything. As already stated, theatricality will be understood in this study
primarily as a perceptual category employed to characterize certain kinds of
phenomena that appear to resemble or embody elements associated with
theatrical performance. When examined more closely, it will become clear
that this set of elements changes over time in keeping with the changing
nature of the theatrical medium itself. Just as the theatres of the eight-
eenth and the twentieth centuries differ in many respects, so too is the
theatricality of the eighteenth not necessarily commensurate with that of
the twentieth century. Nevertheless, some elements remain similar. As Erika
Fischer-Lichte has argued, theatricality invariably brings four factors into
a state of interaction: corporeality, perception, mise en scène, and perform-
ance. Performing bodies are perceived as being staged in some way.12 This

definition is exceptionally broad and needs to be modified for the particular

case of cross-cultural interactions. Nonetheless, it offers a framework within
which one can begin to investigate the concept from both historical and
systematic perspectives.
The beginnings of theatricality as a discursive field go back to the eight-
eenth century, in fact to that period which saw the development of imperial

and colonial expansion on an international scale.13 In the eighteenth
century the word theatrical and its cognates were used within three broad
semantic fields. The first can be roughly defined as a trope for dramatic
events of a particular kind. Phenomena deemed ‘theatrical’ appeared to be
so on account of their extreme concentration and focus engendered by
tensions produced by dramatic situations. These include conflicts, confront-
ations and the antagonistic or agonistic structure constitutive of drama as
defined by Aristotelian categories such as peripeteia or anagnorisis. A second
perceptual component of theatricality developed in the eighteenth century
is the primacy given to things visual and, more narrowly, to the idea of the
spectator. There is a massive shift within eighteenth-century aesthetics and
philosophy from the aural to the visual, and from the level of production
(normative poetics) to reception (theories of sense and sensibility). Sight as
the dominant sense and things visual are increasingly given preference as
modes of perception and representation. This question forms a bridge to the
third and most persistent model of theatricality current in the eighteenth
century. To deem something theatrical in this period – and this still holds
true today – was to bestow on it a number of pejorative epithets revolving
around ideas of second-handedness, deceit, duplicity and simulation. While
it may seem that these three variations on theatricality have little to do with
one another – the one dramaturgical, the second aesthetic and the third
epistemological – when they coalesce, they invariably produce associations
with the theatre. Next to its visual emphasis, theatre is of course predicated
on corporeality of a special kind, the performing body.
Corporeality is the only given material of theatricality. Because most defin-
itions of theatre assume that a live performer is somehow at the centre of
the medium, the staged body seems to feature as an integral aspect of theat-
ricality. While this is no doubt true in most understandings of the term, we
will encounter usages that are not dependent on human beings in action.
Concepts such as ‘spectacle’, which are certainly semantically allied if not
entirely coterminous with theatricality, can be applied to landscapes, for
example. The example of corporeality shows that no one element can be
deemed theatrical in isolation, but only in relation to the other elements.
This condition of interdependence is particularly true for the category
of perception, which lies at the core of any understanding of theatric-
ality. In an important study, the sociologist Elisabeth Burns defined the
latter as a historically and culturally determined ‘mode of perception.’14
Burns is concerned from her sociological perspective with exploring the

Introduction 5
ways theatre and role-playing in social life are laminated. Theatricality as

a mode of perception means that things and actions, peoples and places,
are not in themselves theatrical – they possess no inherent theatricality –
but rather are rendered such by a combination of aesthetic conventions
and discursive practices. They in turn determine around which phenomena
we place the ‘frame’ of theatrical apprehension. Thus, theatricality can be

understood as both a discursive and performative practice by means of which
theatre (as an institution and aesthetic form) intersects with wider cultural
contexts.
The theatrical mode of perception is thus a complex one, consisting of
interlocking, mutually conditioning elements from different genres and
forms of representation. Expressed more concretely, theatricality is a mode of
perception and representation that either merges verbal, visual and corporeal
dimensions or forms a bridge between them. What cannot easily be identi-
fied is an immutable set of signifiers or iconographical markers that provide,
as it were, an index of constitutive elements. Because theatricality is more
a question of perception than it is of representation, its existence will be
found most usually at the interface of the two.
The question must also be asked what consequences this framing strategy
had on the epistemological status of the peoples and places perceived. This
problem lies at the heart of the most persistent model of theatricality. To
deem something theatrical is to bestow on it a number of pejorative epithets
revolving around ideas of deceit and duplicity. While these notions and their
links with the theatre are much older and constitute the epistemological basis
of the ‘antitheatrical prejudice’,15 it was not until the eighteenth century
that a broader category of perception was developed linking the aesthetic
and the moral into a wider concept.16
Closely, even inextricably, entwined with the moral idea of social inter-
course being inherently theatrical is a counteractive tendency towards
valuing objects or forms of behaviour that emphasize authenticity. The
discourse of authenticity emerges roughly at the same time and can be
regarded as the flipside of the unease provoked by an all-pervasive theatric-
ality of everyday life. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the first theatre produc-
tions set in the South Seas, which were almost invariably influenced in some
way by the widely read accounts of Captain Cook’s voyages to the Pacific,
attempted to capitalize on the authenticity bonus. Theatrical authenticity
has of course an oxymoronic ring to it, a resonance, which is central to this
study. From a poststructuralist perspective, an authentic representation is
already a contradictio in adjecto because every representation is by definition
conditioned by a state of vicariousness. As Jonathan Culler has noted: ‘The
paradox, the dilemma of authenticity, is that to be experienced as authentic
it must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic, it is medi-
ated, a sign of itself and hence not authentic in the sense of unspoiled.’17
Theatricality is mediation to an intense degree, as we have already suggested.

Therefore the search for authenticity, in people and places, is an attempt to

escape the ubiquitous theatricality of modernity. One essential condition of
modernity is that it creates its own antithesis through an interest in tradi-
tional societies. Modernity in this sense begins, as both Jürgen Habermas
and Niklas Luhmann have argued, in the eighteenth century with the ideas
of the Enlightenment.18 The history of cross-cultural contact in the Pacific

is thus framed in an ineluctable and ultimately irresolvable tension between
the search for, and experience of, traditional authenticity and its experience
and representation within the perceptual frame of theatricality.
Finally, it is necessary to specify theatricality in cross-cultural contexts.
A particular characteristic of cross-cultural theatricality lies in its unexpected
power to transform and redefine signs. This transformative power integral
to theatre (its ability to make a table into a mountain by a simple word or
gesture) is extended to everyday experience in situations of cross-cultural
contact. Here gestures or articles of clothing can become theatrical signs as
members of different cultures meet and attempt to make sense of each others’
cultural signs. This kind of theatricality is particularly marked in first contact
encounters, but it continues even as cultures become better acquainted with
one another. When these encounters are enacted as formalized perform-
ances – dances, songs, rituals, plays – then the intensities of contact, and
the possibilities of misunderstanding, are increased. As the embodied objects
move from one culture to another, they become charged with an excess of
divergent meanings. Performances also provide a particularly fruitful ground
for cultures to imitate and thereby approach one another. The imitation of
the other – a fundamental experience of cross-cultural and colonial contact –
constitutes a history of asymmetrical power relations as cultures in contact
adopt each others’ performances for many different reasons.
We can summarize the discussion of theatricality in the following way.
Theatricality is a mode of perception that brackets moments of action or
particular places in such a way that they are imbued with extreme concen-
tration and focus. It invariably emphasizes the visual senses and moves
the beholder to become aware of his/her act of spectating. Because this
mode of perception depends on the recognition of pre-existing patterns
and conventions, it is often framed or, pejoratively spoken, marred by a
sense of second-handedness. Apprehending something in theatrical terms
(to borrow from Macbeth’s inebriated porter) thus ‘increaseth’ the sensation,
but ‘lowereth’ the ontological status. Theatrical situations are hence often
marked as citable, repeatable, and are therefore intrinsically mediated. Yet,
it is this state of citability and mediation which enables theatrical percep-
tion to be transported via performative genealogies over long periods of
time. To understand why and how this was effected in the context of the
Pacific, it is necessary to engage with the dynamics of exoticism and mimetic
capital.

Introduction 7
Mimetic capital and exotic commodities
In his study of first contacts in the New World, Marvellous Possessions,

Stephen Greenblatt asks what is probably the most fundamental question
regarding cross-cultural contacts both old and new: ‘How does one read the
signs of the other how is it possible for one system of representation to

establish contact with a different system?’19 Greenblatt articulates the semi-
otic dimension of negotiating alterity, which he describes as a reciprocal
process where both sides or systems of representation strive to make sense of
one another. Apart from or over and above the initial disorder such contacts
inevitably engender, a second stage sets in that Greenblatt terms the assimil-
ation of the other, whereby both sides devise strategies to accommodate the
new signs and beings. Adapting Marx and Bourdieu, Greenblatt proposes the
concept of mimetic capital to explain the dynamics of what happens as these
new signs begin to circulate. Mimetic capital refers to several interconnected
processes. These include the global proliferation, circulation, and also the
stockpiling of representations so that mimetic capital is built up over time as:
a set of images and image making devices that are accumulated, ‘banked’,
as it were, in books, archives, collections, cultural storehouses, until such
time as these representations are called upon to generate new representa-
tions. The images that matter, that merit the term capital, are those that
achieve reproductive power, maintaining and multiplying themselves by
transforming cultural contacts into novel and often unexpected forms.20
Like the New World, the exploration of the Pacific in the second half of the
eighteenth century produced a rich stockpile of tales, images and, as this
book is determined to show, performances that contributed to the mimetic
capital of the region. The first explorers and subsequent visitors were struck
by the highly performative nature of the cultures they encountered. Wherever
they went, they were met with a succession of rituals, ceremonies, dances,
oratory, even dramatic sketches in which they themselves figured. So rich
indeed was this performative aspect of the islands that early visitors had
the impression of attending one long heiva (a Tahitian ceremonial gathering).
Mimetic capital operates on several levels, some of which will be studied
in this book. Of particular interest is the passage of the encountered cultural
forms through time as the exploring and then colonizing powers assim-
ilate and commodify them for a variety of aesthetic, political and economic
reasons. The initial basis of this mimetic capital was provided by the succes-
sion of official and the almost simultaneous unofficial publications that were
issued in the wake of the voyages. Louis de Bougainville’s Voyage autour
du monde (1771) marks the beginning of this process, followed by John
Hawkesworth’s Account of the Voyages successively performed by Commodore
Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Cateret, and Captain Cook (1773). This lavishly

illustrated three-volume publication was compiled by Hawkesworth from

the official logbooks and other documents produced in the course of four
voyages of exploration to the Pacific in the 1760s. It was quickly trans-
lated into other languages and became arguably the most influential book
on Pacific exploration ever to be published. Its pictures and purple prose
provided a truly rich ‘stockpile of representations’ for artists, satirists, novel-

ists, playwrights and scenographers. Almost equally influential were the two
official accounts written by Cook himself documenting his second and third
voyages (the latter published, understandably, posthumously). As we shall
see, these widely translated books literally inflamed the European imagina-
tion, spawning operas, ballets, plays, pantomimes and other entertainments.
But, as Adam Smith and Karl Marx have taught us, capital not only accumu-
lates, it also diminishes. This is doubly true for mimetic capital which, if the
history of the Pacific on the stage is anything to go by, proves to be partic-
ularly susceptible to the law of diminishing returns, as its representational
appeal, predicated on the fickle laws of novelty, begins to pall.
The dynamics of mimetic capital are multifaceted and multi-directional.
The circulation of images and performance forms within European media
economies is only one aspect of a more complex equation. Greenblatt
stresses that mimetic capital, or more widely, mimesis, has also a social
dimension:
any given representation is not only the reflection or product of social

relations but that it is itself a social relation, linked to the group under-
standings, status hierarchies, resistances, and conflicts that exist in other
spheres of the culture in which it circulates. This means that representa-
tions are not only products but producers, capable of decisively altering
the very forces that brought them into being.21
A much discussed example of such processes whereby representational prac-

tices become themselves producers is the phenomenon known as colonial
mimesis. In the course of this book we shall encounter colonial mimesis
and mimicry in a variety of forms: in the context of first encounters
(Chapter 1), and in the highly reflexive mode of subversive tourist perform-
ances (Chapter 7) and contemporary cabaret and drama (Chapter 8).
Mimetic capital manifests itself of course in a more directly economic
fashion as commodification. A glance at any tourist brochure of Hawai‘i or
Tahiti will testify to the fact that the Pacific is very much a commodity
predicated on the exotic. Following Graham Huggan‘s work on the post-
colonial exotic, one can say that the South Pacific and its peoples are not
intrinsically exotic; there are no qualities inherently strange and attractive.
The exotic is rather ‘a mode of aesthetic perception – one which renders
people, objects, and places strange even as it domesticates them’.22 It is
also a dialectical process that oscillates between strangeness and familiarity.

Introduction 9
The totally strange, if there can be such a thing, is not exotic because it
would lack some familiar element that makes it attractive to the viewer.
Neither can it be totally familiar because it would then cease to be attractive.
A handmaiden of colonialism, exoticism often functions to conceal or
disguise the brutal realities of colonial conquest and imperialistic control.
Today exoticism functions primarily as a commodity in the context of the

Pacific: it sells and has always sold. As we shall see in the course of this book,
the indigenous peoples and their performance forms have been exoticized
and commodified to such an extent that one is reminded of the Marxist term
‘commodity fetish’. A fetish is an object representing (usually) an absent
spiritual being (or object of desire). When applied to regions or peoples we
can observe, following Huggan, commodification operating on three inter-
locking and recurrent levels: (a) as a mystification of historical experience:
the Pacific is timeless and always in a pre-contact state; (b) as imagined access
to this mystified Pacific: whether as a postcard, a material object or through
a live or mediatized performance; (c) as reification of people and places
as exchangeable aesthetic objects: tourist performances and ethnographic
spectacles can be regarded as the performative equivalent of the hula skirt
or airport art. Commodification and mimetic capital stand in a reciprocal
relationship to one another: as mimetic capital diminishes through overuse
and overexposure, so too does its commodity value. What holds for goods
is doubly true for performance(s). Over the course of two centuries Pacific
peoples and their performance forms have been repeatedly used as mimetic
capital for commercial and aesthetic purposes.
Performance in Paradise
Imagining the Pacific and its peoples has been an activity that Westerners
have followed with almost as much energy as they have invested in its colon-
ization. Immediately following the early exploration of the Pacific by Wallis,
Cook, and Bougainville and the publication of their journals, the ‘South Seas’
became invested with both desire and repulsion. In his important collection
of essays, Imagining the Pacific (1992), the Australian art historian and Pacific
scholar Bernard Smith diagnoses two broad tendencies within the visual
imagery produced in the wake of Cook’s voyages and representations of the
Pacific more generally:
Yet there is a tendency for the representations to coalesce into two anti-
thetical and yet mutually supportive images around which a high degree
of internal consistency develops during the nineteenth century; that
is to say, the Pacific as a kind of Paradise in which Europeans might find
heavenly bliss on earth, and an opposing image of the Pacific as a kind
of Purgatory from which the poor children of nature might be won for
a life of bliss in heaven. It was Dante who first placed purgatory in the
southern hemisphere.23

And in his conclusion Smith states unequivocally that ‘the imagery was a
component of the decision-making of those Europeans who would enter the
Pacific in their thousands and eventually dominate it.’24 Many, if not most,
representations of the Pacific in literature, painting, film, theatre and music
tend to position themselves within the coordinates outlined by Smith.
The Pacific as paradise is certainly the most overworked epithet in the

discursive field we are dealing with. Because of its persistence, however, as
Smith notes, it cannot be simply ignored as outworn and thereby consigned
to the scholarly midden heap. On the contrary, its prominence requires both
justification and emendation. Its invocation in the first phase of Enlight-
enment response to the voyages of Cook and Bougainville, albeit in a
secularized form, is legendary and formulated in Diderot’s famous ‘supple-
ment’ to Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde.25 In a recent novel, Paradise
News, David Lodge satirizes the commodification of the term in present-day
Waikiki where it is applied by the local service industry as a ubiquitous
epithet for anything from roofing to used furniture.26 Somewhere between
Diderot’s ironic Eden and Lodge’s paradisiacal furniture store we find an
insistent and gnawing aspiration that the South Pacific beaches may indeed
offer, if not Paradise, then at least a counterpoint to the experience of civil-
ization (in the eighteenth) and modernity (in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries).
It is a projection with both political and aesthetic ramifications. Translated
as ‘utopia’ the Pacific as paradise topos exerted a continual influence on
schemes both explicitly colonial and implicitly romantic. Both can be seen
as transgressive in as much as they sought to move beyond the geograph-
ical and cultural borders of their European homelands and occupy another
geographical space. Read aesthetically, the South Pacific seemed to offer a
locus amoenus with heightened appeal to the senses and a sensuous culture of
performance with dancing and trouble-free intercourse appearing as points
on a performative continuum rather than as separate areas of permissible
and prohibited activity. ‘Pacific Performances’ can be understood then as a
double transgression. To occupy this space either actually (by travel) or virtu-
ally (on the stage) meant crossing borders of many kinds. As the missionaries
(and generations of clerics before them) knew only too well, dancing was a
dangerous matter to be engaged in at best not at all, or at worst under strict
supervision. As we shall see, dancing, both actual and metaphoric, became
perhaps the most common form of cross-cultural contact and exchange both
then and now.
The Pacific is also transgressive in the more literal sense of moving
across definitional boundaries. Whereas the term South Seas had reason-
ably well-defined boundaries – roughly the Polynesian islands as well as
parts of Macronesia and occasionally New Zealand – the Pacific became
increasingly ill-defined and thereby discursively uncontainable. While the
Pacific for a long time functioned in the popular imagination as a kind of

Introduction 11
synonym and substitute for the obsolete term ‘South Seas’,27 it gradually
shifted its conceptual coordinates until by the late 1980s it appeared to be
located somewhere in the Far East. The Australian scholar of postcolonial
literature Paul Sharrad described this shift in 1990 in an article entitled
‘Imagining the Pacific’.28 Sharrad bemoans the fact that recent articles or
books featuring the word ‘Pacific’ turn out to be about Korea, Japan or Singa-

pore. It is therefore necessary, he argues, to distinguish between Pacific Rim
and Pacific Basin. The Pacific Rim is, as he puts it, an ‘extremely flexible line’,
running right around the Pacific, including not only a great many Asian
countries, but depending on the interest of the commentators, the United
States, Canada, South America, Mexico, and Australia and New Zealand.
The Pacific Basin, on the other hand, and it is in this area that Sharrad
is interested, consists of the many island groups formerly known as the
South Seas:
Until very recent times the Basin has been represented not as a political
sphere or an economic one in an active, productive sense, but as a passive
receptacle of observation, a space for European adventuring, an area of
natural science, history, anthropology and ‘development studies’.29
The idea of the Pacific Basin as a ‘passive receptacle of observation’ or as an

area of scholarly inquiry – and, it could be added, of untold representations
in all possible media from priceless Gauguin paintings to travel brochures –
is an eminently colonialist one. A place and its peoples become the object of
study and representation according to a set of mostly unchanging criteria.
Focusing his attention more closely on this history of European representa-
tions, Sharrad detects not only an almost exclusive interest in the Polynesian
peoples of the Pacific Basin, but ‘a sense of kindred feeling for the Polyne-
sians’ as opposed to ‘the darker and “more savage” Melanesians.’30 While
this opposition between Polynesian and Melanesian is certainly accurate,
long-standing and the subject of much commentary,31 of more interest
is the lack of attention paid to the other peoples present in the Pacific
who do not belong to the indigenous peoples. This means for the most
part Asian peoples of different backgrounds: Vietnamese (or Tonkinese as
they used to be called) in the New Hebrides, Chinese on most Polynesian
islands, Japanese in the Torres Straits and Hawai‘i, Indians in Fiji to name
only some.
Notwithstanding these new geocultural complexities, this book will focus
on three main areas of cross-cultural contact: the Hawaiian, the Tahitian and
the Samoan islands, with occasional excursions to New Zealand for compar-
ative purposes. That these areas and cultures are also the most intensively
studied is consistent with the logic of this study, which will examine the
processes of performative reciprocity. Reciprocity requires a certain degree

of patterned exchange to function at all, so it is only consistent that well-

traversed areas are required in order that performance genealogies can form
and be sustained over a long period.
Fishing grounds

In an informal interview conducted at the commencement of my research
with William Pearson, then retired professor of English and New Zealand
literature at Auckland University and author of a fine collection of essays on
the Pacific in Western literature,32 Pearson remarked somewhat sceptically
that he had been told back in the 1950s by a renowned Australian historian
that the Pacific was pretty well ‘fished out’ in research terms. Fifty years on,
over-fishing is a subject all too familiar to Pacific peoples, although more
often associated with Japanese trawlers and Korean drift nets. Any scholar
trawling the archives of Pacific culture will find traces of those who have
gone before and, indeed, their catches provide essential beacons for further
orientation. And 50 years on, the fishing shows no signs of abating: on
the contrary, the Pacific as a site of cross-cultural contact has produced
interdisciplinary scholarship with resonances throughout the humanities.
My debts to precursors both past and present will be obvious as the indi-
vidual chapters unfold. As this project is as interdisciplinary as the medium
of performance is multi-dimensional, it has had to draw on a variety of
sources and disciplines. In the field of literary representation, the recent
work of Neil Rennie, Vanessa Smith, and Rob Edmond has done much to
clarify the complexities of inter-cultural encounters by applying techniques
of colonial discourse analysis to textual representations of the Pacific for the
period 1767 to 1900.33 The literature on the early explorers, mainly Cook
and Bougainville and the ensuing publications by expedition members, can
no longer be easily surveyed. The best point of departure still remains J.
C. Beaglehole’s definitive edition of the logbooks of Cook and Banks. The
ground-breaking study by Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific
(1960), mapped out conceptual territory and discussed visual and written
source material, which are still vital for scholars exploring the question of
the European artistic response to the early Pacific voyages. Smith revisited
his own early research in the collection of essays, Imagining the Pacific (1992),
cited above, and discusses this material within contemporary paradigms of
colonial discourse analysis.
Of material and methodological importance for the present study is histor-
ical anthropology, a relatively new field that emerged in the 1970s and
1980s, and which honed its methodologies on Pacific material. Clifford
Geertz, one of its distinguished practitioners observed at the end of the
1980s ‘a change in the ecology of learning that has driven historians and
anthropologists like so many migrant geese, into one another’s territories:
a collapse of the natural dispersion of feeding grounds that left France to

Introduction 13
the one and Samoa to the other’.34 Two names, which will loom large,
are Marshall Sahlins and Greg Dening. Sahlins, the anthropologist turned
historian, and Dening, the historian cum anthropologist have both in their
individual geographical areas (Hawai‘i for one, Tahiti and the Marquesas for
the other) explored the dynamics of cross-cultural encounters of the past.35
Of the two, Dening has encroached deepest into the feeding grounds of

performance and theatre studies. His study of William Bligh and the mutiny
on the Bounty36 combines social and theatre history, historical anthropology
with film criticism, and frames these multiple perspectives within theories
of theatricality: of shipboard life, of the stage, of writing history. The collec-
tion of essays, self-reflexively entitled Performances (Dening, 1996), frames
the whole process of writing (ethno-) history as a theatrical or performative
act: ‘The “theatricality of history-making” involves the notion of viewing in
a space so closed around with convention that the audience and actors enter
into the conspiracy of their own illusions.’37
Disciplinary border-crossing as performed by Greg Dening seems to be a
hallmark of modern Pacific studies. It is nowhere more apparent than in
the writings of the anthropologists Anne Salmond and Nicholas Thomas.
Salmond’s studies of first encounter in New Zealand document a clear move
towards a historical anthropology of the indigenous point of view,38 whereas
Thomas moves between (historical) anthropology,39 art history40 and edit-
orial endeavour, all of which have found their way into this study. Two
recent editions of the Forsters, father and son, edited by Thomas and others,
have finally made available in modern editions crucial documents of Cook’s
second voyage.41 Captain Cook and his voyages continue to exert a fascin-
ation for historians, biographers and anthropologists, as a spate of recent
publications document.42 The above-mentioned scholars represent only a
fraction of the literature that has been consulted. It can only serve to
define the disciplinary cartography which underpins the basic geographical
coordinates of an inquiry that methodologically is situated in the field of
historical performance studies.
The passage
This study is divided into eight chapters arranged roughly in a chronological

order. The structure is not intended as a historical narrative, but rather as a
means to trace the performative genealogies that determine the dynamics of
cross-cultural theatricality. Chapter 1, ‘Pacific Overtures: Trumpets, Beaches,
and Women’, examines how recurrent events – welcome ceremonies, land-
ings, even landscapes – were rendered comprehensible by recourse to ‘figures
of theatre’. Written descriptions and iconographical depictions abound with
set-pieces that stress spectacle. They include graphic written descriptions of
sexual encounters which define quite clearly an actor/spectator relationship.
Sexuality was performed for an audience in Tahiti, it seemed, and was not

just a private act. It is this theatrical aspect of Tahitian sexuality, it will be

argued, and not sexual permissiveness as such, that so inflamed the European
mind in the wake of the voyages of Cook and Bougainville. Performative
encounters include also the act of going ashore for the first time. These
landings, which feature prominently in the iconographical representations
of the Cook voyages particularly, always include an audience of natives,

usually involved in dancing or wild gesticulation. Not only do such illustra-
tions offer ‘ocular proof’ of imperial possession, but the integration of the
local people is deemed necessary to underline the spectacle of inter-ethnic
encounter.
These widely disseminated travel accounts written and illustrated by eye-
witnesses to the many wondrous or despicable acts resulted in a considerable
stockpile of mimetic capital. Chapter 2 will trace how these events, already
framed within tropes of the theatrical and the spectacular, were literally
theatricalized on the European stage. The focus of this chapter will be on the
early period, roughly until 1830, which saw a shift in discursive interest and
representational practice from purported authenticity to arrant exoticism.
The best-documented example of the former is the pantomime Omai, or a
Trip around the World, first performed in London in 1785. Instead of rereading
this much studied work, this chapter will examine a recently discovered
Italian ballet and opera, Gl’Inglesi in Othaiti which predates the premiere of
Omai and can be considered to be the first theatrical presentation of the
South Seas on the European stage. The chapter will also consider Augustus
von Kotzebue’s play La Pérouse in its several metamorphoses from the
German, to English to Italian stage. Kotzebue’s edenic vision of a functioning
ménage-à-trois on a South Sea island remained a contested presence on the
European stage for three decades. The final performance to be considered is
a royal one. In 1824 the recently crowned Hawaiian king Kamehameha II
and his wife visited London. Their ‘Sandwich Majesties’, as the they were
dubbed in the English press, were the talk of the town for about two months
as they attended a wide range of performative events ranging from a trial at
the Old Bailey to a Kotzebue play at Covent Garden. Wherever they went,
their presence upstaged whatever was actually being performed on the actual
stage as the local responses oscillated between condescension and curiosity.
Their final performance was tragically their own funeral, as both contracted
measles and died within ten days of one another. It too was a cross-cultural
performance as indigenous funeral rites were mixed with Anglican obsequies.
By the time Kamehameha II visited England in 1824 a number of South
Pacific islands, including the kingdom of Hawai‘i had come under missionary
influence. The bi-cultural funeral of the royal couple is in many ways symp-
tomatic of far-reaching cultural changes that were already underway. With
the arrival of European missionaries in the Pacific from the beginning of
the nineteenth century, the relationship between colonization and Polyne-
sian performance took on a new dimension. While it is well known, indeed

Introduction 15
part of Pacific-European mythology, that missionaries did all they could

to curb or ban ‘licentious dancing’, this accepted reading requires some
revision. Chapter 3, ‘Comedians and Crusaders: Anti-Theatrical Prejudice
in the South Seas’, investigates the mimetic transactions enacted between
Europeans and Polynesians in the context of the new and highly labile power
relations induced, but not always controlled by missionization. Of particular

interest is the protracted ideological battle that took place in Tahiti between
the missionaries and the arioi society, a group devoted largely to profes-
sional performances ranging from dance to comic sketches. The conflict with
the self-designated ‘comedians of the land’ reflects the deeper reasons for
missionary opposition to indigenous performance. What was declared to be
‘licentiousness’ was probably only an epithet for a more complex problem
of imposing Christian doctrine. The missionaries quickly recognized that
performance and worship were part of the same system. By banning perform-
ance they effectively cut off the life-blood of the religion without having to
address it on a doctrinal level. We shall examine how the missionaries them-
selves, although stout supporters of the ‘anti-theatrical prejudice’ which they
exported to the South Seas, also made use of theatricality in the form of
spectacular mass baptisms and propagandistic plays back in England.
Whatever their motivations and methods, there is no doubt that the
effects of missionization on indigenous Pacific performance culture were
far-reaching. From the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, indi-
genous peoples and their performance forms came under severe pressure.
Caught between missionary strictures on the one hand and increasing tourist
pressure on the other, traditional performance underwent changes and was
forced into new contexts. Chapter 4, ‘Dressing the Hula and Taming the
Haka: Performing Identity in Hawai‘i and New Zealand’, will explore how
indigenous peoples adapted performance forms such as hula in Hawai‘i or
haka in New Zealand as forms of cultural self-representation. The need to
perform one’s culture arose as a response to altered socio-political exigencies:
the addressees being on the one hand the colonizing majority and on the
other hand, other members of the indigenous culture. In both cases specific
performance forms became synonymous with the culture itself.
Within the framework of ethnographic and colonial exhibitions
(Chapter 5) it will be argued that Pacific peoples designed strategies of
metonymic performance for their own purposes. Even in the ethnographic
displays staged in Europe, a certain degree of agency can be discerned. The
focus here will not be on the world’s fairs, which have been extensively
studied, but on the particular German performance genre of the Völker-
schauen, literally ethnographic spectacles, which were developed in the latter
part of the nineteenth century by the Hamburg entrepreneur and pioneer
of zoological gardens, Carl Hagenbeck. Hagenbeck quickly recognized the
appeal of combining wild animals and savage peoples into an elaborate
performative genre. Of special interest are the activities of the Marquardt

brothers, specialized in importing troupes of Samoans, who were advertised

to the Germans as ‘your newest compatriots’, although the activities they
were required to perform were anything but ‘German’.
An important corollary to the ethnographic displays staged in the Fath-
erland was the practice of colonial ceremonies organized in the colonies
themselves. In the second part of Chapter 5, the strategies and functions of

such ceremonies will be examined on the basis of festivities organized by the
Germans in Western Samoa to celebrate German colonial rule. German colo-
nial administrators went to great lengths to incorporate indigenous perform-
ance forms at special points of the ceremonial process, which were fitted into
a carefully thought out dramaturgical structure. The primary end of such
ceremonies, as developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was to
provide a display of national unity by means of carefully staged signs. Yet in
another, and more interesting sense, the colonial ceremony developed into
a genre sui generis, because it had somewhat more complex tasks to perform
than the European model. The most obvious and difficult one was to nego-
tiate the racial and cultural conflicts that any colonial enterprise implied
and make them appear harmonious.
No doubt spurred on by an increase in colonial involvement, the early
twentieth century sees a renewal of interest in the Pacific on the Euro-
American stage. Indigenous Pacific islanders performed not only in German
zoos but also on the ‘legitimate’ stage, namely Broadway and the West
End. Chapter 6, ‘Birds of Paradise: American-Pacific Dramas of Displace-
ment’, will examine how interest shifts geographically from the European
to the American stage in the twentieth century. This move is the result
of increasing US and later Asian involvement in the area, which is motiv-
ated in turn by two central events: the US annexation of the Hawaiian
islands in the 1890s and the Japanese invasion of the Pacific in World War
II. Both events found their theatrical reflection in immensely successful
stage plays or musicals. The annexation of Hawai‘i forms the background to
Richard Walton Tully’s largely forgotten musical drama, The Bird of Paradise
(1912), which featured prominently Hawaiian dance and music performed
by Hawaiians. The second example will consider how the missionary endeav-
ours in the South Seas became the subject of dramatic treatment on the main-
stream American stage. Rain, an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s story
‘Miss Thompson’ (1921) set in Pago Pago, Eastern Samoa, recast the battle
against performance and promiscuity into a struggle between a missionary
and an American ‘loose woman’, Sadie Thompson. The play’s huge success
can be explained to some extent by a complex process of displacement
whereby the acute social debates on morality and the place of Christian
moral authority are transposed geographically while remaining local in
terms of identificatory potential for a metropolitan audience. Displacement
also underpins the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific (1949),
which broke all box-office records and is still one of the most commercially

Introduction 17
successful stage productions of all time. While the US–Japanese conflict

appears to be central, it is in fact the now burning race issue, which again is
played out not in Little Rock, Arkansas, but on a generic Polynesian island. A
central thesis to be explored is the way in which local race issues were trans-
ferred to the Pacific and reconfigured there. What connects all three plays
is a sharpening of racial issues along the fault-line of inter-racial liaisons. In

all three works the Pacific becomes a place of debate for issues of eugenics
and miscegenation.
Commodification of culture is a much-belaboured catchword in the
context of tourism. Tourist encounters with indigenous cultures are framed
in an unstable equilibrium poised between the desire for authenticity on
the one hand and the demands of commodification and consumerism on
the other. Chapter 7 will investigate how the genre of tourist perform-
ances, perhaps the quintessential and most maligned metonymic perform-
ance form, can also be ‘refunctioned’ (in Brechtian terms) to subvert the
very discourses being projected by the tourists. The issues will be exempli-
fied by looking at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawai‘i. The Polynesian
Cultural Centre (PCC), situated on the north-eastern coast of Oahu, the
main island of Hawai‘i, offers a spectacular example of the theatricalization
of Polynesian culture. Under the aegis of the Mormon church, a cultural
complex, founded in 1963, houses seven Polynesian villages and more or less
authentic inhabitants. The different activities and performances demonstrate
numerous ways in which discourses of authenticity and staging merge and
refine themselves. Using the disparate performances offered at the Hawaiian
PCC, I shall argue that performances involving the self-representation of
the ethnic ‘other’ can employ various forms of deconstruction, whereby the
spectatorial patterns of expectation are parodied and ironically subverted.
Since the 1960s the Pacific has seen a massive movement of populations
around its rim, as Tongans, Samoans, Tahitians and many other island
peoples have settled in cities such as Auckland, Sydney, Honolulu and Los
Angeles. Any consideration of contemporary Pacific experience must take
cognizance of its (also) diasporic nature. This holds as true for performance as
it does for literature, painting, or any form of aesthetic endeavour. The final
chapter will thus survey under the heading ‘translocations’ the burgeoning
theatre movement, located mainly in New Zealand, and the highly visible
theatricality of Polynesian transgendered persons, known mainly by their
Samoan term fa’afafine. Of particular interest here is the aspect of explicit
theatricality in the form of beauty pageants, shows and other performance
forms where the ‘citationality’ (Judith Butler) of drag and gay sexuality is
laminated with the citation of cultural identity.
Sexuality would appear to be at the heart of the performance group The
Naked Samoans, New Zealand’s most successful Pacific Island performance
group, but its concerns are squarely those of inter-racial rather than erotic
tensions engendered by immigration. Transgressive humour and cabaret-
style performance join forces with indigenous Samoan comic traditions

to create a new syncretic form. The Mau ensemble, an innovative dance

and performance group composed mainly of Pacific islanders, directed by
Samoan Lemi Ponifasio, is also a product of the Pacific Island diaspora in
New Zealand, although their success is now largely international as they
have garnered awards and resonated with audiences at major theatre and
arts’ festivals as well as in the Pacific region.

These final examples will hopefully demonstrate that a network of inter-
locking discourses and practices can be identified and studied which estab-
lish (dis)continuities between the late eighteenth century and today and
between locations as distant as Apia and Auckland, Honolulu and London,
Papeete and New York.

1
Pacific Overtures: Trumpets, Beaches
and Women

Ever since Columbus’s exploration of the New World, the notion of a ‘first
encounter’ has exerted continual fascination in Western discourse. Two
cultures entirely unaware of one another attempt communication by any
means at their disposal except natural language. The situation poses, in
Anthony Pagden’s words, ‘the possibility, and for many the impossibility, of
cultural commensurability’.1 The literature treating European incursions into
the Pacific contains perhaps the richest documentation of such encounters,
which, in the case of James Cook’s first and second expeditions, took place at
regular, sometimes (in the course of his circumnavigation of New Zealand)
at almost daily intervals. First encounter or contact situations are located in a
liminal space between imprévu and déjà vu, between wonder and recognition.
While most discussions tend to stress the moment of imprévu – the exper-
ience of wonder, surprise and astonishment – recent theories have begun
to question whether there can be such a thing as genuine ‘first’ encounter,
devoid of any premeditation.2 It can be argued that ostensible first-contact
scenes are always haunted by a moment of déjà vu and are therefore always
at some level recognition scenes. The Other is never totally strange, because
at some fundamental level a common ‘humanity’ is apprehended. As we
shall see, the cultures involved in these encounters immediately integrated
the foreign culture into pre-existing matrices of response. For the European
explorers, first contacts were always in some way re-enactments of previous
encounters in which they employed the same basic repertoire of actions
and theatrical devices. From the indigenous perspective, the visitors had
to be either repulsed or welcomed by means of existing practices of ritual
and ceremonial encounter. In the harbours visited on a regular basis such
as Matavai Bay in Tahiti, the ruling response was genuine anagnorisis, as
seasoned sailors and officers renewed old acquaintances.
This chapter will demonstrate three stages and modes of performative
encounter. The first tentative exchanges initiated by Abel Tasman employed
trumpets and sailors’ dances in response to native conch shells and dances
of welcome or warning. These exchanges could have fatal results as Tasman
19

quickly learned. Captain Cook preferred cannon fire and skyrockets to

impress on the islanders a mixture of awe and fear. The second stage was
enacted on the beach, which becomes a more than metaphorical theatre of
encounter. As will be demonstrated, the texts and images representing the
voyages highlighted such scenes, giving them the import and ideological
power of history paintings. The third section focuses on the proliferation

of sexual encounters, perhaps the aspect of cross-cultural ‘performance’ that
occasioned the most wonderment back in Europe. In often spectacular inver-
sions of European dichotomies, private acts became public performances,
and public performances (dances) emphasized private parts to the consterna-
tion of the European visitors. The final stage of first encounter is represented
by the mimesis of the other, as both Polynesians and Europeans adopt each
others’ clothes and performances.
Trumpets and hornpipes
Europeans had been in the Pacific intermittently since Magellan’s first

circumnavigation in 1520–21. The most important expedition in the seven-
teenth century was that of the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman, who embarked
on an expedition from the East Indies in the course of which he ‘discovered’,
or rather encountered, New Zealand in 1642 and the Tongan islands in
1643. Tasman developed a method for establishing contact with indigenous
inhabitants, which was primarily performative. He instructed his sailors to
play music, presumably to pacify the savage breast, which had quite the
opposite result. On his brief visit to Murderers’ Bay (nomen est omen) on the
South Island of New Zealand, on 18 December 1642 he ordered that music
be played:
after our people have been on board about one glass, those from the 2
canoes begin to call out to us; in a gruff, hollow voice but [we] could not
in the least understand any of it, however [we] called back to them in
token of an answer, when they began again several times, but did not
come nearer than a stonepiece’s [small cannon] shot, blew also many
times on an Instrument which gave sound like the moors’ Trumpets, we
had one of our sailor’s (who could play somewhat on the Trumpet) blow
back to them in answer, those of the Zeehaen had their under-mate (who
came to the Land [East Indies?] as Trumpeter ) do likewise: after This
several Times was done on both Sides those in the vessels have finally
stopped and paddled away.3
This famous ‘first encounter’ took place in Taitapu (Golden Bay) on the
northern tip of the South Island. Anne Salmond interprets this musical
exchange from the Maori perspective as a combination of a ‘haka, a chant
for war, and the instrument played from the canoes was almost certainly

Pacific Overtures: Trumpets, Beaches and Women 21
a shell trumpet, sounding to challenge the strangers and signalling that

the people in the bay were on the alert’.4 A haka is better known today as
a vigorous intimidating dance, but difficult to perform in the confines of
a wobbly canoe. She also suggests possible decodings of this performance
from the other side of the cultural divide: ‘the warriors must have been
mystified by these creatures who entered into their rituals, yet used exotic

instruments and spoke an unintelligible tongue.’5 That the ritual participa-
tion was marked by fatal errors in execution is common knowledge to most
New Zealanders. The Maori returned the next day in a canoe and killed four
Dutch sailors in a brief but fatal skirmish.
Like many first encounters this one had its precursors. On his third voyage
to the New World, Columbus, desperate to communicate with the inhab-
itants of what is today Trinidad, ordered a tambourine to be played and
a man to dance: the native response was similarly hostile.6 Irrespective
of what ‘meanings’ were actually exchanged in Murderers’ Bay or on the
beach in Trinidad, both examples demonstrate conclusively that wires got
significantly crossed and that performative exchanges are anything but
purely aesthetic in the Kantian sense of being non-instrumental in their
function. On the contrary, musical instruments were in both cases promptly
exchanged for more lethal ones.
Tasman did not tarry long in Murderers’ Bay, or indeed in New Zealand,
but sailed on into the Pacific. On 21 January 1643 he cast anchor before
Tongatapu, the largest island of the Tongan group. Undeterred by the
bad reception in New Zealand, he instructed his sailors to give a repeat
performance:
Meanwhile a number of South-landers had come back to the ships: for

whom the mate and the boatswain’s boy blew on trumpets, another
played on the flute, the fourth on a fiddle; the ship’s crew danced: at
which the South-landers were so astonished, that [they] forgot to shut their
mouths. 7
The plain trumpet duet of Murderers’ Bay was no match for the full-
scale song and dance act performed for (or on) the unsuspecting Tongans.
Trumpets, a flute and a fiddle provided back-up for a dancing sailors’ chorus.
The locals were evidently dumbstruck by this demonstration of a maritime
knees-up. In any event it was more efficacious than in New Zealand, as
intercourse between the Dutch and Tongans got off on a much better foot.
A pattern that was to repeat itself many times and ultimately become legend
in the South Seas began. The Tongans paddled out in their canoes; a brisk
trade in trinkets and comestibles ensued, which quickly shifted to other
kinds of traffic:
With the men came also many women on shipboard: these were all
uncommonly big: but among all stood out two frightful giantesses, one

of whom had a moustache [Marginal note: Giantesses fall in love with the
Hollanders] they both grasped the wound-healer Henrik Haelbos round
the neck: each desired fleshly intercourse: whereupon [they] assailed each
other with words. All had thick, curly and black hair. Other women felt
the sailors shamelessly the trouser-front, and indicated clearly: that they
wanted to have intercourse. [Marginal note. South-islanders what people.]

The men incited the sailors to such a transgression.8
Compared to the French and English visitors a century later, the Dutch, no
doubt braced by their staunch Protestant upbringing, gave no sign (at least
no recorded account) of actually entering into this kind of exchange. The
visitors were not, however, averse to other kinds of entertainment and thus
began a practice that can be considered ‘structural’ in the context of cross-
cultural theatricality:
[Marginal note: Wonderful King.] Tasman got an old Orangkaey9 to dress

in a shirt, trousers and jacket, and put a hat on his head. Thus clothed,
[he] stood a long time astonished at himself: his followers watched no
less amazed: but having returned to land, [he] appeared later without
clothing. Another Orangkaey presented with a glass of wine, poured the
wine out: put the glass on his head, and set off, pleased with the gift.10
On the surface, we see here a fairly primitive kind of burlesque that was
endemic in cross-cultural contacts. To dress the other in one’s own garb
meant staging a kind of ‘mimic man’, perhaps the most infamous and ambi-
valent of colonial stereotypes, as V. S. Naipaul and Homi Bhabha have
argued. Whereas Bhabha and Naipaul describe practices of self-motivated
mimicry as the response to sustained colonialism, we observe in the old
Tongan decked out in Dutch attire a variant that cannot, however, be termed
colonial in the narrower sense. Relations between the encountering cultures
were still suspended in the moment of ‘wonder’ that Greenblatt has analysed
for the first contacts in the New World. Transformation by costume is, of
course, an integral part of theatrical performance, a mode to which the
Dutch here resorted to celebrate amicable relations. Unbeknownst to the
early explorers was the fact that for some Polynesian cultures, the exchange
of clothing was part of an elaborate reception ceremony. In this case, there
were indeed two quite separate cultural performances being enacted: the one
comic, the other probably more serious. This question will be discussed in
more depth at the end of the chapter.
The anecdote also demonstrates the unpredictability inherent in perform-
ative encounters. The inverted wineglass demonstrates how a planned mise
en scène complete with props – presumably an attempt to ply the Orangkaja
with ‘firewater’ – is thwarted by a flick of the wrist and transformed into its
parody. Theatrical properties are material objects, and as Nicholas Thomas

has argued, such objects change as they move between cultures; their
properties are not inscribed in them.11 The up-turned wineglass suggests
that – and this too is endemic to the theatricality of cross-cultural perform-
ances – both audiences are laughing at two different plays, although the
action may appear to be the same.
Returning now to Tasman’s trumpets, we can trace a veritable perform-

ance tradition, as the generation of Pacific explorers who succeeded Tasman
a century later perfected these techniques. Captain Cook too used the
occasional song and dance act to impress his hosts. In Tahiti in partic-
ular, the European visitors were treated to an unbroken succession of heiva
(festivities) to which they could only reciprocate in a very modest manner.
The actual nature and function of the heiva from the Tahitian perspective
is difficult to ascertain because the purposes were clearly multiple. The first
ones seemed to have had an important ritual function by means of which
the visitors were accommodated to the local hosts. Anderson, the ship’s
surgeon on Cook’s third voyage, was given a clear emic explanation by the
Tahitian Mai (Omai), who was returning home after his sojourn in England.12
He instructed Anderson not to touch any objects because ‘it was not the
custom here to admit freedoms of that kind till they had in some measure
naturaliz’d strangers to the country by entertaining them with a festivity
for two or three days.’13 ‘Naturalizing’ strangers by means of performance is
familiar in most Polynesian cultures even today. The initial heiva were clearly
predominantly efficacious, even if the visitors perceived them mainly as
entertainment.
On Cook’s second visit to Matavai Bay in August 1773, he ordered that a
visiting dignitary, the famous Otoo (Tu), consort of the even more famous
‘Queen’ Oberea, be accompanied back to shore to the sounds of bagpipes and
‘dancing by the Seamen; Otoo in return ordered some of his people to dance
also, which dancing consisted chiefly in strange contortions of the Body,
there were some of them that could however imitate the Seamen tolerable
well both in Country dances and Hornpipes’.14 By this time the Tahitians in
Matavai Bay had begun to grow accustomed to the Europeans, having been
visited almost every year since 1767. Otoo at least had developed a taste for
the bagpipes (‘of which musick he was very fond’15 ) and others were able
to mimic the capering of the English sailors. The interesting question to be
asked is in what mode this imitation was framed. A postcolonial reading
would probably suggest a nascent form of parodic mimicry; yet there may
have been a more general principle of performance at work here: for all
the cultural misunderstandings that the visits entailed (the logbooks and
‘accounts’ are full of them), both sides recognized a ‘dance’ when they saw
one, this time not framed within a system of ritual signification but rather
in a mode of ludic disposition where there is a genuine curiosity to imitate
and thus learn from the other.
When practising performative reciprocity, however, Cook preferred more
spectacular demonstrations than country dances or sailor’s hornpipes. He

had on board ship a stock of fireworks, which, when combined with cannon-
ades from the ship’s pieces, never failed to strike awe or even fear into the
locals. On different occasions, Cook refers to how these demonstrations
‘astonished and entertained’ or even ‘entertained and frightened’ the indi-
genous audiences.16 The young German Georg Forster, accompanying his
father Johann on Cook’s second voyage, is more analytical in his diagnosis

of the impact such displays had on the Tahitians. While echoing Cook’s
estimation of the principally positive effects produced, he suggests that the
overall result was to raise the visitors even higher on to a semi-divine plane:
‘They looked upon us as extraordinary people, who had fires and stars at
command, and gave our fire-works the name Heiva-Britannee, the British
Festival.’17 When commenting on a similar festival staged for the Hawaiians
during his third voyage, Cook is even more explicit about the cultural
strategy he pursued: ‘Nothing could effectually excite the admiration of these
islanders, or strike them with more exalted ideas of our superiority, than
such a representation.’18 That such ideas of superiority could ultimately pall
was demonstrated finally by Cook’s murder on the beach at Kealakekua Bay
shortly after he wrote these words.
Landings and beaches
As Cook discovered too late, beaches could be murderous as well as ludic

places. For the first voyagers, beaches were the initial stage of encounter,
ludic or otherwise. Dramatic scenes were played out when the Europeans
attempted their first landings on the islands. These events, and the written
and iconographical representations of them, reflect further variations of
categories of perception we can term theatrical. The beach is a theatrical
place, as Greg Dening has noted. It is the privileged arena of encounter in
the Pacific, the site of first contacts and new perceptions. It is liminal in the
sense of limen, a threshold, marking different spheres of experience and thus
difference in the most palpable terms. The theatrical nature of the beach had
already been grasped and utilized by indigenous peoples before the arrival
of the Europeans, and, we could add, it became even more so after they
arrived:
In Tahiti, the island people made beaches the mythic meeting places
between Natives and Strangers. Their beach became enclosed in the ritual
space of their place of worship, consciously set between land and sea.
These temples, called Taputapuatea were theatres for the Tahitians’
deepest plays about the origins of their power and authority. They had
had such theatres long before the arrival of the European strangers in
1767.19
The beach in Tahiti was thus prefigured and defined according to a cultural
‘grammar’ based on a series of oppositions: ‘violence and quiet, sea and

land, stranger and native, politics and cosmology. No one met on the beach
at Tahiti without bending to that grammar.’20 What Dening identifies as
a structural principle of cross-cultural contact in Tahiti can be extended
to embrace any first-encounter situation in the Pacific. The deep structural
significance of the beach, and more specifically the first landings on it,
the initial moment of going ashore, was so fundamental, so loaded with

symbolic energy (ranging from the sexual to the political) that these events
were given special attention by artists and engravers both during and after
the voyages.
Many such landing scenes can be found illustrated in the early travel
accounts, nowhere more so than in Cook’s own published journal of his
second voyage (1777).21 The official artist on board, William Hodges, easily
the most accomplished of the painters and draughtsmen who accompanied
Cook, produced some of the most famous images to emerge from the early
voyages of Pacific exploration. A Voyage towards the South Pole contains no
less than four different landing scenes, produced with all the complexity
and import of history paintings. I wish to concentrate here on two – The
Landing at Middleburgh (Tonga) (Figure 1) and Landing at Erramanga (Vanuatu)
(Figure 2) – which stand in symmetrical opposition to one another. The one
symbolizes peaceful contact between Native and Stranger, the other antag-
onism and violence. Both exemplify the conventions of history painting
in the most fundamental sense in that they attempt to capture in one
charged moment events from a narrative sequence. The narrative is in
this case Cook’s accounts of the landings as described in the Voyage
towards the South Pole. For The Landing at Middleburgh we find the following
description:
Soon after, a party of us embarked in two boats, in company with Tioony;

who conducted us to a little creek formed by the rocks, right abreast of
the ships, where landing was extremely easy, and the boats secure against
the surf. Here we found an immense crowd of people, who welcomed us
on shore with loud acclamations. Not one of them had so much as a stick,
or any other weapon in their hands; an indubitable sign of their pacific
intentions. They thronged so thick round the boats with cloth matting,
&c. to exchange for nails, that it was some time before we could get room
to land. They seemed to be more desirous to give than to receive; for many
who could not get near the boats, threw into them, over the others heads,
whole bales of cloth, and then retired without either asking, or waiting
to get anything in return. At length the chief caused them to open to the
right and left, and make room for us to land. He then conducted us up
to his house, which was situated about three hundred yards from the sea,
at the head of a fine lawn, and under the shade of some shaddock trees.
The situation was most delightful. In front was the sea, and the ships at
anchor; behind, and on each side, were plantations, in which were some
of the richest productions of Nature.22


Figure 1 The Landing at Middleburgh, One of the Friendly Islands
Source: Engraving after Hodges by J. K. Sherwin, in James Cook, Voyage towards the South Pole, 3rd
edn, i. plate no. 54. Collection of the author.
If the landing on the island of Eua, part of the Tongan archipelago, is

related as an encounter with a locus amoenus, then the attempted arrival at
Erramanga, one of the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), was more like a locus
terribilis. In contrast to the ‘pacific intentions’ of the ‘Friendly Islanders’ who
bore only coconuts and ‘bales of cloth’, the islanders at Erramanga were
armed with ‘clubs, spears, darts, and bows and arrows’. Despite ostensible
signs of friendship – the offer of yams and coconuts – Cook remained on
his guard. Once the landing boat was near the beach, the islanders tried to
haul it ashore and snatch the oars from the boatsmen. In the ensuing scuffle
Cook ordered that the islanders be fired on. Two were killed and several
more wounded: ‘Happy it was for these people, that not half our musquets
would go off, otherwise many more must have fallen.’23
The events related, and more especially the images depicting them,
although different in time, place and nature (the one friendly, the other
antagonistic), are linked by the structural principles of Dening’s theatrical
grammar of the beach: the moment of dramatic encounter and conflict, the
acting out of events of political and cosmological significance. The political
significance of such landings from the European perspective is clear. The
landing is the moment of implicit or explicit political control.
The indigenous perspective is more difficult to reconstruct. Much research,
and more speculation, has been carried out over the past years in an effort to
translate these momentous events into the epistemologies of the peoples they
encountered. The traditional interpretation has been cosmological, with the
European strangers being seen as part of the cosmology of the local peoples –
in Hawai‘i, Cook was ostensibly seen as the god Lono. This has a tradition
stretching back to Columbus, but it nevertheless cannot be easily dismissed.24


Figure 2 The Landing at Erramanga, One of the New Hebrides
Source: Engraving after Hodges by J. K. Sherwin, in James Cook Voyage towards the South Pole,
3rd edn, i., plate no. 57. Collection of the author.
If we now turn our attention to the images, we can find theatricality of

different kinds at work. On the most obvious level, the events depicted reveal
the moment of focus and concentration identified as constitutive of one aspect
of theatricality in eighteenth-century modes of perception. This element
is in turn a prerequisite for history painting, a genre that throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was continually linked with drama
and the theatre. The history painter was always in search of the ‘pregnant
moment’, to cite Lessing’s felicitous term from the Laocoön (1767), in which
past, present and future seem to be unified.
The formal parallels between both pictures are obvious: the division into
sections follows the same principles of composition: the bottom left section
of both the pictures is reserved for the European landing party with the
ship hovering in the background. The larger part of the picture is reserved
for the massed crowd of natives who are framed by trees and bushes. The
locus amoenus of the house in Middleburgh is replaced in Erramanga by the
threatening presence of two naked and armed islanders who are given added
emphasis by the dark, ill-boding foliage of a large tree.
The Australian art historian and Pacific historiographer Bernard Smith has
demonstrated that, although ascribed to him, neither engraving is based
on actual drawings or sketches by the ship’s artist William Hodges. The
engravings by J. K. Sherwin are in fact after drawings by G. B. Cipriani,
who, while one of the foremost contemporary history painters in England, is
known to have never set foot in the Pacific. Smith argues that both pictures
are constructed after ‘art’ and not ‘nature’. He buttresses his argument by

referring to original drawings by Cipriani (for the Erramanga picture) and by

quoting Georg Forster’s critique of The Landing at Middleburgh. 25 Forster was
aboard ship and thus indirectly at least a kind of eyewitness. In his Voyage
Round the World (1778–80), Forster levels harsh criticism at Hodges, to whom
he logically ascribed authorship of The Landing at Middleburgh:

The plates which ornamented the history of captain Cook‘s former
voyage, have been justly criticised, because they exhibited to our eyes the
pleasing forms of antique figures and draperies, instead of those Indians
of which we wished to form an idea. But it is greatly to be feared, that Mr
Hodges has lost the sketches and drawings which he made from Nature in
the course of the voyage, and supplied the deficiency in this case, from his
own elegant ideas. The connoisseur will find Greek contours and features
in this picture, which have never existed in the South Sea. He will admire
an elegant flowing robe which involves the whole head and body, in an
island where women very rarely cover the shoulders and breast; and he
will be struck with awe and delight by the figure of a divine old man, with
a long white beard, though all the people of Ea-oowhe shave themselves
with muscle-shells.26
Empiricism triumphs over the conventionality of art in this critique; the

actuality of ‘Indian forms’ downgrades whatever beauty Classical Greek
models may have to offer. While Forster’s criticisms and Smith’s evidence
of faulty ascription make the images less interesting as documentary records
and as potential documents of visual anthropology, it increases their value
as indicators of the categories of aesthetic perception brought to bear on
cultural encounters in the Pacific.
When viewed outside the parameters of the great nature versus art debate,
the landing pictures develop an intrinsic complexity that derives from the
very theatricality that Forster and Smith criticize. The Landing at Middleburgh
is the picture that most clearly legitimizes the scene of colonial contact by its
recourse to the theatrical conventions of history painting. Both Europeans
and indigenous figures are represented in the flowing dress of neoclassicism.
Smith refers to ‘sentimentalized neo-classical versions of the noble savage
drawn in the manner of Angelica Kauffmann’,27 whereby the reference to
Kauffmann is clearly not intended as a compliment. The almost complete
homogenization of the figures results in a curious visual effect. The expected
cultural contrast in terms of dress and physiognomy is eliminated in favour
of a merging of the two sides of the dramatic encounter. The blurring of
difference is not just a product of iconographical conventions, as can be seen
when comparing Middleburgh with the other landing pictures. In the latter,
there is considerable effort made to produce visual contrast between Native
and Stranger, even if the result is not ethnographically accurate.

Shocking spectacles
Of all the myths surrounding the discovery of the South Sea islands, the
stories of sexual promiscuity were those that most interested and inflamed
the European audience back home. The apparent uncomplicated exchange
of amorous favours for iron nails was a transaction that, for the male public

at least, seemed to encapsulate a sexual economy in which even the poorest
sailor could be a sultan. The spectacle of overt sexual overtures and their occa-
sional public consummation gave the term ‘theatre of love’ a new meaning.28
The locus classicus of erotic spectacle can be found in Bougainville’s Voyage
autour du monde. After describing how the Tahitians in their canoes commu-
nicated by universally understood signs that the French should come ashore
and form connections with their women, Bougainville relates how one very
resolute young girl climbed on to the ship:
In spite of all our precautions, a young girl came on board, and placed
herself upon the quarter-deck, near one of the hatchways, which was
open, in order to give air to those who were heaving at the capstern below
it. The girl carelessly droped a cloth, which covered her, and appeared to
the eyes of all beholders, such as Venus shewed herself to the Phrygian
shepherd, having, indeed, the celestial form of that goddess. Both sailors
and soldiers endeavoured to come to the hatch-way; and the capstern was
never hove with more alacrity than on this occasion.29
Most commentary of this scene has pointed to the classical allusions and
metaphors Bougainville employs, particularly the figuring of Tahiti in terms
of Greek mythology. Of interest is also the sheer theatricality of the scene.
While the girl’s act of divesting herself of her last (or only) piece of clothing is
itself spectacular enough, one should also focus on the spatial configuration
evoked. There are many onlooker positions and they function to reinforce
the intensity of the scene through focus and concentration. At least three
different groups of spectators can be identified. When the girl clambers up on
to the quarterdeck (a space usually reserved for officers), she is being viewed
by those sailors and officers on deck (including obviously Bougainville); by
the Tahitians waiting in the surrounding canoes; and lastly, and perhaps
most importantly, she is seen from below, from the hatchway where the
sailors are working and where they scramble to look up at the sight of
‘celestial’ splendour. By thus emphasizing a variety of intense, and clearly
erotically driven gazes, Bougainville is practising a kind of ekphrasis, the
verbal description of a picture, with his description deliberately echoing the
theatricality of rococo history painting.
There is another theatrical emphasis implicit in the scene if one
adds to it the account of the young volunteer on board the Boudeuse,
Charles-Félix-Pierre Fesche. He reports that the Tahitian Venus was not alone,

but accompanied by an old man and several other Tahitians. He stresses the
whiteness of her skin, ‘the envy of most Spanish women’; and instead of
standing in splendid isolation, as Bougainville suggests, Fesche writes that
the French:
came closer, looked, admired, touched; soon the veil was lifted, and truly

much more thanks to the Indian goddess herself than by the French. She
followed the customs of her country, customs that have been destroyed
in France by the corruption of our morals. What brush could paint the
splendors that we apprised on the happy fall of that veil? A sanctuary
consecrated for cupid himself and which he would share with no other.
An enchanted little wood that the god himself had doubtlessly planted.
We were plunged into ecstasy; a strong and sweet warmth befell our
senses, we burned .30
Unfortunately, in Fesche’s view, decency prevents the French from

converting thoughts to deeds. From her reactions, Fesche interprets that the
Tahitian ‘Venus’ left the ship in disgust, annoyed with the visitors for their
inability to overcome their inhibitions and make a sacrifice to the goddess.
One could also gloss the scene in theatrical terms in the sense that the French
preferred for obvious reasons to enjoy the spectacle as spectacle and not to
cross the fourth wall to enter into direct intercourse with the scene being
played out before their eyes.31
Although the large majority of sexual contacts were secret or open
connections in native huts, sailors’ hammocks or under coconut palms,
the great political, religious or ludic significance the Tahitians attached to
sexual union with their strange visitors can be gauged from the repeated
attempts that were made to ‘stage’ copulation between cultures as a (from
the European point of view) theatrical entertainment. A number of these
encounters were recorded in varying degrees of detail. The emphasis on
viewing, on the spectator position, recurs throughout the early accounts of
sexuality encountered on the early visits to Tahiti. It ranges from impromptu
public copulation by an Irish marine from the Dolphin, to the famous ‘rites
of Venus’ scene staged by ‘Queen’ Oberea and witnessed by Captain Cook.
A scene which then gave rise to a ‘theatrical entertainment’ back in London.
In the rest of this section I wish to examine in more detail the performance
dynamics of the erotic encounters between Europeans and Tahitians, as they
were played out in two different cultural frameworks.
The scene witnessed by the French had already been well rehearsed by the
Tahitians almost a year before during the visit of HMS Dolphin under the
command of Captain Wallis. The initial contacts between the two cultures
had been antagonistic rather than intimate, with stones being thrown and
muskets fired. These skirmishes continued on and off during the first days.
After being fired at by a party of sailors in a boat trying to collect water,

the Tahitians on shore changed their tactics, as George Robertson, the ship’s
master, recorded in his journal:
they soon found non of them was hurt and all returnd back to the Water
side, and brought a good many fine young Girls down of different colours,
some was a light coper collour oyrs a mullato and some almost if not

altogeather White – this new sight Atract our mens fance a good dale,
and the natives observed it, and made the Young Girls play a great many
droll wanting [wanton] tricks.32
Although initially unsuccessful – the sailors did not allow themselves to

be lured ashore – the Tahitians continued their ploy the next day when
about several hundred canoes surrounded the Dolphin, ostensibly to trade:
‘the most of the trading canoes which lay round the ship, and dealt with
our people, had a fair young Girl in each Canoe, who playd a great many
droll wanton tricks, which drew all our people upon the Gunwells to see
them.’33 Although the erotic display was soon followed by a hail of stones,
which was responded to in turn by a devastating blast of cannon fire (the
colonial structure of pleasure and pain manifested itself within minutes of
each other), the fundamental theatrical situation is still unmistakable. The
Tahitians provided the English with a repeat performance of ‘droll wanton
tricks’ performed by fair-skinned young girls. By thus attracting all the
English to the gunwales they were presented with better targets for their
stones. Quite apart from the aspect of military tactics employed, the more
important point is that the theatrical communication worked. ‘Droll wanton
tricks’, whatever they actually were, constituted a signifying practice that
functioned across cultures.
While these initial displays remained within the framework of distanced
spectatorship, the next stage involved a shift from the realm of ocular to
haptic proof. After amicable relations had been established and the English
had begun to move about onshore, the flourishing trade in hogs, pigs
and fruit that had already commenced on the ship was rapidly expanded
to include young girls once both sides realized that a demand existed.
The ice was broken, again, by a significant and signifying exchange of
glances:
But our Young men seeing several very handsome Young girls, they could
not help feasting their eyes with so agreeable a sight this was observed
by some of the Elderly men, and several of the Young Girls was drawen
out, some a light coper colour oythers a mulatto and some almost White.
The old men made them stand in Rank, and made signs for our people
to take which they lyked best, and as many as they lyked and for fear
our men hade been Ignorant and not known how to use the poor young
Girls, the old men made signs how we should behave to the Young
women.34

Needless to say, this message was clearly understood on the other side of the
cultural divide and the English sailors communicated back that they knew
perfectly well what to do, which ‘seemd to please the Old men greatly when
they saw our people merry, but the porr young Girls seemd a little afraid,
but soon after turnd better aquanted’.35 It is worth noting how Robertson
stresses the various figures of seeing on the part of both cultures, which is

further emphasized (on this and later occasions) by the girls having to stand
in rank in order to be better beholden.
The primacy of seeing and being seen manifests itself not surprisingly in
the first ‘observed’ sexual contact between European and Tahitian. While
Robertson did not actually witness this first encounter himself, he hears a
fairly detailed report on the same day:
I was tould by one of the Young Gentlemen that a new sort of trade took
up the most of their attention this day, but it might be more properly
called the old trade, he says a Dear Irish boy one of our marines was the
first that began the trade, for which he got a very severe cobing [thrashing]
from the Liberty men for not beginning in a more decent manner, in
some house or at the back of some bush or tree, Padys excuse was the fear
of losing the Honour of having the first.36
The ‘Pady’ received his thrashing for exposing to European public view what
even the seasoned soldiers and sailors deemed unfit for visual consumption.
The young marine, for his part, sought to provide ‘ocular proof’ of his first
contact. That it was an Irishman, himself an outsider on an English ship,
might also suggest a subtle division within the monolithic ‘European’ view
and its implied binary.
In a sense the young Irishman had involuntarily ‘gone native’ by offending
the fundamental cultural opposition between public and private, which,
while by no means immutable in European culture, generally held sexual acts
to be an activity exclusively reserved for the private sphere. By ‘performing’
it in public, the marine had unwittingly crossed an important cultural
threshold for Europeans and Tahitians alike, which brought sexual perform-
ance into a theatrical perspective by rendering it spectacle. While both parties
of the cross-cultural encounter seemed to have perceived it, the semanticiz-
ation of the threshold was radically different.
All the early explorers to Tahiti (as well as other islands) remarked on
the repeated efforts of the indigenous people to make hosts and guests
‘connect’ in public. By the time Bougainville arrived, the Tahitians from
Matavai Bay, the principle anchoring place for European ships, were well
acquainted with the propensity of sailors for Tahitian girls. Soon after the
spectacular tableau of the Tahitian ‘Venus’ before the Phrygian sailors, the
French went ashore. Bougainville relates how the ship’s cook was stripped
naked by the Tahitians and rendered a spectacle to their gaze. They also

endeavoured to persuade him to ‘content those desires’ with a girl on the

spot.37 Perhaps not surprisingly, the cook did not feel up to the task; certainly
not in the theatrical situation the Tahitians favoured. Undaunted, over the
next ten days the French spent on the island, the Tahitians made repeated
attempts to have the visitors ‘sacrifice to the goddess of love’ in public.
Some of these encounters were observed and recorded by Bougainville and

others. Bougainville, for example, suggests that these overtures were not just
isolated incidents but part of a social pattern of ‘friendliness’:
Our people were daily walking in the isle without arms, either quite alone, or
in little companies. They were invited to enter the houses, where the people
gave them to eat; nor did the civility of the landlords stop at a slight colla-
tion, they offered them young girls; the hut was immediately filled with
a curious crowd of men and women, who made a circle round the guest,
and the young victim of hospitality. The ground was spread with leaves
and flowers, and their musicians sung a hymeneal song to the tune of their
flutes. Here Venus is the goddess of hospitality, her worship does not admit
of any mysteries, and every tribute paid to her is ‘a feast’ for the whole
nation. They were surprised at the confusion which our people appeared
to be in, as our customs do not admit of these public proceedings.38
This predilection for public copulation was interpreted by the resident

Rousseauist on board, the ship’s naturalist, Philibert Commerson, as an
expression of religious practice. Although his interpretation stresses religion,
his ethnographical description is couched in the metaphoric language of
the stage:
The act of procreation is a religious act; the prelude to it is stimulated by

the desires and songs of the throng assembled for this purpose, and its
completion is acquitted with general applause. Any stranger is admitted
to participate in these happy mysteries; indeed, it is even one of the laws
of hospitality to invite him, so that the good Utopian [Tahitian] enjoys
endless delight – either the sensation of his own pleasure or the spectacle
of the sensual joys of others.39
Preludes, music, applause, mysteries, spectacle: Commerson’s metaphors

embed Tahitian sexual mores in a Rousseauian inflected utopia where the
spectacle of people’s festivals rather than the theatre forms the basis of a
moral society.
The erotic details of Commerson’s general ‘laws’ were provided by the
young gentleman Charles-Félix Fesche in a kind of ‘thick description’ of
Tahitian ‘deep play’. He records at considerable length an encounter with
a Tahitian family. A group of Frenchmen are invited into their house. The
head of the family provides the Europeans with details of Tahitian material

culture until the possibility of performative culture is announced with the

arrival of the host’s wife and 12-year old daughter. After a meal of coconuts
and bananas, the Tahitians move into performance mode:
We saw then how each of them took up a leafy twig and formed a circle
around us. One of those standing there took up a flute from which he

produced sweet and pleasant sounds. A mat was spread out in the middle
and the young girl [the daughter] sat down upon it. The sign language of
all the Indians gave us clearly to understand what was required. As this
custom was so entirely foreign to our own customs, and to ascertain that
they really meant it, one of us approached the presented sacrifice, gave her a
false pearl, which he fastened to the girl’s ear, and dared to proffer her a kiss
which was immediately reciprocated. A bold hand, steered by love, slid over
two budding, opposing apples, which, like those of Helen’s, were worthy
to serve as a model for charming-shaped cups of incomparable beauty.40
The ‘bold hand’ continues its journey downwards until it encounters an

impediment in the form of a loin cloth, which the wearer swiftly removes
until she is in Eve’s costume ‘before her fall’. The girl then beats the breast
of the French ‘warrior’ laying siege and communicates to him her willing-
ness to ‘fall’ by ‘opening the barriers to the temple in which so many men
offer sacrifice every day’.41 Although the warrior was too well versed in the
‘art of fencing’ not to have been able to take advantage of such an oppor-
tunity, the presence of fifty Indians cooled his ardour to such a degree that
further combat or sacrifice was to no avail. The moral of the story: ‘Only
he who fears the light does evil, or believes to do it. We conceal ourselves
to carry out so natural an act; they do it openly and often.’42 Fesche goes
on to describe, more ethnographically than erotically this time, a ‘typical’
Tahitian ‘wedding ceremony’, which corresponds in most details to the
afore-mentioned encounter except that the ‘actors’ (as Fesche terms them)
display few inhibitions and consummate the sacrifice.
The genre of erotic ethnography elaborated by the young French volontaire,
for all its mixed metaphors of military combat, religious sacrifice and theatrical
performance, links two elements that continued to exert a fascination on and
influence the European perspective of the South Seas. The Tahitians, in partic-
ular, appeared to combine sexuality, religious worship and theatrical display in
one and the same performance.43 One can also adduce that women were objects
of exchange in these transactions. The examples from the Dolphin suggest a
great deal of coercion in the initial encounters as older men forced young girls
to make contact with the sailors. They were perhaps part of a ‘gift’ economy
in which women were the circulating commodities. In this respect the Poly-
nesian culture would seem to offer confirmation of the feminist critique of a
heterosexual cultural matrix predicated on women as objects of exchange.44
Anthropologists have offered alternative explanations based in part on
early indigenous interpretations. With reference to similar encounters in

Hawai‘i, Anne Salmond, for example, cites Samuel Kamakau, an early

Hawaiian historian, who suggested that the enforced sexual relations were
a means to test the visitor’s possible divinity.45 Marshall Sahlins has also
analysed the Hawaiian first contacts and argued that these ‘affairs’ were
neither an expression of the overwhelming, culturally transcendent sex
appeal of Europeans nor just a straightforward ‘business’. In his ‘Supplement

to the Voyage of Cook, or: le calcul sauvage’, an ‘essay on the historical
efficacy of love’, Sahlins attempts to place the amorous actions of the
Hawaiians in an explanatory framework that contrasts ‘prescriptive’ and
‘performative’ structures within differing or even the same cultural systems:
We could say that they [performative cultures] are differentially ‘open’

to history. The performative orders tend to assimilate themselves to
contingent circumstances; whereas, the prescriptive rather assimilate the
circumstances to themselves – by a kind of denial of their contingent
evenemential character.46
The first contacts between Europeans and Pacific peoples were, if they were
anything, contingent and ‘evenemential’ to the highest degree for both sides.
Neither culture had the prescribed cultural systems in place to deal effort-
lessly with contingent situations that happened on a daily basis: whether
they were breaches of tapu or offers to copulate in public. Sahlins argues
that the so-called permissiveness or promiscuity of the Hawaiians (and the
argument can be extended to the Tahitian situation as well) was in fact a
reflection of a performative economy whereby new phenomena were incor-
porated into the semantic systems and patterns of the island societies. As
Sahlins puts it: ‘[Hawaiian society] was performative: rather literally a “state
of affairs,” created by the very acts that signified it.’47
The famous traffic in nails initiated by the English sailors of the Dolphin
was perceived by them to be the introduction of the ‘oldest trade’ to the
unsullied isles. Conversely, one could speak, following Sahlins, not of the
implantation of a pernicious practice from the Polynesian point of view, but
rather of the incorporation and assimilation of the foreigners into the struc-
tures and cultural transactions of the host society. It could be argued that
Polynesians performed sex as an attempt to integrate the foreign beings into
an existing cultural state of affairs. However speculative such theories may
be, they at least proceed from the premise of indigenous agency as compared
to the older Eurocentric paradigms, which figure the Pacific peoples in the
passive role of victims of a ‘fatal impact’. Sexual exchanges constitute perhaps
the most striking example of the intertwining of material and performance
culture, where the payment of a nail for pleasure resulted for the one side
in the procurement of sexual favours (to the great detriment of the ship’s
woodwork and fastenings) and, for the other, in accruements of religious or
social status.48

Venus observ’d
Captain Cook recorded what was to become the most famous example of
the striking compound of sexual with other performative activities during
his first sojourn in Tahiti. It came to be known as the ‘Point Venus scene’,
less on account of the type of activities observed than because the place

in question was the vantage point from which the transit of the planet
Venus was observed. On 14 May 1769, Cook, who was by all accounts not
overly fond of religious activities, celebrated a divine service in the newly
constructed fort. The theatrical and/or ethnographical potential of such a
cultural performance did not escape the ship’s naturalist, Joseph Banks, who
noted in his journal his desire that ‘our Indian freinds should be present
that they might see our behaviour and we might if possible explain to them
(in some degree at least) the reasons for it.’49 This was presumably the first
time (with the exception of sailors’ jigs and their musical accompaniment)
that the Tahitians had seen Europeans in a formalized performance situation.
Banks notes that the guests followed his movements slavishly, yet were not
interested in explanations. Thus ended the first, albeit largely unconscious
attempt at proselytizing among the Tahitians. It was not until 30 years
later with the arrival of the first English missionaries that this activity was
resumed.
The staging of a divine service at a place called Point Venus turned out
to be more than apt as Cook and his men soon discovered. Perhaps in a
gesture of performative reciprocity, a group of Tahitians carried out their
own religious ceremony outside the gate of the fort later on in the day. Cook
reports the scene in his characteristic laconic way:
This day closed with an odd Scene at the Gate of the Fort where a young
fellow above 6 feet high lay with a little Girl about 10 to 12 years of age
publickly before several of our people and a number of the Natives. What
makes me mention this, is because, it appear’d to be done more from
Custom than Lewdness, for there were several women present particularly
Obarea and several others of the better sort and these were so far from
shewing the least disapprobation that they instructed the girl how she
should act her part, who young as she was, did not seem to want it.50
Cook’s journal in its original version remained unknown to his contempor-

aries. The scene itself became famous, or rather infamous, in Hawkesworth’s
rendering. John Hawkesworth was entrusted with the task of editing an offi-
cial account of the recent voyages of exploration. He had at his disposal the
journals of Cook and Banks. Neil Rennie has glossed the way Hawkesworth
links the two performances (divine service and public copulation) ‘by way of
an amusing but irreverent metaphor’.51 Hawkesworth writes (in the person
of Cook): ‘Such were our Matins; the Indians thought fit to perform Vespers

of a very different kind’; and Cook’s biblical ‘lay with’ is transformed by

his editor into the more Bougainvillean ‘performed the rites of Venus’.52
Although Hawkesworth softens the account slightly, its impact on the British
reading public was nonetheless considerable.53 The pun on ‘perform’ did
not go unnoticed; indeed, it was seized upon by wits and clerics alike.
An anonymous ‘Christian’ conducted a ten-week long campaign against

Hawkesworth, comparing his ‘account’ unfavourably with ‘that scandalous
performance’ Fanny Hill.54
The transformation from metaphorical to actual performance was effected
by the notorious brothel madam Charlotte Hayes, who, as Rennie notes,
‘recognized that Hawkesworth’s Voyages contained not only “entertaining
matter” but matter for entertainment’.55 The source for this re-enactment is a
book of somewhat doubtful veracity entitled Nocturnal Revels: or, The History
of King’s-Place, and other Modern Nunneries containing their Mysteries, Devotions,
and Sacrifices. Comprising also, the Ancient and Present State of Promiscuous
Gallantry: with the Portraits of the most Celebrated Demi-reps and Courtesans of
this Period: as well as Sketches of their Professional and Occasional Admirers. By
a Monk of the Order of St. Francis. Ostensibly an account of a high-class club
cum brothel, related by a ‘Monk of the Order of St. Francis,’ the activities
of the members were exclusively devoted to pleasures of the flesh. The chief
coordinator of activities was the said Mrs Charlotte Hayes, who arranged sala-
cious entertainments based on literary or artistic models.56 Hawkesworth’s
Account, evidently stimulated her imagination, for she issued to her guests
the following invitation:
Mrs. Hayes presents her most respectful compliments to Lord—, and takes
the liberty to acquaint him, that to-morrow evening, precisely at seven,
a dozen beautiful Nymphs, unsullied and untained, and who breathe
health and nature, will perform the celebrated rites of Venus, as practised
at Otaheite, under the instruction and tuition of Queen Oberea; in which
character Mrs. Hayes will appear upon this occasion.57
Then follows a quotation from Hawkesworth in which the Point Venus

scene is related together with his editorial commentary, where he attempts
to provide a ‘philosophical’ discussion of the question whether ‘shame
attending certain actions is implanted in Nature, or superinduced by
custom’.58 In the case of the London performance, Mrs Hayes had evidently
studied Hawkesworth’s account attentively, as the anonymous writer of the
Nocturnal Revels notes:
Mrs Hayes had certainly consulted these pages with uncommon attention,
and she concluded, that shame upon similar occasions ‘was only superin-
duced by custom,’ and being so much of a Natural Philosopher as to have
surmounted all prejudices, she resolved not only to teach her Nuns all the

Rites of Venus as practiced at Otaheite, but to improve upon them, with

the invention, fancy and caprice of ARETIN; having taught them everyone
of his postures, in their former rehearsals, and which they were already
pretty expert.
Upon this salacious Olympic she had no less than three-and-twenty
Visitors, consisting chiefly of the first Nobility, some Baronets, and but

five Commoners.
What follows is a sexually suggestive account of staged copulation between

the ‘unsullied nymphs’ and ‘the most athletic, best proportioned young
men that could be procured’. That the performance is done ‘by the book’ is
demonstrated by the fact that the Festino begins with the presentation of ‘a
Nail of at least twelve inches in length, in imitation of the presents received
by the ladies of Otaheite upon these occasions’ (Nocturnal Revels, 1779: 26).
The festivities conclude with several of the spectators taking over the roles
of the ‘male devotees’.
Whatever the factual status of this account, and it is mixed to say the least,
the processes of theatricality it purports to represent are significant. One
can observe a circulation of mimetic capital, as the highly theatrical energy
of the events recounted by the English explorers begins via Hawkesworth’s
publication to find entry into the popular imagination. The Festino also
represents a further variation of the theme of the reversal of the private and
public nature of sexual activities. While the Tahitians seemed to insist on
the public nature of sexual contact, thus theatricalizing it in the eyes of the
European visitors, the performance enacted at the King’s Club blurred the
clear opposition. The club itself was clearly ‘private’ in the sense of being
highly select and only frequented by invited guests of the best pedigree,
yet the act of staging sexual acts before an audience brought the European
spectators far closer to a Tahitian cultural economy than they were conscious
of. The already instituted flaunting of accepted sexual behaviour received
a curious ‘ethnographic’ sanction in the form of Hawkesworth’s ‘empirical’
account.
Wanton dancing
Even in formal performance situations, the Tahitians continued to practise

a conflation of the sexual and the aesthetic in such a way as to confound
European perceptual categories. All early visitors remarked on the ‘lascivious’
nature of the dances they saw performed. Particularly confusing was the
dance by young girls that the English called Timorodee, which, according
to Cook, consisted of ‘indecent songs and useing most indecent actions’.
Whereas Cook remains characteristically reticent in the moral interpretation
accorded to the dance, noting chiefly that the dancers are young, keep good

time and that the practice is suspended once they ‘have form’d a connection
with a man’,59 the editor of his journal, Hawkesworth, seized on this passage
to provide significant embellishments:60
In these dances they keep time with an exactness which is scarcely

excelled by the best performers upon the stages of Europe. But the prac-

tice which is allowed to the virgin, is prohibited to the woman from the
moment that she has put these hopeful lessons in practice, and realized
the symbols of the dance.61
The comparison with the ‘best performers upon the stages of Europe’
provides an unusual example of hyperbole in reference to Tahitian perform-
ance forms in that they are framed within the discursive orbit of European
theatrical practice. More characteristic is the final comment, which draws
the reader’s attention to the link between performance and practice. The fact
that for Tahitian girls dance is a kind of propaedeutics of sexuality and that
they ‘realize the symbols’ of their performances suggests a shift from the
subjunctive to the indicative mode (to cite Victor Turner’s famous distinc-
tion) that stands in stark contrast to the European ontology of performance
which locates signs chiefly in the realm of the subjunctive. Cook does not
elaborate the exact nature of these signs. A more detailed description is
provided by William Anderson, a surgeon on the third voyage, who described
a dance involving ‘young women, who put themselves into several lascivious
postures’ and repeated stanzas of a chant:
At certain parts they put their garments aside and exposd with seemingly
very little sense of shame those parts which most nations have thought
it modest to conceal, but in particular a woman more advanc’d in years
who stood in front & might properly be calld the tutoress or prompter
of the rest, held her cloaths continually up with one hand and dancd
with uncommon vigour and effrontery, as if to raise in the spectators
the most libidinous desires and incite her pupils to emulation in such a
wanton excercise. The men flockd eagerly round them in great numbers
to see their performance and express’d the most anxious curiosity to see
that part just mentioned, at which they seemed to feel a sort of rapture
that could only be expressed by the extreme joy that appear’d in their
countenances.62
What Anderson records is a graphic account of the reciprocal effects of

performance. Gestures, movement and song are combined to elicit an
emotive response entirely in keeping with eighteenth-century theories of
the passions. The account characteristically oscillates between revulsion and
fascination. Epithets such as ‘licentiousness’ and ‘lasciviousness’ alternate

with adjectives that hint that the writer may have shared the ‘rapture’ that
the indigenous spectators and performers evidently experienced.
Less ambivalent was the reaction to the facial expressions that appeared
to have accompanied the Timorodee and which were captured in sketches by
Sydney Parkinson, the artist on board the Endeavour. Joseph Banks writes of
the dancers ‘setting their mouths askew in a most extraordinary manner’,63

while Georg Forster was more offended by the facial than by the pelvic or
gestural contortions of the Tahitian dancers he witnessed:
Their attitudes and gestures were much varied, and sometimes might
admit of being construed into wantonness; but they were entirely free
from that positive degree of gross indecency which the chaste eyes of
English ladies of fashion are forced to behold at the opera. The only
action which gives offence to all our ideas of gracefulness and harmony,
is the frightful custom of writhing their mouths into the strangest distor-
tions, which it was impossible for any of us to imitate. They screwed their
mouth into a slanting direction, and at last threw the lips into a waving
or undulated form, which seemed to us to be performed by means of an
habitual and sudden convulsion.64
In a characteristic turn of thought, Forster arrives at a kind of reversed

perspective, whereby European operatic dance is more guilty of ‘gross inde-
cency’, for English ladies at least, than Tahitian dancing. Forster contrasts
the ‘wantonness’ of Tahitian dancing as a projection of European imagin-
ation (‘being construed’) with the apparent unmitigated variety in Europe,
although what he precisely means by ‘gross indecency’ in this context
remains unclear.65 Far more disturbing is evidently the aesthetic revulsion
produced by the facial distortions. Not only does the practice contravene
established notions of harmony synonymous with dance but it also evokes
pathological associations (‘sudden convulsion’) which place this kind of
performance outside acceptable boundaries of aesthetic practice. Finally,
Forster’s reference to the Europeans’ inability to imitate the expression desig-
nates it clearly as a mark of alterity that cannot be assimilated into Western
corporeal repertoires.
With the exception of such ‘distortions’, dance provided the most nego-
tiable connection between purported or actual sexual encounters and the
socially acceptable codes of the European reading or viewing audience. Of the
rich iconographical record produced in conjunction with Cook’s voyages –
much of which was the result of first hand observations – Polynesian dances
were easily one of the most popular motifs. The visual material ranges
from unpublished sketches, such as Parkinson’s drawings of grimacing Tahi-
tian dancers, to fanciful and mass-produced engravings. Figure 3, published
some three years after Cook’s death for a popular work on geography, harks
back to the first discovery of Tahiti by Captain Wallis in 1767. The image


Figure 3 ‘Captain Wallis on his arrival at O’Taheite in conversation with Oberea the
Queen, while her attendants are performing the dance called the Timorodee’
Source: Engraving by Morris after a drawing by Hamilton. 1782. By permission of the Bishop
Museum.
refers to Hawkesworth’s description of the scene (although not illustrated

there) and is a composite impression of several encounters between Tahitians
and Europeans related in his account of the early voyages. For some of
its gestural details the picture draws on Bartolozzi’s engravings of Tahitian
dance published in Hawkesworth, which are fanciful renderings of the
written text rather than the transposition of drawings from artists on the
voyage.
The engraving of Wallis in Tahiti provides a characteristic summation
of received ideas of the connections between Tahiti, eroticism, dance and
conquest. Captain Wallis, the English commander who took ‘possession’ of
the island during his sojourn there, is entertained by Queen Oberea and
half-clad dancers performing the Timorodee. Almost generic for these kinds
of images is the presence of the European spectator(s) for whose exclusive
delectation the dance appears to be performed. In a performative gesture
with its implied text of ‘behold’, Queen Oberea directs the gaze of Wallis to
the spectacle of the topless dancers. Their highly Europeanized appearance
(not uncharacteristic for these pictures) provides an identificatory image for
the viewer, while at the same time markers of cultural alterity such as the
drums and nose-flute player situate the scene clearly in a non-European

context. Dance thus provides a complex nexus of performance activities,

which allows the sexual-erotic level to be linked with other discourses.
Becoming the other
The ‘rites of Venus’ staged by Mrs Hayes with herself in the starring role of

Queen Oberea demonstrate another crucial feature of cross-cultural theat-
ricality. The urge to rework described actions in another medium in the
form of a masquerade or dance brings us closer to a phenomenon which
is characteristic of cross-cultural encounter in general and can be termed,
with reference to Michael Taussig, ‘the mimesis of alterity’. Citing Walter
Benjamin’s claim that the mimetic faculty is the compulsion to become
the other, Taussig explores what he calls ‘the two-way street of Euro-
American colonialism’ along which cultures in contact transact symbolic
exchanges in a theatrical mode.66 The mimesis of alterity, the urge to become
the other, even for a brief moment, manifests itself in moments of first
contact where fear and repulsion are often counteracted by attraction and
fascination. The mimetic responses range from a simple imitation of gestures
or the exchange of clothes to complete adoption of, and absorption into,
the other culture. These acts constitute, it can be argued, a first stage in the
accumulation of mimetic capital. The mimetic urge – or the act of mimicry
(as it is often pejoratively termed) – is an integral part of colonial history
as postcolonial theory has frequently pointed out.67 In the two examples to
be discussed, they are still outside colonial history proper and, in terms of
the power relations involved, constitute a balanced exchange of theatrical
signs.
For the first example we must return to HMS Dolphin and the first encoun-
ters between Europeans and Tahitians as related by George Robertson in
his journal. Once the initial violence had subsided and trade (both old and
new) was in full swing, Robertson and his fellow officers befriended a Tahi-
tian whom they christened Jonathan. He visited the ship frequently and
was even initiated into the rituals and ceremonies of dining at an English
officers’ table. The relationship ended when Robertson and another officer
presented Jonathan with a suit of clothes:
Mr Furneux and I rigged out Jonathan with a compleet Sute of Cloathes

shoes etc. we hade plenty of devertion showing him how to put all the
Cloathes on, espetially the Bretches they puseld [puzzled] him worst of
all, but after he found out how to use them he seemd more fond of them
than all the rest except the shoes, they pleasd him greatly and he walkt up
and doun the Deck with great spirits. After dinner he went ashoar in his
English dress and seemd Extreemly happy when our Boat Landed him, he
called to some of the country people to carry him out for fear of weiting
his shoes, and when he came to the river he made two of his servants

carry him over, but before he always wade through the River without
any kind of ceremony. When he got across the River a great many of his
Country people came round him and he took great pleasure of showing
himselfe – but what became of this Jolly young fellow afterwards we know
not, as we neaver saw nor heard anything more of him.68

Robertson’s anecdote recounts the basic situation of cross-cultural contact
that Stephen Greenblatt has called ‘the assimilation of the other’.69 We
have already encountered it earlier in the chapter when Tasman’s officers
decked out a Tongan in sailors’ garb. The dressing of an ‘untutored savage’
in the raiment of civilization is a deeply ambivalent and multi-faceted act.
At its most superficial, the situation stage-managed by the officers provided
them with ‘plenty of devertion’ (present-day circus acts featuring apes in
clothes or on bicycles appeal to the same impulse). From the European
perspective, normal clothes are transformed into theatrical costume, as they
are literally divested of their typical cultural functions when they adorn
a strange body. Both the act of dressing and the ensuing parading of the
clothes on deck demonstrate the transformative power of signs charac-
teristic of cross-cultural theatricality. As the embodied objects move from
one culture to another, they become charged with an excess of divergent
meanings.
On another level, however, the European clothes evidently endowed
Jonathan with signs of power, perhaps mana, as he returned to the shore.70
His performative display, first on board ship and then to the Tahitians
ashore, while totally disparate in terms of the messages being transmitted
and received, was predicated on the fact that at this moment, for both
cultures, clothing was no longer fulfilling practical but primarily symbolic
and theatrical functions. For the Europeans, Jonathan had become a clown,
for Tahitians he presumably was demonstrating some kind of control over
the signs of the strangers. Although we can only speculate about the effect
of Jonathan’s performance on his compatriots, there is no doubt that his
assumption or usurpation of the signs of alterity was significant. Just as
Europeans misread the semantics of Tahitian dress, so too did the Tahi-
tians reinterpret Jonathan’s acquisitions. The latter certainly entered the
local symbolic economy, for Jonathan has one final entrance in the long
drama of European-Tahitian first encounters. When Cook arrived at Matavai
Bay on the Endeavour two years later, Jonathan appeared in his English suit
to welcome them. When two high-ranking individuals came on board the
next day, they proceeded to dress Cook and Banks in their own clothes,
as Banks relates in his logbook.71 Clearly, the exchange of clothing had a
symbolic function for the Tahitians, which the Europeans had almost by
chance stumbled on.72
If the Tahitian attempt at mimetic assimilation of the other involved the
donning of English clothes, the performative response on the part of the

Right Honourable Joseph Banks Esq. required their removal. On learning of

the death of a woman and the impending funeral ceremony, Banks managed
to convince the Tahitians to let him not only attend but also to participate
in the proceedings.
Yesterday and today the Heiva no Meduah or funeral ceremony walkd. My

curiosity was raisd by his most singular dress. I was desirous of knowing
what he did during his walk; I askd Tubourai, at the same time desird
leave to atend him tomorrow which upon my consenting to perform a
character was readily granted. Tomorrow therefore I am to be smutted
from head to foot and to do whatever they desire me to do.73
The ‘character’ Banks performed was that of a neneva, a spirit-cum-fool figure

designed to harass and intimidate the local people so that they dispersed
before the Heiva, the approaching chief mourner. Banks had no inhibitions
about playing this role to the full as he confided in his logbook:
Tubourai was the Heiva, the three others and myself were to Nineveh. He
put on his dress, most Fantastical tho not unbecoming, I was next
prepard by stripping off my European cloths and putting me on a small
strip of cloth round my waist, the only garment I was allowd to have,
but I had no pretensions to be ashamd of my nakedness for neither of
the women were a bit more coverd than myself. They then began to
smut me and themselves with charcoal and water, the Indian boy was
compleatly black, the women and myself as low as our shoulders. We then
set out.74
If Jonathan’s deportment in English clothes was cast in the genre of farce

or low comedy for the English spectators, then Banks’s performance was,
for the Tahitians at least, part of an efficacious rite, designed to expedite
the spirit of the deceased person. The presence of the English party meant,
however, that it was perceived within two quite different frames, a situ-
ation typical of cross-cultural theatricality. The procession proceeded first
to the English fort, where the sight of the daubed figures elicited surprise
on the part of the English and ‘affright of the Indians for they fly
everywhere before the Heiva like sheep before a wolf’.75 Surprise and fright
were the two quite disparate reactions that accompanied the appearance
of four Tahitians and an Englishman in a loincloth ‘smutted’ down to the
shoulders (the rest of his body presumably gleaming palely English in the
moonlight).
A further reaction might have been disgust on the part of the English,
as Banks’s performance had brought him dangerously close to what later
became known as ‘going native’, that most cardinal of sins in the British
colonial system of values. That Banks did not really go native is clear from

his journal; he only flirted with the exterior signs of the behaviour. Yet, one
may be permitted to conjecture that under the protection of the subjunctive
mood of theatrical performance, its culturally sanctioned authorization to
dissemble, Banks was beginning to negotiate the dangerous ‘two-way street’
of colonial mimesis. His excursion into Tahitian performance culture evid-
ently tickled his antic disposition. Subsequent rumour and gossip in England

suggested that back home he re-enacted the ceremony with his servants.
In his satirical poem reflecting on Cook’s first voyage, the wit and scandal-
mongerer Peter Pindar (the pen-name of John Wolcot, 1738–1819) intimated
that Banks performed Tahitian rites at his seat at Hinchingbrook: ‘I grant you
naked with your servants pranc’d,/ To shew how folks at Otaheité danc’d;/
And much the smiling audience you amus’d,/ Though decency indeed the
dance abus’d.’76 Even allowing for satirical licence, the poem picks up on
Banks’s frank admission that he stripped near naked and joined in with the
Tahitians in what, from the English point of view, could only be regarded
as near obscene behaviour. Becoming the other in Tahiti was problematic
enough, but its re-enactment in England was clearly an act that occasioned
profound unease.
∗ ∗ ∗
Of all the myths surrounding the discovery of the Pacific islands, the stories
of sexual promiscuity were those that most inflamed the European audience
back home. The apparent uncomplicated exchange of amorous favours for
iron nails was a transaction that, for the male public at least, seemed to
encapsulate a sexual economy in which even the meanest sailor had access
to a seraglio. The spectacle of overt sexual overtures and their occasional
public consummation gave the term ‘theatre of love’ a new meaning. The
sexual trade was not, however, just an economic transaction, but a perform-
ative practice. It was spectacle for spectators in a situation of cross-cultural
exchange: to the Europeans ‘very shocking’, for the Tahitians, as far as it is
possible to reconstruct, very intriguing.
These first encounters in the Pacific clearly did more than upset European
notions of moral behaviour, they questioned perceptual practices. While
there was an established mode of representing places and peoples in theat-
rical metaphors, even in conceptualizing parts of the world as stages for the
delectation of the European viewer, the Polynesian practices of theatrical-
izing sex, not only of enacting sexuality in public but of framing it within
a formalized performance situation – through dance, music and spatial
arrangements – posed a genuine challenge for Western conceptual categories.
The European sailors certainly entered into the ‘economy’ that developed
around it, and in fact the first explorers could not conceptualize these activ-
ities in anything other than mercantile terms. What remained invisible were
the performative structures and transactions enacted on the indigenous side

of the cross-cultural encounters: the integration of the foreigners into a set

of beliefs, practices and symbolic systems, the semantics of which remained
closed to them. It appears also that these performative encounters provided
both sides with more than just material and symbolic gains. There was pure
pleasure involved, too.

2
Staged Authenticity: The South Seas
and European Theatre, 1785–1830

In the previous chapter we observed how the first encounters between
Pacific Islanders and Europeans were marked by various manifestations of
theatricality. In this chapter we will examine how these events, already
framed within tropes of theatricality and the spectacular, were translated
into theatrical genres on the European stage. The focus will be on the early
period, roughly between 1785 and 1830, which sees a shift in discursive
interest from representations claiming a high degree of authenticity to those
maximizing exoticism. Roughly speaking we can follow a narrative whereby
the theatrical representations, whatever their genre, seek in the immediate
aftermath of the voyages and their published reports to present these exper-
iences in the theatrical equivalent of the new ‘discourse of authenticity’
emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century. The apparent anti-
thetical nature of the terms ‘authenticity’ and ‘theatrical’ produces a tension
that is the subject of this chapter. Defining authenticity is notoriously diffi-
cult, as we noted in the introduction. On the one hand, it seems to defy
identification according to any essentialist categories. On the other, it is
a crucial discursive concept with far-reaching ramifications. It is a central
concept for media representations, particularly those emanating from the
mass media.
The need to authenticate messages as factual information rather than as
fictional entertainment is, however, by no means an invention of the mass-
media age, but rather appeared when an epistemic shift occurred which
made the distinction necessary. It is certainly a product of the Baconian
and Humesian move to empiricism and the necessity to have observations
verified in some way for their truth value. It explains the necessity too for
the epithet ‘authentic’ which we find with increasing frequency in the titles
and subtitles of travel accounts in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Some of the earliest uses of the term ‘authentic’ as a title or subtitle of books
are in fact in connection with voyages to the Pacific.1 These subtitles imply
the possibility that such narratives could be written in a fictional mode
47

(and indeed were). They also demonstrate that by the middle of the eight-
eenth century, this epistemic shift was basically achieved. Authenticity in
this context means material that is based primarily on eyewitness accounts
rather than other forms of textual authority.2 It is then perhaps no surprise
that the first theatre productions set in the South Seas, which were almost
invariably inspired in some way by Cook’s accounts, attempted to capit-

alize on the authenticity bonus. Performances with somewhat oxymoronic
subtitles such as ‘A Fact told in action’ or ‘Historic pantomime’ testify to an
attempt to generate signals of authenticity as the main points of attraction.3
They provided, in a sense, armchair tourism, the ostensible experience of
authentic otherness without leaving London, Paris, Berlin or Milan.
Spectacles of emotion: Cook o sia Gl’inglesi in Othaiti
Mrs Charlotte Hayes’s pornographic soirée at King’s House took place

(if indeed it did) some time between 1773 and 1779 and represents the
first ‘documented’ theatrical representation of European encounters in the
Pacific. Generically speaking, the event can only be encompassed by an
expanded concept of theatre – a cultural performance at best. The first
theatrical performance in a stricter sense took place, not in France or
England, the countries which had organized the major expeditions, but in
Italy. In 1784, the Italian choreographer Antonio Muzzarelli staged a ‘dance
pantomime’, that is, a ballet, entitled Gl’inglesi in Othaiti in Lucca. A year
later it reappeared as an opera (dramma per musica) on the stage of the
Teatro del Fondo di Separazione in Naples in an adaptation by Umilissimo
Vassallo, the director of the theatre. Both opera and dance pantomime were
performed throughout Italy and Germany over the next 20 years.4 Together
with Omai and the Death of Captain Cook, it represented the most widely
viewed theatrical treatment of the Pacific in the eighteenth century. In the
following I will be concentrating on the operatic version.
Although the sources for the libretti are not explicitly stated, Hawkesworth
is clearly the main one. Muzzarelli’s and Vassallo’s recourse to this by now
famed three-volume account was motivated not just by the English captain’s
European renown, but also by the publication’s ‘documentary’ qualities.
Never before had a description of exploration and travel been apparently so
exhaustively researched and scientifically presented with its combination of
official logbooks and detailed illustrations ‘after nature’. That this public-
ation was also attacked by contemporaries and later scholars alike for its
poetic embellishments has already been noted.5
The dramatic action conflates two episodes from Hawkesworth. The first
revolves around the encounter between Captain Wallis of the Dolphin, and
the Tahitian ‘Queen’ Oberea. The latter, actually Purea, was the wife of a
high-ranking chief of the Papara district near Matavai Bay. She provided
Wallis and his ship with a warm welcome compared to the hostility they had

Staged Authenticity: The South Seas and European Theatre, 1785–1830 49
initially encountered. She attended to Wallis when he came ashore to recover

from scurvy and wept bitterly when the English departed. Wallis had given
her a pennant as a parting gift, which she immediately incorporated into the
local treasure house of sacred objects, the maro ura. She reappears again when
Cook arrived on the Endeavour and took a special fancy to Joseph Banks,
who took great pains to resist her amorous advances while not offending

her dignity. Oberea became, as Greg Dening puts it, an ‘invented character’
in several ways.6 She became, for the British, a Queen when she was not
one, and a kind of semi-comic figure for the satirists back home. Corpulent
and overly attentive to the British visitors, Oberea oscillates between the
grandeur of monarchy, and the ‘fat lady’ of popular farce. For Vassallo, she
retains the former qualities as befitting the serious genre he was working
in, but she receives all the embellishments necessary to make the genre
work.
The second episode pertains to events that unfolded between Wallis’s visit
in 1767 and Cook’s first visit to Tahiti in 1769. Hawkesworth relates how
Cook’s party found evidence of warfare and a diminishment of power on the
part of Oberea.7 In the cast of characters, Cook is designated the commander
of the ‘Resolution’, a reference to his second voyage. Whether Vassallo had
access to an account of the second voyage, it is not clear. The dramatized
events appear to be drawn exclusively, if loosely, from Hawkesworth.
Fact must always be embellished by fictional imagination, or in the case
of Vassallo’s libretto, by the stock-in-trade elements of operatic convention.
Yet, in its first appearance on the European stage, the Pacific is packaged
as ‘history’ in the new sense of the word. In Italy Giambattista Vico had
prepared the way for a more scientific, post-theological view of history.
Vico postulated that human action was incomprehensible outside of history
because man, not God, makes it.8 It is also contemporary history, as at least
one of the mentioned figures, Captain Gore, was still alive, and Cook only
recently dead. Storia, was attaining that double meaning it now has, since
Vassallo’s storia is also a story, an episode gleaned from the accounts of
Cook’s voyages. Hawkesworth provides enough dynastic detail for Vassallo
to fashion his dramatic action, which can be briefly summarized as follows:
Queen Oberea and King Oamo, rulers over the people of Eparra, are at
war with Mathabo, chief of the Tiarrabou tribe. As the opera opens, Oamo
has been killed and Mathabo demands Oberea’s hand in marriage. She
refuses whereupon Mathabo kidnaps her son, Tirido. The queen despairs
for the life of her son and hopes that Captain Cook will return to help
her, as he did once before. Cook returns on board the Resolution: English
sea captain and Tahitian queen pledge eternal love to one another and
they resolve to rescue Tiribo. Thanks to a combination of subterfuge and
superior European fire-power the Tiarrabou are defeated. A second drama
unfolds as Cook, torn between love for the Tahitian queen and his duty,

resolves to set sail again. The opera concludes, as Oberea stricken with
grief, swoons on the shore.
Of the many liberties with ‘history’ taken by the Italian, the construction of a
love affair between Cook and a Tahitian was the most blatant. In comparison
to many of his officers, and certainly most of his sailors, Cook refrained from

intimate relations with the indigenous people.
Of interest here are, however, less the imaginative embellishments on the
level of action, which Vassallo justifies in his preface as necessary to ensure
dramatic focus. I wish to argue that in comparison to English treatments of
the Pacific discoveries, which found expression exclusively on the popular
stage, the Italians approached the theme in the stilus sublimus of opera. In
Gl’Inglesi in Othaiti we find the question of authenticity explored through
two interlocking perspectives. On a thematic level we find it dealt with
within the framework of Enlightenment anthropology, on a formal level as a
way of addressing certain theatre reform questions pertaining to both opera
and ballet. Each perspective will be dealt with in turn.
From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the term ‘anthropology’ was
understood as an all-embracing ‘science of mankind’. The discipline or
perhaps better, ‘project’, united physiology, psychology, medicine and incip-
ient comparative ethnology. The latter served primarily to answer the funda-
mental questions regarding the ‘essence of mankind’, as the Italian historian
Sergio Moravia has termed it, and was not conducted out of genuine interest
in the specific cultures.9 Until the voyages of Bougainville and Cook, most
comparative ethnographic material discussed was derived from the New
World, which the médecins-philosophes found increasingly questionable as
cultural contact there between Europeans and indigenous peoples had been
going on for up to two centuries. Leaving aside the physiological questions
and experiments (skulls of Eskimos, Hottentots, ‘negroes’ and chimpanzees
were being forever measured, compared and placed in changing taxonomic
categories), philosophers and scientists were also preoccupied with the old
problem of man’s (and woman’s) emotional make-up.
By making a Tahitian woman the central figure of his dramma per musica
Vassallo was able to explore several interconnected late-Enlightenment
anthropological discourses: women, emotions and savages. By 1785
Rousseau’s notion of the ‘noble savage’ was a common-place in the salons
and learned circles of Europe. It has been frequently remarked that his
idea received new nourishment with Bougainville’s reports. Less discussed
in the literature on the Pacific is the anthropological category ‘woman’.
In his essay ‘Sur les femmes’ (1772), Diderot had argued that women in
general were subject to ‘epidemic savagery they may appear more civil-
ized than we on the outside, but inside they remain true savages, or at least
completely Machiavellian’.10 Even allowing for Diderot’s typical irony, he
does engage with his topic from an anthropological perspective. The ques-
tion of emotions is of course linked to both categories. The problem that

so vexed Rousseau – to what extent can emotions be faked, especially by

women – was also studied from an ethnographic point of view.11 Do the
savages have the same emotional make-up as Europeans, and if so, are they
capable of the same techniques of dissembling, hypocrisy and emotional
management that civilization has seemingly developed? The Rousseauian
line is one that aims for maximum authenticity in intercourse, the mark of

ideal bourgeois selfhood as opposed to courtly social relations.
Taking emotional authenticity or sincerity as our point of departure, we
can see that Oberea is characterized as a woman of extreme emotional
expressiveness. If the eighteenth century can be characterized as the
‘Weeping Saeculum’,12 then Oberea in Gli’Inglesi in Othaiti is a worthy repres-
entative. The opera opens with Oberea, confidante Aldiva, and her soon to be
kidnapped son, Tirido, in tears, mourning the deceased Omao. The opening
stage directions describe them as being ‘moved and distressed’ and – after
the first chorus – as ‘overcome with tears’ (13).13 Oberea’s first words are:
‘Weep, weep, o Tirido: Your sorrow/ I cannot condemn. While your eyes/ I
try to dry, mine are flooded/ by a torrent of tears’ (14). While tears are by
no means a seldom occurrence in opera, the extent and volume are here
truly remarkable. As already mentioned, the source is in the first instance
Hawkesworth’s report based on Captain Wallis’s logbook, where the latter
expresses surprise as such an outpouring of emotion:
When she [Oberea] was told that the boat was ready, she threw herself
down upon the arm-chest, and wept a long time with an excess of passion
that could not be pacified the queen, once more bade us farewell, with
such tenderness of affection and grief, as filled both my heart and my
eyes.14
Robertson, whose logbook was also consulted by Hawkesworth, remarked,

she wept ‘with as much tenderness and Affection as any Wife or Mother,
could do, at the parting with their Husbands or children’.15 Clearly European
wives and mothers are meant here. Hawkesworth’s account of Cook’s visit
contains many references to the Tahitian’s propensity for tears.
Dramaturgically, the opera is structured around three situations of grief,
which enable Oberea to show her prowess in all of them: as a wife (to
Omao), a mother (of her kidnapped son Tirido) and a lover (of Cook). The
weeping has hardly subsided beside Omao’s funeral pyre when the rival
chief Mathabo enters and demands Oberea’s hand, which she refuses. In
the meantime Cook has returned, providing Oberea with emotional and
military support. Mathabo’s response is to take young Tirido hostage, a
situation to be exploited for its emotional effect. Apart from generating more
tears on Oberea’s part, it also raises the affective stakes by presenting on
stage the image of a threatened child. Oberea’s appeals to Mathabo’s sense
of pity is directed equally at the audience: ‘What blame has the innocent

child? His frightened face/ will move you to pity/ Look how he stretches
out his soft arms humble and entreating’ (29). Male savages are, however,
made of sterner stuff, especially when confronted by English marines bearing
muskets. Mathabo presents Cook with an ultimatum: depart or the boy will
die. For Oberea this means a choice between two loved ones: ‘Ah, what
a cruel moment/ I feel how my heart is torn/ between my son and my

lover’ (20). All appeals to Mathobo’s sense of pity, that other important mid-
eighteenth-century mark of bourgeois sensibility, are to no avail. Eventually,
Lieutenant Gore manages to rescue the waif and Mathabo and the Tiarrabi
warriors are placed in chains. At this point the emotional drama switches to
the Oberea–Cook relationship. Mathabo’s only pleasure is to torment Oberea
with the news that she will be abandoned by her English seafarer once again:
‘It is enough/ To see my proud foe weep, then I/ can die satisfied’ (46).
In this regard, Oberea provides him with ample satisfaction: her response
is predictable and violent. Her grief is so absolute that she desires to stage
a theatre of emotions in the literal sense of the word. Cook must see her
suffer:
Confused, oppressed
Unresolved lost. At least he shall see me
disconsolate on the shore amidst sighs and tears

Ungrateful as he is
He must see me die. (47)
For all its affective excess, Vassallo constructs dramaturgically a moral conun-
drum. Now it is Cook who has to weigh up ethical choices, as he says himself:
‘What barbarous torment/ In this cruel ordeal/ My values falter’ (49). It is
left to the confidants, Aldiva and Gore, to actually discuss the problem in a
kind of cross-cultural ethical debate:
Aldiva: What right do you have

To say we are the savages?
Why did you bring us
Pity and virtue? Are those
Signs of humanity?
Gore: Tender Aldiva
You condemn us wrongly. You know
No other duties but love. You deem
Barbaric and cruel what we owe
To fame and honour; but from this
Springs what you see in us
As great and radiant. (49)

Quite apart from the unselfconscious lack of modesty, the message is

clear. All that is admirable in Europeans stems from their ability – if an
anachronistic concept be permitted – to sublimate love to honour. For, as
Gore goes on to explain, honour is Cook’s primary duty. Aldiva’s response
is to exhort the English to leave ‘our shores and disturb no longer our
former peace’ (50). Her assessment is one that corresponded to a widely held

opinion in Enlightenment circles. If Tahiti was a new Eden, then the arrival
of the Europeans signalled the beginning of the expulsion from Paradise.
We find this sentiment already in the navigators’ logbooks, who, from the
beginning, began to question the effects of the European presence (although
mainly on account of the rapid spread of venereal disease). This idea finds its
most complex discussion in Diderot’s posthumously published Supplément
au voyage de Bougainville where the loss of innocence theme leads into a wider
debate on the nature of ‘laws’, natural, civil and religious. Diderot’s essay
remained largely unknown to his contemporaries but the ideas debated were
widely disseminated.
Concepts such as fame and honour are abstract, with the result that the
opera cannot end until Cook is plunged into a genuine dilemma. In a remark-
able trio featuring Oberea, Cook and Mathabo, severe emotional pressure is
brought to bear on the English navigator. In an unlikely alliance, Mathabo,
seething with anger at his capture, and Oberea, slowly dying with grief,
join forces indirectly to excoriate Cook. All three are torn apart for different
reasons but join voices in common chorus:
All three: Ah, what cruel pain!

What unhappy love!
Stars, pitiless stars!
Barbaric unjust love!
Amidst a hundred desires
I feel my heart torn apart. (54)
Cook nonetheless heeds the call of duty, promising a hasty return and
exhorts the Tahitians to do what they do best: dance a cheerful and lively
dance with the English soldiers. The image remains somewhat ambivalent.
After the ‘joyful folk-dance’ watched by Cook, Oberea and Gore, the English
embark, while Oberea remains behind on the beach in a swoon. The operatic
convention of lieto fine, the compulsory happy end, prevents presumably a
worse fate, but within the dramaturgical requirements of opera at this time
she has been ‘sacrificed’ for the English captain: the demands of honour and
fame triumph over more basic desires.
If we return briefly to Hawkesworth, the intertext of Vassallo’s libretto,
we can better contextualize the image of the weeping Oberea. After

relating several instances of Tahitian’s propensity for sudden outbursts of

emotion followed by equally quick recoveries, Hawkesworth, writing as
Cook, concludes:
It is not indeed strange that the sorrows of these artless people should
be transient, any more than that their passions should be suddenly and

strongly expressed: what they feel they have never been taught either to
disguise or suppress, and having no habits of thinking which perpetually
recall the past, and anticipate the future, they are affected by all the
changes of the passing hour, and reflect the colour of the time, however
frequently it may vary.16
The message is clear. Oberea won’t remain disconsolate for long. In terms
of emotional expression, their total lack of dissembling brings them into
line with Rousseauian ideals. This is supported by the thesis that they dwell
in some way outside history, living in a perpetual present. The exploration
of Tahitian affective life remains, in the light of such statements, ambi-
valent. On the one hand, the propensity to tears brings them into a kind
of sympathetic communion with the Europeans, generating feelings of pity.
On the other, the rapid shifts in emotional states underline their savage
nature. Transient sorrows are not authentic sorrows it would seem.
While the spectacle of emotional turmoil acted out by Oberea (and to
a lesser extent Cook) remains the dominant drama, other Enlightenment
discourses are also played out in this unlikely inter-cultural encounter. As
already mentioned, Hawkesworth’s description suggested that an internecine
political struggle had taken place on the peaceful isles. Translated into the
idiom of pre-revolutionary Europe, it becomes a debate on the question of
tyranny on the one hand, and on the benefits of Enlightenment catchwords
on the other. Cook’s timely return to Tahiti prevents the ‘tyrant’ Mathabo
exerting his cruel will over the rightful heir to the kingdom of Eparra, Oberea.
As Cook phrases it: ‘We hasten to help my Queen./ Love, pity, reason be my
beacons, and may their triple radiance/ inspire this heart with courage’ (28).
He justifies his attack on Mathabo because the latter has transgressed, in
Gore’s words, not just against this ‘triple radiance’ but also against the ‘sacred
laws of humanity/ Which nature has planted in the heart/ of the most distant
inhabitant of this earth’ (27). We are close here to the inalienable rights of
man, which had already been enshrined in the American constitution. This
is ultimately Cook’s justification in interfering in the political affairs of the
Tahitians. Mathabo confronts him in the second act with this very question:
‘But you, who are you?/ Who has made you judge/ over the disputes of
a distant and unknown land?’ Cook’s answer is simple and ‘enlightened’:
‘Reason, justice, and duty’ (39). Ridding foreign countries of tyrants by means
of military force has become familiar again in our own times. The repeated
use of the word in the libretto testifies to its emotive appeal and of course

to its possible redirection on the part of an Italian audience to ‘tyrants’, that

is, absolute monarchies, closer to home.
Turning now to the formal aspects of the work, we can discern
an emphatic and programmatic concern with questions of authenticity.
Vassallo presented his libretto as a kind of reform opera. He states program-
matically in the preface that Italian opera has been too much preoccupied

with stories from classical antiquity. In their place he emphatically demands:
drama of universal validity and novelty. Costumes of a nation unknown

until the middle of our century, a scenario that would present new views
of landscapes, houses, fortifications and burial places, forms unknown in
Europe. (3)
Vassallo asks that opera turn its sights to the exciting recent discoveries and
present them in a form corresponding to the actual practices and customs of
the strange culture. He demands a mise en scène based on principles of cultural
authenticity restricted only by the conventions of the operatic form itself.
He admits that his adaptation is only loosely based on historical veracity:
I admit that I have based my drama on historical facts and that I have
included a number of anachronisms. There are characters who are histor-
ical persons: Mathabo, Cook, Gore, Tirido and Oberea. The love affair of
that queen for an English captain is also true as is the latter’s affection for
that people. Another historical fact is the war that Mathabo conducted
against Oberea and the illegal annexation of the kingdom Eparra. These
events I have woven into the action and combined them with episodes
that make it more interesting. (4)
In this sense the theatrical practices of late-eighteenth-century opera are

little different from those of early twenty-first-century Hollywood which
still follow the same basic strategy of ‘interesting episodes’ on the level of
plot and character, but fetishistic attention to historical detail for set and
costumes. Vassallo’s libretto features numerous footnotes attesting to the
ethnographic accuracy of the customs and costumes presented. The notes
elucidate Tahitian words, dance steps and elements of ritual and mythology,
which draw extensively on Hawkesworth. Of particular interest are customs
that could be construed as inhuman or cruel, such as the practice whereby
women in mourning lacerate themselves with sharks’ teeth. The ending of
the opera makes it clear that Cook’s humanizing influence will ultimately
put an end to such barbarism.
Characteristic for the early works is the central place given to dance,
the cultural practice that had been so intensely observed, described and
illustrated, as we saw in the previous chapter. The opera opens with a
dance by the inhabitants of Eppara, and Vassallo comments: ‘The dance in

Othaiti is an energetic language of feeling. All great expressions of feeling,

whether they be pain or joy are communicated in dance’ (13). Such a
phrase could have been lifted almost verbatim from the writings of the
great mid-eighteenth-century ballet reformers and exponents of the ballet
d’action, Jean-Jacques Noverre, or his rival Gasparo Angiolini. Both advoc-
ated reforming theatrical dance by introducing plausible stories that could be

accommodated to the Aristotelian unities. Both stressed the importance of
pantomimic rather than conventionalized movements to convey action and
emotion. Two points are at issue here. One is the relationship between dance
within opera, a vexed question which continued to be debated well into the
nineteenth century. How could balletic interludes be included within the
operatic line of action in a plausible manner? The subject of Europeans in
Tahiti seemed to supply at last a suitable subject matter. As the published
accounts stressed, for Tahitians dance appeared indeed to be ‘an energetic
language of feeling’ and not an artificial convention. The second point refers
to the new theories of naturalness in the performing arts that took hold in
Europe during the Enlightenment. Dance and opera were always at a disad-
vantage when it came to justifying their aesthetic devices and conventions
within the dominant discourse of naturalness. Again the South Seas provided
a setting where, at this early date of reception at least, important questions
of theatre aesthetics could be justified. To put it bluntly: Tahitians seemed
to sing and dance at the drop of a hat, thus providing a kind of true-life
behaviour not too far removed from the demands of opera itself.
The subject of Captain Cook in Tahiti continued to circulate in Europe.
However, it was the ballet and not the operatic version that found acclaim.
Muzzarelli performed his dance pantomime throughout Italy, but it failed to
amuse spectators at the court theatre in Vienna in 1791. As late as carnival
1801 we find an adaptation of Muzzarelli’s libretto being performed by
the dancer and choreographer Lauchlin Dusquesney at Berlin’s Royal Court
Theatre under his own authorship.17 As the story is basically the same as
that of the opera, but less detailed of course (ballet librettos consist naturally
just of descriptions of action), it will not be examined in any detail here. Of
note is perhaps the genre. Dusquesney terms it a ‘ballo storico-pantomimo’,
a designation that becomes rare in the following decades as the romantic
ballet with its fantastical plots begins to gain dominance. Around 1800 it
was, however, still possible to treat a historical theme such as Cook in Tahiti
within the conventions of ballet.
Restaging first encounters: La Mort du Capitaine Cook
While Italy may have been the first country to stage the Pacific explorations,
the honour of the commercially most successful theatricalization must go
to the English in the form of a pantomime, produced by a team including
a Frenchman. The pantomime Omai, or A Trip round the World opened at

Covent Garden in December 1785.18 It contained all the essential elements

of popular South Seas theatrical reception, linking discourses of authenti-
city with exoticist modes of representation. Autochthonous performance
forms (songs, dances, costumes) culminating in a spectacular procession
of newly discovered Pacific peoples are replicated on stage in a quasi-
ethnographic manner within the unlikely dramaturgical framework of a

harlequinade. The final scene presented a ‘Great Painting’, entitled the
Apotheosis of Captain Cook, which, beyond its dramaturgical function within
the performance, was an image of considerable significance. The audience
had been confronted throughout the evening with an unbroken succession
of images, mostly exotic, some familiar. Tahitian burial places by moon-
light alternated with views of Kensington Gardens, ‘Margate from the Pier’
shifted via Kamtschatka to the inside of a Siberian yurt, and Arctic icebergs
were contrasted with a village scene in Tonga. This final image repres-
ented the deification of Cook in all the grandeur of a baroque history
painting.
The final scene of Omai, the Apotheosis of Captain Cook, provided
material for the next major treatment of European heroism in the South
Seas that was enacted three years later. The place this time was Paris, which
shows that Cook had become not just an English but also a hero of European
stature. Jean François Arnould-Mussot was the author of a four-act panto-
mime performed in 1788 at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique on the eve
of the French Revolution. Like its English counterpart, the pantomime in
France was a genre created to circumvent the licensing laws, which prevented
all but two or three theatres from performing spoken drama. The French
pantomime is a genre characterized by mime, dance and music so that
the published text provides neither dialogue nor songs but only a detailed
outline of the action. The place of performance, the Theatre de l’Ambigu-
Comique on the famed Boulevard du Temple where vaudeville and puppet
shows were presented, was the most renowned of the pantomime theatres
in pre-revolutionary France.
Arnould found himself in the same situation as his predecessors in that
he was forced to navigate between the constraints of theatrical convention
and the desire to present historical truth. He outlines his quandary in an
‘Avertissement’ which prefaces the published scenario. He stresses his desire
to present this ‘mort tragique’ in a manner which is dignified and befitting
the stature of a hero known throughout Europe, yet ‘the conventions of
theatre have not always allowed us to follow truth exactly. We have rendered
it as best as possible with respect to the costumes, manners, dances of the
savages of the South Seas.’19 As usual, ‘truth’ or authenticity could only be
approximated on the level of exterior signs and in the realm of performance,
that is, dance. The author had put himself in a particularly difficult situation.
By elevating the main character to tragic status, he was in fact creating from
the outset an internal contradiction between subject matter and genre. The

action, the ‘mort tragique’, required the genre of tragedy, which is reliant on
the spoken word, the very medium the genre of pantomime had to eschew.
The detailed descriptions of the scenario make clear that the performance
did its utmost to achieve a sombre and dignified tone befitting the tragic
subject matter.
An English version of La Mort du Capitaine Cook was billed at Covent

Garden in the following year. While playing in London, separate produc-
tions were presented at Dublin, Hull, Limerick, and perhaps other provincial
centres as well. The programme summary published in Limerick for the
performance at the New Theatre Royal there, advertised the play ‘as now
exhibiting in London, Dublin and Paris, with universal applause’.20 Its some-
what oxymoronic title gave a clear indication that the story would emphasize
scenographic effect rather than psychological subtlety: The Death of Captain
Cook: A Grand Serious-Pantomimic-Ballet, In Three Parts. As now exhibiting in
Paris with uncommon Applause with the original French Music, New Scenery,
Machinery, and other Decorations.21
In comparison to the light operatic nature of the English pantomime with
its satirical songs, the French variation of the genre, relied more heavily on
non-verbal communication: music, dance and mimed action, even puppetry
were its mainstays, buttressed of course by elaborate costumes and sceno-
graphic spectacle. Leaving aside the completely fictional treatment of Cook’s
death – in Arnould-Mussot’s treatment he is caught in the middle of a jealous
triangle and is the victim of savage treachery rather than ritual sacrifice –
the pantomime is of interest from another perspective. As we have seen, all
the theatrical versions of the Europeans in the South Seas examined so far
shared a genuine interest in representing on stage the cultures encountered
and described in a fashion that approximated to the scientific nature of the
official accounts. La Mort du Capitaine Cook is the work that attempts to
realize most exactly the dynamics of performative encounter examined in
the previous chapter. Its non-verbal nature with much trumpeting, drum-
ming, dexterous sign-making and elaborate ceremonies finds a precise theat-
rical equivalent in the dumbshow and musical emphasis of pantomime.
The French text is more elaborate in its descriptive detail and the English
version has only three instead of four acts. The names of the male native
protagonists, Étoé and Oki, are changed to Koah and Pareea in the English
translation, while the nameless ‘roi de l’isle’ in Paris becomes Terreeoboo in
England. All three names derive from actual persons Cook encountered in
Hawai‘i as recounted in the official account, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean
(1784). This change in nomenclature in the English version creates a curious
displacement between fiction and history. Terreeoboo [Kalani’opu’u] was the
Hawaiian king who welcomed and hosted Cook. Koah [Ko’a’a] was an old
priest, who initially conducted the elaborate ceremonies leading to Cook’s
deification as Lono, but was attached to the king, as was Parea [Palea],
another lower ranking chief. Opposed to Koah were the actual Lono priests

who repeatedly warned the English of the latter’s treachery. The duplicitous
Koah of the pantomime thus has some origin in the official accounts.22
An interesting textual feature of the French version is the use of italicized
passages, which refer almost certainly to direct citations from the travel
accounts. These passages document the creators’ concern with ethnographic
detail. For example, in an elaborately staged wedding scene in Part 1 the

English version specifies laconically that a ‘troop of female natives, preceded
by four islanders, come down two and two dancing’ (7), whereas the French
text is verbally and presumably scenographically much more explicit: ‘A
troop of young natives [Sauvages]half-naked, their hair billowing, plaited and dyed
in different colours, their heads decorated with bits of glass, red feathers and very
pretty mussel shells They are followed by several young girls who are also
almost naked, their hair and head decorated with a bridal bouquet made of
flowers.’23
Part 2 consists largely of a ceremonial encounter, which is enacted
following almost slavishly the details found in the official accounts. Scene 1
opens on a beach, the stage of most first encounters. A ship actually appears
in full view with Cook on the forecastle, a spy-glass in hand ‘with which he
seems discovering the country’ (9) He waves a white flag to which the king
responds by brandishing a green branch, actions which Cook enacted many
times on encountering a new island. In the next scene military music is
heard slowly approaching until ‘a detachment of marines appear marching
two and two’ (9) followed by Cook and his officers who march up to the
king. The white flag and green branch are waved once again in a reciprocal
gesture: ‘The King orders his warriors to ground their arms; Captain Cook
does the same; they advance and embrace, the King joining his nose to the
Captain’s, as is customary among the Islanders’ (10) The exchange of gifts
occupies the bulk of Scene 1 with the authors making specific reference to
the ‘wonder and pleasure’ which beads, mirrors and other objects afford
the natives. This is followed by a formal Heiva (in the French original the
Tahitian term is used), ‘kieva, or feast’, in the English version. In terms of
performance detail the French original is more elaborate with regard to the
dance that follows. It specifies 16 dancers (male and female) and two musi-
cians, one playing a drum the other, the nose-flute, and even glosses the
style of movement employed:
These dances are very lively; they move their feet with surprising agility. The
dancers demonstrate considerable grace and dexterity in the way they move their
hands and their fingers, which they clap following the rhythm of the drum. A
singer also follows this same movement with vocal sounds or by clapping his
hands.24
What the French or English dancers actually did, we cannot tell. It will be
over a century before Richard Walton Tully includes indigenous Hawaiian

dancers and singers in his Broadway production, The Bird of Paradise, as

we shall see in Chapter 6. Nevertheless, the description is drawn, albeit in
a composite form, from the published accounts. Whatever was performed,
spectators were presented with something that attempted at least to imitate
Tahitian or Hawaiian dance and music (such as the nose-flute). The next
scene shows Cook and the King on board ship in the background. The action

depicts trading from canoes and the growing familiarity between native girls
and English sailors. This is a scene familiar in countless Hollywood movies
but which finds its first theatricalization in an eighteenth-century French
pantomime. The rest of this act is pure invention and culminates in the
murder of Cook by Étoé (Koah in the English version).
The final act, Cook’s funeral, relies once again on ethnographic detail. It
stages in fact two funeral ceremonies in a kind of cross-cultural counter-
point. It opens with the European version. To the strains of a funeral march,
marines enter carrying Cook’s body, which they deposit in the middle of the
stage. They erect a pole bearing the following inscription: ‘To the Memory of
Captain James Cook, 14th February 1779 the Islanders being spectators
of the ceremony’ (17). When the British have completed their ceremony by
firing their muskets in a final salute, they retire to the back of the stage.
The natives then reciprocate with an elaborate ceremony, which seems to
be a composite of Tahitian and Hawaiian rituals. The ceremony enacted
in the pantomime is based to some extent on a funeral of an old English
sailor, Will Watman, who died during Cook’s first sojourn on the island of
Hawai‘i. The king had requested that he be buried on the marae: ‘At the
request of Terreeoboo, the remains of this honest seaman were buried on the
morai; the ceremony being performed with great solemnity. Kaoo and his
brothers were present at the funeral, who behaved with great decorum, and
paid due attention while the service was performing.’25 In contrast, Cook’s
actual burial was anything but solemn. His body was dragged away from the
beach and up to a temple where it was dismembered and distributed around
the island. Like a wedding cake, the English got their ‘bit’, an upper thigh,
48 hours later. Together with some other charred remains they managed to
consign it to a watery grave in Kealakekua Bay.26
The pantomime concludes with a natural rather than cultural sign. The
active volcano in the background finally erupts with smoke and lava issuing
forth. The suggestion is that the natives will be consumed by this natural
calamity. In fact this ending begins a dramatic tradition that continued to
erupt for the next 150 years. Voluntary or enforced immolation in active
volcanoes became a standard device of South Seas popular culture in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Volcanic eruptions aside, Cook’s death
was easily the most dramatic event that had eventuated so far in the Pacific.
Others were to follow – such as the Mutiny on the Bounty – but even the
adventures of Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian never reached the stature
of Cook’s murder on the beach of Hawai‘i.27 Dramatic and tragic events

demand appropriate aesthetic treatment: apart from history paintings this

could be best provided in the unlikely genre of the pantomime. The Death of
Captain Cook ends the first phase of theatrical representation of the Pacific.28
The tension between authenticity and exoticism could not be sustained
indefinitely. As the Pacific islands became better known, so did the modes of
theatrical representation change. The central importance of the indigenous

peoples and their customs begins to fade until the islands and the cultures
themselves become little more than a backdrop for purely European dramas.
The first phase of the circulation of mimetic capital was marked by the
interaction between European explorers and indigenous peoples. The richly
documented and illustrated reports led to a fascination with, and interest in,
presenting ‘authenticity’ on stage. We have seen that the rise of new forms of
stage spectacle coincided with the development of this new discourse formu-
lated particularly in relation to Pacific explorations. If the first performances
were marked by specificity of locale and culture, with utmost care being
lavished on presenting Tahiti, the Friendly Islands, and Owhyhee ‘authen-
tically’, then the next phase is characterized by a move to a generalized
picture of the ‘South Seas’.
La Perouse and the imaginary Pacific
Two years before Captain Bligh was forced to paddle across the Pacific in
a leaky boat, a French explorer Jean François Galaup de la Pérouse had
disappeared without a trace. In 1785 he had embarked with two frigates on a
Pacific voyage which was later to be recognized as one of the most important
in the eighteenth century, rivalled only by those of Cook. Planned as a
French answer to Cook’s discoveries (and territorial acquisitions), he made
important contributions to charting the northern reaches of the Pacific. En
route to Kamschatka, La Pérouse was the first to safely navigate and chart
the Japan Sea. From there he went to Australia, arriving at Botany Bay just
hours after the arrival of the British with their first batch of convicts in the
(in)famous First Fleet. On the way he had explored Samoa, discovering new
islands. After leaving Australia, the expedition was never seen or heard of
again. Forty years later an English trader, Peter Dillon, visiting the Solomon
islands, discovered a piece of glass in a native’s nose which turned out to be
from the ship’s thermometer. It was presumed that the expedition had been
shipwrecked and killed by the natives.
The disappearance was reported throughout Europe. The French
despatched a search mission under the command of Count Bruny
d’Entrecasteaux. His unsuccessful voyage between 1791 and 1794 (among
other things he died before its completion) was also widely reported. On 20
April 1795, the widely acclaimed and frequently maligned German dramatist
Augustus von Kotzebue (1761–1819) read in the Intelligenzblatt der Allge-
meinen Literatur-Zeitung the following notice: ‘This much is known, that

throughout the whole voyage not the slightest trace or piece of news of
Monsieur Pérouse’s two ships was found. So it is now most probable that
he perished somewhere in the South Seas.’29 From the point of view of box-
office receipts, Kotzebue was by this time undoubtedly the most successful
living German playwright. His sentimental drama of adultery Misanthropy
and Repentance (1789) made him famous overnight and established the basic

formula he would vary across genres approximately 200 times. Skilfully
constructed dramatic tension is combined with comic relief, sentimental
endings and moral didacticism. He particularly favoured exotic settings
which provide the backdrop for romantic interests in plays such as The Indian
Exiles, and Pizzaro: The Death of Rolla; or the conquest of Peru (adapted by
Richard Sheridan). Kotzebue was acutely aware of social issues, not afraid of
controversy, and part of his success as a dramatist lay in his ability to present
current social questions on stage. The overwhelming success of his plays
made them a mainstay of European theatre for over 30 years. His successful
dramaturgical formula was also a seminal influence on the development
of Anglo-American melodrama. His plays featured prominently throughout
Europe and America until the mid-nineteenth century.
By the time he read the newspaper report, Kotzebue had already visited the
South Seas in his imagination and with his prolific pen. His drama Brother
Moritz, the Eccentric, or the Colony for the Palau Islands (1791) ends with a
utopian perspective that had its equivalents throughout romantic circles in
Europe. The characters resolve to establish a colony on the newly discovered
Palau islands in the South Seas. Brother Moritz is set, however, entirely in
Europe so that the Pacific perspectives of the subtitle – the Palau islands
(later to become a German colony) – are a construct of the imaginary Pacific
which would continue to exert its hold on the European imagination.
The Pacific of La Perouse is equally fanciful – the only ‘authentic’ aspect
is the name of the title character. Kotzebue’s flight of fancy situated his
eponymous hero on an island occupied only by La Perouse, his native wife
Malvina, and their 8-year-old son, Charles. It transpires that the ‘young
savage’ (Kotzebue’s appellation for Malvina) had rescued the shipwrecked
captain from the waves, the only survivor of his ill-fated expedition, and
then saved him anew from the murderous intentions of her father and
brother. Left alone on the island for seven to eight years – the age of their
son Charles – they had evidently enjoyed not only near perfect weather but
also a relationship untroubled by the vagaries of normal social intercourse.
The idyll is disturbed, however, by the arrival of a ship bearing an ominous
cargo – relatives. In a teichoscopic opening scene, La Perouse stands on a
cliff top and enjoys the ‘spectacle’ of a South Seas sunrise:
La Perouse is standing on the highest point of a rock, and looking at the

horizon. The mist disperses – yet still it seems in contention with the
sun, and still its vapours cloud the surface of the sea. Thus does calumny

overshadow virtue, and create imaginary forms, till it is at length absorbed

by truth. Ha! what a spectacle! 30
The spectacle of nature is ruffled by the appearance of a white spot on the

horizon. The sailor’s eyes strain to distinguish a cloud?, a seagull?, a swan?,
before making out finally a ship’s sail. His excitement is understandable

after eight years on the island. Elation and despair alternate until several
exclamation marks later a cannon shot signals that the ship has anchored
in the bay.
La Perouse clambers down from his rock and charges across the stage
without pausing to exchange even the simplest niceties with his devoted
paramour Malvina. Shouting, ‘A ship! a ship! There, there!’ (4), he disappears,
leaving her to ponder on the import of the arrival. It quickly becomes clear
that Malvina is a marvel of the civilising process – an Eliza Doolittle of
colonization. A fluent French speaker and devout Christian, Malvina is also
equipped with the emotional make-up of a late eighteenth-century upper-
middle class society lady. Thanks to La Perouse’s influence, she has severed
all ties with her family who dwell on a neighbouring island. Her only regret
seems to be dissatisfaction with the name of her son, Charles, whom she
would rather have called ‘Tomai, for that is his grandfather’s name’ (4).
Malvina is evidently caught in the classic culture clash – wistfully maudlin at
the severed dynastic ties, less than enthused at the prospect of company, but
resolute in her dedication to the new nuclear family and her wifely duties:
‘We want no ship. Yet my good friend seemed to be glad, therefore I must
be glad, for we never yet were happy singly’ (5).
Her unease is well-founded, for the ship has already disgorged Perouse’s
first wife, Adelaide, their son Henry, and Adelaide’s brother Clairville. More
threatening and unsettling for the beachcomber than the direct confront-
ation with his first wife and child, however, is the emotional threat posed
by his absent mother-in-law. In numerous entreaties by his European wife
Adelaide, her memory (i.e. of the mother-in-law) is invoked as an emotional
bludgeon to batter down the shipwrecked sailor’s affective defences. In a
play punctuated primarily by exclamation marks there is very little room
for emotional subtlety. The story begins in a register of ardent fervour (the
unblighted love between La Perouse and his native girl) and moves quickly
into even more intense outpourings of sentiment, oscillating between friend-
ship (Adelaide–Malvina), romantic attraction (Perouse–Adelaide–Malvina),
appeals to duty and visions of distraught mothers-in-law.
The dramatic conflict is for the most part less one of European civilisa-
tion versus savagery and alterity than a moral debate of choice. Perouse, a
paragon of uxoriousness, is caught between two wives. To whom should the
greater loyalty be owed? To Malvina, mother of his child, saviour of his life,
but not legally his wife? Or Adelaide, the loyal wife, also mother of his chil-
dren, and legal spouse? In normal circumstances, such a situation requires

in theatre the timely demise of one of the characters, usually a female one.
It is perhaps the most innovative aspect of the play that Kotzebue proposes
an unconventional solution:
Adelaide: Sisters? [Seems for a moment buried in reflection] Sisters! – Good

girl! you awake in me a consoling thought. Yes. Sisters let us be, if this

man will be our brother. As we cannot share him, neither of us must
possess him. [enraptured] We, as sisters, will dwell in one hut – he, as our
brother, in another. He will assist us in educating our children. During
the day we will form one happy family, and the evening shall part us.
The mothers shall remain with their children – the father in his hut –
Do you consent to this, Malvina? – and you, Perouse?
Malvina: Willingly, if I may but see him.
Perouse: With all my heart, if you be thereby satisfied.
Clairville: Brother, I wish you joy. The treaty is concluded. Take each
other’s hands, and ratify it by a warm embrace!
Adelaide: [Goes towards La Perouse with outstretched arms.] A sister’s
embrace!
Clairville: As you please. I don’t dispute about expressions!
Malvina: My friend! My brother!
Perouse: [holding them both in his arms] My sisters!
Charles: [Creeping to Malvina ] My mother is happy.
Henry: [Hanging on Adelaide] My mother smiles again.
Clairville: The paradise of innocence!
[The curtain falls.] (40)
Motivated no doubt by the setting of a Pacific island, Kotzebue constructs

a heterotopia, a space of difference where new forms of social intercourse
can be played out. The social model was not, however, a direct result of
the Pacific setting. Other dramatists had already experimented with the
menage-à-trois, most famously Goethe in his ‘Play for Lovers’, Stella (1776).
Where the young Goethe ends his play with the famous line of the female
character, ‘One house, one bed, one grave’, that is, a genuine menage-à-trois,
Kotzebue’s domestic arrangement is definitely separate huts, with proto-
feminist tendencies as the women form a kind of gynocentric arrangement.
The ‘Paradise of Innocence’ that brings down the curtain was not deemed
so innocent by Kotzebue’s contemporaries. The Hamburg premiere, although
in the hands of Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, one of the leading actor-managers
in Germany, was not a success with only three performances.31 In Vienna it
was banned altogether.
Perhaps inspired by Goethe’s own problems with Stella, who revised his
play into a tragedy (it too had met with a lukewarm reception), Kotzebue
fashioned a new ending 20 years later. His friend and mentor Schröder had
complained about the ending after the first reading. Writing to Kotzebue on

9 December 1795, he attested to the play’s considerable sentimental effect,

which was, however, counteracted by what he considered its anticlimatic
conclusion:
When reading through Perouse my friends and I wept a great deal – but the
ending! The play as a whole creates the picture of an extraordinary youth,

who is determined at the risk of his own life to climb an insurmountable
cliff, overcomes the danger, has almost attained his goal, and then turns
back.32
Clearly, the ending either scandalized or disappointed. Plays end tradition-

ally in death or marriage and since the title character was already married,
death was the only alternative. The second version ends over Malvina’s
dead body. She takes her own life, sacrificing herself so that La Perouse and
Adelaide may live a scandal-free bourgeois existence: ‘Malvina: I have now
recognized – and felt it – we three cannot be happy – neither here nor in
your fatherland. Three victims bleed when fate demands but one.’33 Her
justification is based however on shaky theology:
Malvina: [To Perouse] I have prayed to your god as you taught me, prayed
with hot fervour, there where the bush with its bright fruit tempts your
boy. – See, there God awoke pious thoughts in me – and I stretched out
my hand for the fruit –.34
That the pious thought is suicide suggests that Perouse’s religious instruction
has been less than thorough. Clearly, however, the ending is emotionally
more satisfying. Somebody had to go and the death of the little native girl,
even with a child, would set the pattern for a succession of Orientalist dramas
and operas, in which native women would make the ultimate sacrifice for
their European lovers. As we will see in Chapter 6, the settings could be
Japan or equally Hawai‘i.35
Another point to be considered is the resolve to remain on the island and
begin a colony. The image of Europe is characterized by both decadence
(‘I am an European [sic!] and subject to hateful passions’ (32) says Adelaide
to Malvina) and moral chaos (Clairville mentions an encounter with an
Englishman, ‘who was taking petty thieves to Botany Bay, and had left the
greater in Europe’ (37)). Clairville, a mouthpiece of the politically conser-
vative author here, espouses anti-revolutionary sentiments, a point which
went largely unnoticed. The political resonances are overshadowed by the
provocative marital utopia of the first version which seemed paradoxically
to both confirm and refute the popular image of sexual promiscuity in the
South Seas.
Like Gl’Inglesi in Othaiti, La Perouse entered the circulation of mimetic
capital and underwent substantial transformations of both plot and genre.

Despite its inauspicious beginnings on stage, it embarked on a 50-year voyage

through European theatrical culture – its vicissitudes comparable with those
of its real-life hero. It was adapted into a pantomime (London, 1801), a ballet
(Naples, 1822) and back into a drama (Paris, 1859). While the drama was
promptly translated into English (including Dutch and Italian versions), the
performance in London met with the same reception as in Germany. The

ending was doubly unacceptable: it was considered either immoral, or simply
incomprehensible that a European male, and a French one at that, should
spend the rest of his days in the South Seas in a state of sexual abstinence,
especially considering the well-publicized temptations that the public knew
awaited seafarers to the Pacific. Kotzebue’s Pacific island was in this sense
indeed a u-topia, in the etymological sense of ‘no place’.
Failure as a drama does not mean failure in the theatre (at least not on
the London stage). Two years later the plot and subject matter were put
through the grinder of pantomimic adaptation and emerged as La Pérouse:
or, the desolate island. Despite vigorous objection to the play’s ‘immoral’
thrust, another section of the London theatre establishment had a keen eye
and ear for public taste. On the 28 February 1801 the pantomime opened
at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, as the second half of a double bill
with Ben Jonson’s Every Man and his Humour. The team included the author
John Fawcett who had made a name for himself the year previously with the
pantomime Obi, or Three-finger’d Jack, a spectacle set in Jamaica revolving
around the practices of Obeah (the Jamaican equivalent of Voodoo), and the
composers John Moorehead and John Davy,36 as well as a large group of set
designers and decorators.
An announcement in The Times a few days later revealed that the demands
of public taste had been met: ‘The ground-work and principal incidents of the
superb Exhibition, are borrowed by Mr. Fawsett, the Artist, from Kotzebue’s
acting Drama of La Pérouse; but the immorality of the denouement in the
original has been judiciously omitted.’37 However, the changes constituted
more than just expurgation or refinement:
It is avowedly an alteration from a piece of Kotzebue, but we are glad to

find that much of the immorality which disgraces the German original,
as well as many of the incidents that render it absurd, are omitted. If
Kotzebue did not write so fast; if he were obliged to consult sound morals
and good taste, the genius he possesses might enable him to produce
something worthy to last, but present favour has ruined his claims to the
attention of posterity.38
The question of what represents absurdity in the construction of a dramatic

plot is clearly historically contingent, as closer examination of the adaptation
reveals. What in Kotzebue is clearly a human drama here metamorphoses
into a feral one. The title character saves the life of a chimpanzee twice:

once by shooting a hungry bear, and the second time from the predations
of (presumably equally ravenous) natives from a neighbouring island. When
Pérouse is wounded by a poisoned arrow, the chimp sucks the venom from
the wound. He is thus saved, not by a native woman, but by an animal.
He does become enamoured of a native girl called Umba, or rather she
becomes enamoured of him, whereupon he saves her from another bear.

With the arrival of Pérouse’s wife and son, Umba’s love turns to jealousy.
Far from entertaining utopian notions of abstinence and feminist solidarity,
she instructs her countryman Kanko to dispose of the faithless Frenchman.
What the action now gains in tempo it loses in verisimilitude: Kanko steals
into Pérouse’s hut; the chimpanzee saves Pérouse’s son, but his master and
family are taken prisoner; Pérouse is lashed to a cliff and is about to be
burned when the chimp frees and arms him with a pistol. Pérouse promptly
shoots Kanko just before he kills Madame Pérouse. Their son is pushed
off a cliff by the other natives but Pérouse in a circensian trick catches
him in the nick of time. French soldiers arrive and put the savages ‘to
the rout’.39
Needless to say the critics were not amused: ‘In judicious hands, Perouse
might have been rendered a very interesting subject, instead of being what
it is now, a mere vehicle for pageantry, frippery, and puerile exhibition’,
noted censoriously the critic from The dramatic censor.40 This did not prevent
him from devoting to this ‘Pantomimical olio’ an extended disquisition on
the subject of verisimilitude. Finally, though, he finds words of approval for
the scenery which commands within the conventions of the genre its own
legitimation, ‘which is avowedly intended as an appeal to the eye, not to the
judgement.’41 To this dichotomy we shall return in the next section.
The public, however, seemed to enjoy the mixture of circensian and exot-
istic entertainment because La Pérouse: or, the desolate island sustained itself
on the London stage for almost 50 years in various adaptations. It also
spawned an Italian ballet Il naufragio di La Perouse. The pantomime reveals
the distance travelled in 15 years since Omai and the Death of Captain Cook.
Fawcett’s adaptation was set somewhere ‘north of Japan’, where bears, chim-
panzees and natives commingled. The waning interest in ‘verisimilitude’
or ‘authenticity’ cannot be adduced to the choice of genre alone as the
‘dramatic censor’ argued. It would seem rather that the mimetic capital of
the first voyages of exploration was becoming exhausted, at least on the level
of theatrical representation. In the language of the contemporary media,
the next move was to ‘reality TV’, a confrontation with the real not the
represented thing.
A royal revue: their Sandwich Majesties
In 1824 the British public was able to encounter the authentic Pacific in the
flesh and in the theatre. Since 1790 the Hawaiian or Sandwich islands, as they

were still known, had been ruled over by an indigenous monarch. Through
conquest Kamehameha I (c.1738–1819) had become ruler of all the Hawaiian
islands, which had been previously governed by warring chiefs. Although
he was cordial to the traders who visited the islands and encouraged the
introduction of their technology, he also insisted on the preservation of the
ancient customs and religious beliefs of Hawai‘i. This changed dramatically

when his son, Liholiho (Kamehameha II), succeeded to the throne in 1819.
During his short reign, American missionaries were admitted to the islands
for the first time and the tapu system was abolished.
For a combination of diplomatic and social reasons Kamehameha II and
his Queen Ka’ahuamanu sailed for England aboard the English whaling ship
L’Aigle in November 1823, accompanied by a small royal retinue. The British
press tracked their progress before and during their visit, which ended tragic-
ally with the death of both king and queen from measles after little more
than a month in London.
English protocol has always found it difficult to accommodate aristocratic
personages of uncertain cultural pedigree, but has traditionally tended to err
on the side of propriety, preferring to give native guests the benefit of the
doubt. That there existed some ‘saucy doubt’ as to their place on the great
ladder of protocol, that is, whether they should be accorded a Royal audience
for example, is discussed in a number of editorials. A leading article in the
Evening Paper argues that a ‘King is a King’ and that ‘accidents of civilization
can surely make no difference in dignity.’42 King George reportedly declared
that he was not going to meet a ‘pair of d—d cannibals’.43 The Hawaiian royal
couple was compared favourably to dilapidated and impoverished German
sovereign houses for example, who would most certainly be accorded the
appropriate protocol. The Times had difficulty finding the correct register
with which to describe the Hawaiian royal party, especially their apparel
which appeared on the one hand European, but also mixed with indigenous
elements. The writer is also unsure whether he is describing a human or
zoological curiosity: ‘The two males appeared in European costumes’ and
were deemed ‘exceedingly stout. The females are equally fat and coarse
made.’44 Another commentator found a precedent in the visit to court in
1734 of a delegation of Creek Indians and cites at some length the perora-
tions of both parties.45 One of the first articles to announce their visit is able
to assuage most anxieties:
His Majesty is of very gentlemanly appearance, and but for the darkness
of his complexion, which is of very deep copper colour, might pass for an
Englishman, having in every respect correctly adopted our costume. The
Queen is not so tall nor of so robust an appearance as had been repres-
ented. Her Majesty is certainly a fine full grown lady, but very little above
the middle stature; she is remarkably well made, possesses an open and
very agreeable countenance, not devoid even of sweetness and sensibility,

with good eyes and teeth, and is by no means deficient in gracefulness of

manner or elegance of demeanour. Already, with the exception of head-
dress, which is very plain, has she, like her Royal Husband, conformed in
a great degree to the English mode of dress.46
With ‘good eyes and teeth’ offsetting a deep copper colour and their partially

correct adoption of English dress modes, it appeared that their Sandwich
majesties could almost ‘pass’. Another report had described her Majesty as a
‘large woman’ fond of smoking cigars. It was little wonder they immediately
attracted attention and became, like their Native American precedents in the
eighteenth century, a kind of travelling amusement show. One paper notes:
‘These personages are still remaining at the Adelphi Hotel, and continue to
attract attention by exhibiting themselves at the windows.’
Figure 4 King Rheo Rhio [Liholiho] and Queen Kamehameha [Ka’ahumanu] delighted at
the performances of Punch (1824), lithograph, hand col., 29 × 37 cm
Source: By permission of the National Library of Australia.
The first public performance they attended was the Fantoccini, the puppet
theatre. This attendance, rather than the performance itself, was of such
interest that it occasioned a colour illustration, a number of which were
produced in connection with the stay (Figure 4) and a number of reports
in the press: ‘Yesterday morning they had another treat in witnessing the
performances of Ramo Samee, Black Billy, Harlequin, Columbine and Clown,
in the Fantoccini.’ Another reports: ‘A gratifying treat was yesterday afforded

them by the performances of Mr Punch and his family, whose merits they
acknowledged by an ample reward; they were also highly delighted by an
exhibition of the Fantoccini.’47 The illustration, a hand-coloured lithograph,
was probably first printed in the The Lady’s Magazine. Whatever its proveni-
ence, it commemorates a street performance of a puppet theatre outside
the Adelphi hotel where their majesties were staying. While the caption

states explicitly - ‘King Rheo Rhio and Queen Kamehameha delighted at the
performances of Punch’ – the turbulent collection of figures makes it difficult
to locate the royal visitors. They are visible on the balconies of the hotel.
The type of performance they were persuaded to watch must give us pause
to think. Although puppet theatre in the early nineteenth century was by no
means ‘just’ children’s theatre, it was becoming increasingly that. In addi-
tion the choice of figures such as Ramo Samee (a form of black sambo) and
Black Billy suggest this royal command performance was motivated by the
same sentiments of condescension that flow through many of the articles.
The press reported regularly on their public appearances, which seemed
to centre almost entirely on performances of different kinds. Apart from
frequent visits to the theatre they were seen at the horse races, military
parades, at a ‘grand fete’ hosted by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, and
they even attended a trial at the Old Bailey, one of England’s most famous
arenas of performative encounter.48 As one London paper put it, they were
‘extremely anxious to view the curiosities of this great metropolis’.49 The
pleasure was, however, all London’s, as the articles make clear: the Hawaiians
were themselves the curiosities.
The major theatrical entertainments they attended were indeed designed
especially for them. At the beginning of June they visited the Covent Garden
and Drury Lane theatres in one week. Their attendance at Covent Garden
was itself clearly a performance to rival the play, as the reporter notes: ‘They
were hailed on their entrance with plaudits, which the King acknowledged
by bowing repeatedly to the audience, and the curtain being drawn up
immediately, the whole of the vocal corps came forward and sang “God save
the King”.’50
The major disappointment was, however, the well publicized fact that
the ‘Royal party were not dressed in their native costume It having been
publicly understood that the Royal Strangers did not intend to appear in
their peculiar costume, many persons probably absented themselves on
that account.’ That the theatre was by no means full may also have been
due to the play ‘selected for the occasion’. It was none other than August
von Kotzebue’s hugely popular treatment of the Spanish conquest of Peru,
Pizzaro, which had been performed more or less regularly for the past 20
years, followed by an afterpiece The Spirits of the Moon; or, the Innundation of
the Nile. The reasons for the choices of play? ‘[A]s it [Kotzebue] afforded an
extensive display of scenery, procession, and decorations, it was well calcu-
lated to attract the attention of those for whose immediate entertainment
it was brought forward.’ It is clear that the writer has a clear position in the

great pantomime–melodrama debate and the problem of spectacular theatre

forms. Discussion had been raging for some time over the dominance of
spectacular and melodramatic forms. A few years later, in 1832, a parlia-
mentary select committee brought out a report on ‘Laws Affecting Dramatic
Literature’. In ‘legitimate drama’ the report argued, the ‘interest of the piece
is mental’.51 In consequence, ‘illegitimate drama’ emphasized scenic display,

the visualization of central action points, particularly moments of affective
arousal. Kotzebue’s Pizarro, as in all his plays, did not stint in such ‘realiza-
tions’, as Martin Meisel has termed them.52 The most famous was probably
the moment where the Indian chief Rolla protects a child from the Spaniards,
so it is not surprising that the writer chooses it for special comment:
The Royal Party seemed to pay considerable attention to the business of

the stage, especially in the latter part. Cora’s child was an object of interest
with them; and when Rolla rushed upon the stage, in the last scene, with
the infant on his arm, and the wounds received in protecting it, exhibited
on his forehead, the Queen was strongly affected. Indeed throughout the
Piece, she manifested a degree of sensibility which rendered her an object
of peculiar attention to the audience.
Figure 5 The king and queen of the Sandwich Islands, and suite, at Covent Garden
Theatre (1824), engraving, hand col.; 91 × 13 cm
Source: By permission of the National Library of Australia.

He refrains from making any comment about the play or production,

which he notes, ‘has been so often performed and criticized’. The impression
is gained that the reactions in the Royal box were of greater interest to
the spectators than the familiar antics on stage. While it is not uncommon
for visitors to the theatre to be of greater amusement than the play, what
is unusual is the form of theatricality where the spectators’ reactions are

tracked in relationship to the action on stage. In the engraving reproduced
(Figure 5) we can see how European spectators on the far left of the picture
struggle to catch a glimpse of their ‘Sandwich Majesties’ being entertained.
Unfortunately the afterpiece, The Spirits of the Moon, was also suitable for
the special guests, ‘a brilliant spectacle which could not fail to attract minds
most likely to be affected by shew.’ What categories of ‘minds’ these were,
did not need to be spelled out.
The final ‘brilliant spectacle’ that their Sandwich Majesties afforded
London and Londoners was tragically their own death. Both contracted
measles: the Queen died on 8 July, the King on 14 July. The funerals of both
occasioned considerable comment, mainly because the Hawaiian royal party
decreed that indigenous ‘sepulchral rites’ be performed. Indeed, what had
been staged 35 years earlier in the The Death of Captain Cook was going to
be carried out, if not in full view, at least for real in St Martin’s Church.
In fact, the couple were given a double burial as in the French panto-
mime. The Times reported: ‘On Saturday morning the remains of the Queen
of the Sandwich Islands (after having been embalmed by Mrs McGregor)
were laid out according to the English custom, and placed in a leaden
coffin The native attendants, after performing the funeral services of the
Sandwich people proceeded to lay the Queen in state according to the
manner of their island.’53 There followed an elaborate account of this prac-
tice, which involved the placing of sacred objects with the corpse. Such
details attracted more than passing curiosity. It was reported that body
snatchers had attempted to abduct, if not the bodies, at least the treasured
objects so a guard was placed on the church.54
∗ ∗ ∗
The funeral of the Hawaiian royal couple was the last major theatrical
event depicting the South Seas for quite some time. While the geographical
area continued to be explored, missionized and colonized, its artistic repres-
entation shifted away from the stage. Prose fiction became the dominant
aesthetic form with writers such as Melville, Stevenson, London and Loti
producing a rich literary tradition.55 The Pacific appeared intermittently
on the Parisian stage with various versions of the Perouse story and a
romantic ballet by Jean Coralli, Ozai (1847), featuring a love story between
a Tahitian princess and Bougainville, who finally makes an appearance as
a stage character.56 During the first half of the nineteenth century, the

most sustained and dramatic conflicts were being enacted on the islands
themselves between the islanders and the English missionaries who arrived
in the late 1790s to convert and save the savages. To do this, though, they
had to do battle with indigenous belief systems, which were based on an
intricate performance culture. This struggle between missionaries who were
suspicious of theatricality in any form whatsoever and the by now proverbial

Polynesian love of performance in its all its manifestations is the subject of
the next chapter.

3
Comedians and Crusaders:
Anti-Theatrical Prejudice in the

South Seas
When the English ship Duff put down anchor at Matavai Bay in March
1797, the local people had clear expectations of what was awaiting them.
European, and particularly English, ships had been visiting there for the
past 30 years. As we saw in the first chapter, such visits were framed by
predictable performance procedures. The local chiefs went aboard bearing
gifts, to which the visitors reciprocated in kind, who were then invited ashore
and entertained by a heiva. Indeed, the Duff was honoured by a visit from
the paramount chiefs of the district, including Tu (Otoo), now known as
Pomare, who had already made acquaintance with Captain Cook. In fact,
Pomare had, as Georg Forster related, developed a keen interest in bagpipes
and sailors’ hornpipes. After the formalities had been settled, which included
a gift of land to accommodate the new visitors, the ship’s commander,
Captain Wilson, related that Pomare desired some amusement:
the chief thought it was time to inquire after entertainments; and first
sky-rockets, next the violin and dancing, and lastly the bagpipe, which
he humorously described by putting a bundle of cloth under his arm, and
twisting his body like a Highland piper. When we told them that we had
none of these, they seemed rather dejected; therefore, to revive them, a
few tunes were played.1
Little did the Tahitians know, the vessel carried a very special cargo. About
to disembark was the first group of missionaries sent out by the Missionary
Society of London (later to be renamed the London Missionary Society,
LMS) to the Pacific comprising 26 artisans, four missionaries, six women and
three children. The Tahitians were soon to learn that these Europeans had
little time for sky-rockets, dancing or bagpipes. The pantomimic antics of
Pomare probably elicited hardly a smile from these first colonists. But most
portentously, the arrival of this small group presaged the beginning of the
74

Comedians and Crusaders: Anti-Theatrical Prejudice in the South Seas 75
end of the Tahitian religion and its related performance practices, which
were, as we shall see, inextricably entwined.
With the arrival of European missionaries in the Pacific, the relationship
between colonization and Polynesian performance took on a new dimen-
sion. While it is well known, indeed part of Pacific-European mythology,
that missionaries did all they could to ban ‘licentious dancing’, this propa-

gandistic catchword obscures more complex and less clear-cut relationships
between the missionaries and their converts, and religion and performance.
What was declared to be ‘licentiousness’ was in part an official epithet
for a more complex problem of imposing Christian doctrine. While the
missionaries certainly witnessed performances that even by today’s stand-
ards would be considered pornographic, this was by no means the norm.
More importantly, the missionaries recognized quickly that performance
and worship were part of the same system. By banning performance they
effectively cut off the life-blood of the religion without having to address it
on a doctrinal level. While this battle was a protracted one, they ultimately
won the war and destroyed performance traditions that were never to be
revived in their original form.
It is important to note that in the following remarks, the focus will be
primarily on the LMS missionaries and the first mission in the Pacific they
established in Tahiti. In the course of the nineteenth century other Protestant
denominations, most importantly the Anglicans and Wesleyans, also became
involved as did the Catholic Church, represented principally by the French
Marist brotherhood. There were significant differences in the approaches
followed, and in some islands such as Samoa, downright rivalry emerged
between the different groups. Whereas the Catholic brothers were often
more accommodating of indigenous practices and even allowed these to be
syncretized in some cases with Catholic ecclesiastical ceremonies, the first
Protestant missions, especially the LMS and its American spiritual counter-
part in Hawai‘i, the New England-based American Board of Commissioners
for Foreign Missions, tended to be uncompromising in their opposition to
native religion.2
The first mission was established in Tahiti and there the LMS missionaries
were confronted with the arioi, a religious cult and society whose members
were performance specialists. They moved around the islands feasting and
performing in a way that reminded early visitors and missionaries alike of
strolling or vagabond players. The latter had of course been a bone of conten-
tion in Europe since the Renaissance and the object of massive opposition
by Church authorities. By the mid-eighteenth century, the battle against the
theatre, which had been waged primarily by Protestants throughout Europe,
had been lost. As we shall see, this deeply rooted ‘anti-theatrical prejudice’
was then exported to the South Seas. Much missionary discourse against
performance (and this applies to most areas where they were active) seems
to rehearse the same, often very sophisticated, arguments put forward by

the anti-theatrical fraternity. The South Seas become for the missionaries a
new testing ground for a doctrinal battle now being carried out in a new
theatre of war. The first section of the chapter will look in detail at the arioi,
the ‘comedians of the land’ as they were known, and the anti-theatrical
prejudice the missionaries propagated. It is one of the unhappy ironies of
Pacific colonization that an extremist fringe of Europe came to have such

an influence, becoming effectively synecdochal of Western culture.
The theatrical transactions between Europeans and Polynesians examined
in the opening chapter should be borne in mind when examining how
such relationships were varied in the new and highly labile power relations
characteristic of missionization. In terms of the wider question of theatric-
ality outlined in the introduction, we shall see that missionary actions and
discourse were framed within two almost contradictory variants. Primarily
they were motivated by the widespread suspicion of all things that smacked
of duplicity, deceit and, in more instrumental terms, of represented actions
that could elicit mimetic imitations. They were staunch advocates of the
anti-theatrical prejudice as we shall see. Within the broader discussion of
theatricality and visuality they of course, advocated the primacy of the
written word, both divine and otherwise. Yet, as we shall see, they made use
of performance procedures themselves. For all their opposition to theatrical
amusements, the missionaries made extensive use of such devices for their
own purposes. On the islands this penchant for the spectacular manifested
itself in elaborately staged baptisms; back home in England, it found expres-
sion in propagandistic tableaux vivants and in visual demonstrations of the
efficacy of conversion. Indeed it would be unwise to see missionization as a
purely theological undertaking, effected mainly by sermons and bible study.
From the outset the missions linked spreading the word of God with the
introduction of Western technology and made use of Western media such
as the printing press and the magic lantern. As was so often the case with
cross-cultural encounters in the Pacific, the neat conceptual and behavioural
categories elaborated at home could not be sustained on the islands.
Plato’s legacy
A contemporary historian of South Pacific missionary endeavours, Niel

Gunson, has described the first missionaries, although interdenominational
and not members of one particular sect or church, as ‘spiritual descendants of
the Puritans’.3 The latter’s long history of opposition to theatre and dancing
needs little exemplification and the Evangelical movement, to which all
the missionaries were in some form attached, continued this opposition
well into the twentieth century. The Evangelical movement, which can be
traced back to Calvin and his various descendants, spawned many offshoots
in different countries. The basis of the movement is the concept of reviv-
alism, where an individual is reborn through a spiritual experience, usually

the personal recognition and affirmation of Christ having died for one’s
sins. The intense focus on individual experience of religion rather than by
collective upbringing is a distinguishing characteristic of the Evangelists. As
Gunson puts it: ‘The missionaries who went out to convert the heathens
were as much concerned with their own souls as with those of their coloured
brethren.’4

One of the most influential disciples in Britain was John Wesley, the
founder of Methodism. Like his Puritan ancestors, Wesley stated that he
could not see a serious tragedy ‘with a clear conscience; at least not in an
English theatre, the sink of all profaneness and debauchery’.5 The Evangel-
ical opposition to performances of most kinds had two main motivations.
On a more superficial level, dancing and dramatic play were considered to
be fundamentally non-utilitarian; a waste of (God’s) time. The opposition
had also more deeply rooted motivations as Gunson notes: ‘Many of the
Evangelicals also believed that dramatic representation was bad, not only for
the traditional reasons, but because of the Platonic notion that imitation is
bad in itself.’6
This deeply rooted and ancient distrust of the stage has been termed by
Jonas Barish the ‘anti-theatrical prejudice’, who locates its origins and persist-
ence in a fear of theatricality in its various guises: ‘the insidious theatricality
of life and the exhilarating theatricality of art’.7 While Platonic ontology
renders all objects of perception basically suspect, the arts of representation,
by mimetically doubling an illusory world of appearances, exacerbate an
already less than satisfactory state of affairs. Indeed Plato’s Republic, along
with early Christian opponents to Roman theatre, provides the starting point
for all diatribes against the theatre. The English anti-theatrical tradition
(which has its counterparts in most European countries with flourishing
theatre cultures) culminated in Jeremy Collier’s famous Short View of the
Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), in which Collier not
only revives the Puritan arguments of the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries but develops elements of theatrical theory while at the same time
damning the medium. His arguments reached a new level of sophistication,
which even the most ardent supporters of the stage found hard to refute.
Although the anti-theatrical discussion had a famous revival in the mid-
eighteenth century with Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert, as a serious social
debate it had, despite Collier’s rhetorical victory, run its course. It did not
disappear, however, but rather went underground and was sustained by the
Evangelical movement in countless sermons and tracts.
A summary of contemporary Evangelical opposition to the theatre can
be found in a sermon published in 1805 by George Burder, a director of
the LMS and ‘extremely influential with the missionaries in the Pacific’.8
Although entitled ‘Lawful Amusements’, the bulk of the tract is devoted to
the, from the Evangelical perspective, ‘unlawful’ variety.9 Apart from a few
predictable remarks on amusements on Sunday and cruel or profane sports

such as bear-baiting, two forms of entertainment occupy Burder’s attention.

These are the playhouse and dancing. The former is excoriated on all counts
and in all aspects: audience, actors and plays. For Burder the playhouse and
brothel are scarcely distinguishable, mere sliding points on a continuum
of depravity. The ‘Flesh-market of the metropolis’ has a magnetic attrac-
tion for sinners and Burder poses the rhetorical question: ‘Is there a loose,

debauched, depraved, ungodly man or woman, who, generally speaking,
does not frequent the Theatre?’ (6–7). The players are predictably of the same
ilk whose company should be avoided at all cost. Most dangerous, however,
are the plays themselves, as they consist of, quoting a fellow Evangelist,
‘love intrigues, blasphemous passions, profane discourses, lewd descriptions,
filthy jests, and all the most extravagant rant of wanton, profligate persons
of both sexes, heating and inflaming one another with all the wantonness
of address, the immodesty of gesture, and lewdness of thought that art can
invent’ (8) Burder discounts as specious the traditional eighteenth-century
argument that folly and vice must be first represented in order to be exposed
and corrected. This is tantamount to taking poison to ‘cure a pimple’. In
the unlikely event that the tragedy or comedy performed be in fact morally
sincere, its beneficial effects are rendered useless by the ‘Interludes, the
Dances, the Scenery and the Music’, that is, the afterpieces, which can be
relied on to dissipate the mind and ‘to render the rules of virtue and reli-
gion irksome and disgusting’ (9) Burder cites extensively from Jeremy Collier
to locate his own arguments in a discursive history of opposition to the
stage, while at the same time providing associative annotations to Collier’s
‘authorities’. One such association is a bold leap from Tacitus on ‘German
ladies’ to a broadside against the ‘seducing dramas of Germany’, meaning
the plays of Kotzebue. These come in for more sustained and explicit criti-
cism later on when plays such as Pizarro and The Stranger are singled out
for special mention on account of their positive portrayal of strumpets and
adulteresses. In a long appendix, Burder returns to Kotzebue or the ‘German
School’ yet again and analyses in some detail Pizarro and Virgin of the Sun
because both plays ‘place Paganism on a level with [Christianity]’.
Equally unlawful, but more difficult to condemn unequivocally is dancing
in almost all its forms. Burder concedes that it is ‘a natural expression of joy,
common to all nations’ and that David danced before the ‘Ark of God to
express the exultation of his soul’ (18). What cannot be condoned is mixed
dancing with its tendency to ‘awaken immoral passions’ (19). Needless to
say, theatrical dancing focuses all the potential dangers of dance, as it unites
both sexes and in its pantomimic tendencies lends itself to conveying and
inciting wanton thoughts in the spectators. Music, on the other hand, had
a more complex position within the missionary aesthetic economy. As the
vehicle of hymn singing and basically non-mimetic it was, on the one hand,
beyond reproach. Yet, in connection with dancing or even worse, theatre,
it had little or no legitimacy. Italian opera was considered the very epitome

of depravity. As late as the mid-nineteenth century a missionary periodical

could denounce ‘operas and theatres’ as the ‘very essence of carnality’.10
Judging the world, or at least England, by Burder’s sermon, we can see that
the missionaries were leaving a very sinful place. Although they would never
admit it in so many words, the battle against theatrically induced corruption
at home was, however, basically lost. With the exception of anomalies such

as Rousseau’s Geneva, the institutions of theatre were well established and
flourishing. To create a world free of the theatricality of life and art, it
would be necessary to start afresh, in places far from the depravity and the
ubiquity of theatre-related amusements. Such a place might in fact be found
in the South Seas, where, the founders of the LMS had decided, many souls
could be saved and new forms of social and spiritual intercourse could be
introduced. It needs to be stressed, however, that even by the standards of
late eighteenth-century British religious culture, the LMS missionaries who
set out for Tahiti (and many other places throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries) represented a minority group with extreme views. While
their abomination of ‘savage’ practices such as infanticide would have been
shared by the mainstream of British society back at home, this was not the
case for their opposition to dancing, whether in Tahitian or English style.
Arioi te fenua: comedians of the land
When the Duff arrived in Tahiti in 1797, the missionaries were under no
illusions as to the hard labour awaiting them. Some had, of course, read
Hawkesworth and Cook, and perhaps even Bougainville. They knew there-
fore that licentiousness was ubiquitous and by no means a preserve of the
stage or brothel but apparently a fact of public life. What they could not
immediately grasp were the complex interrelationships between perform-
ance and religious culture, both of which they had to contend with and
ultimately remove if they were to finally prevail in their self-appointed task
of bringing civilization and salvation to the Polynesian islands.
No institution of Tahitian society better encapsulated the need for salva-
tion and civilization than the arioi. A hierarchically organized cult, the arioi
paid homage to the god Oro by means of elaborate festivities combining
dancing, singing and dramatic pantomimes. Members could be of either
sex and they enjoyed considerable freedom in an otherwise highly strati-
fied society. They also embodied what the missionary John Williams termed
the ‘great’ and the ‘smaller evils’. The great evils were indisputably warfare,
cannibalism and infanticide. To these were added the minor although still
objectionable forms: ‘going in a State of Nudity or nearly so, cutting &
scratching themselves in seasons of grief – tatooing their bodies. Eating raw
fish, their lewd dances &c but the great Evils will requite your first attacks &
then the smaller.’11 With the exception of cannibalism, the arioi were guilty
on all counts. Infanticide, perhaps the most heinous of the ‘great’ evils, was

linked primarily to the fact that the members were forbidden to have chil-
dren. Yet, it was not a practice restricted exclusively to the arioi but carried
out throughout the Tahitian and indeed other Pacific islands as a form of
population control.
Ethnographers have reconstructed retrospectively the chief elements of
the cult, which did not, and could not, survive missionization. Since the arioi

were no longer active after the 1820s, this reconstruction was heavily reliant
on the early explorers and the missionaries themselves.12 The origins of the
cult were relatively recent. According to oral testimony and traditions, it
probably had its genesis on the island of Raiatea in the sixteenth century and
was linked to a fertility cult associated with the god Oro, or more precisely
his two brothers, who were worshipped through the maro’ura, a cult object
in the form of red feather girdle.13 By the time Cook arrived, the sect had
spread throughout the Society group. Entry into the cult was by means of an
initiation ceremony. Before admittance, novices were trained in performance
practices such as singing, dancing, the art of genealogical recitation and
pantomime. The initiation ceremony was an elaborate rite of passage in
which the novices were costumed, anointed, given new names and, finally,
tattooed. Within the sect there were eight ranks recognizable by tattoo marks
and dress codes. Advancement through the ranks was possible and marked
by a public ceremony and new tattoo marks. Life within the society appeared
to be, at least to outsiders, a prolonged round of festivities and performances
as they moved from district to district. When performing, the arioi were
recognizable by highly distinctive clothing and make-up that all observers
remarked upon. They dyed their faces red and blackened their bodies with
candle-nut soot. A visit by an arioi troupe meant a major religious ceremony
for the host village or district. Offerings were made to the god Oro, gifts
were exchanged and the local chief was expected to feast the visitors. They
reciprocated with extended performances that frequently lasted the whole
night. The performances were often framed by a subtle politics of opposition
to the power of the chiefs to whom the arioi stood in a relationship of covert,
and occasionally overt, opposition. The opening speech of the leading arioi
contained, as Jonathan Lamb has noted, ‘a veiled threat’ to the power of
the chiefs:14 ‘I stand comedian of the land that vibrates to the sound of the
gun.’15 Within the formulaic strictures of Polynesian rhetorical forms, the
latter shows how recent history, that is, the arrival of the Europeans, could
be integrated and instrumentalized by subtly alluding to the recent visitors
as a new force in local power struggles.
The missionary William Ellis, who observed their activities firsthand in
the early nineteenth century, provides an account mixing his characteristic
blend of ethnographic exactitude and moral disgust:
Their public entertainments frequently consisted in delivering speeches,

accompanied by every variety of gesture and action; and their representa-
tions, on these occasions, assumed something of the histrionic character.

The priests, and others, were fearlessly ridiculed in these performances,

in which allusion was ludicrously made to public events. Dancing,
however, appears to have been their favourite and most frequent
performance. In this they were always led by the manager or chief. Their
bodies, blackened with charcoal, and stained with mati, rendered the
exhibition of their persons on these occasions most disgusting. They

often maintained their dance through the greater part of the night,
accompanied by their voices, and the music of the flute and the drum.
These amusements frequently continued for a number of days and nights
successively at the same place. The upaupa [performance] was then hui,
or closed, and they journeyed to the next district, or principal chieftain‘s
abode, where the same train of dances, wrestling, and pantomimic exhib-
itions was repeated.16
The activities of the arioi cannot have come to the missionaries as a

complete surprise, for they had already attracted the attention of the first
explorers. The Arreoy (sic!) find mention in the Endeavour journals of Cook
and Banks who stress the elements of promiscuity, infanticide and indecent
performances.17 The earliest observers had, however, considerable difficulty
in accommodating them to any familiar categories of social organisation
or function. Therefore we find terms as disparate as ‘libertines’, ‘freema-
sons’, ‘strolling players’ and ‘devotees of debauchery’, as well as several
combinations thereof.18 In their respective publications of Cook’s second
voyage, both Cook himself, the Forsters and other log-keeping crew members
describe the arioi performances. Apart from the singing and indecent dances
(the infamous Timorodee) it was the aspect of comic satire that particularly
attracted the attention of the visitors. Because of their clear narrative struc-
ture and mimetic performance style, these comic interludes were almost
completely ‘legible’ to the English. Not only that, but they could occasion-
ally even recognize themselves and Tahitians they knew as the objects of
satirical buffoonery. One of these plays thematized theft, the problem that
so plagued Cook and other visitors on his visits to Tahiti. Georg Forster
relates: ‘We could plainly understand the name of captain Cook, and several
of our shipmates, mentioned in the songs, and they seemed to represent a
theft committed by their people.’19 The same plot was encountered in other
performances as well, with slightly different variations in as much as the
thief sometimes escaped, or on other occasions was punished. Adultery and
elopement were common themes, too. In one play witnessed by the Forsters,
a father attempts to forestall the union of his daughter with a young man
of whom he disapproves. Despite the father’s nocturnal vigilance the couple
run off together and a child is born. The main action was the childbirth,
which was acted out at length and, in Georg Forster’s words, ‘provoked
immoderate peals of laughter from the multitude’.20 The comic climax was
the actual birth in which a grown man playing the role of the newly born

infant charged about the stage dragging the placenta and trying to evade
capture by the midwife.
Another interlude witnessed at Huahine featured a girl from Raiatea who
was actually in the audience. She had eloped to Tahiti in the company of
an arioi – who had subsequently left her – and was now returning to her
parents on board Cook’s ship. The satire was evidently so effective that the

girl was reduced to tears and could only with difficulty be restrained from
leaving the performance. This piece and the lachrymose effect it engendered
on the young girl prompted Johann Forster to an extended speculation on
the place of ‘drama’ in Tahitian society:
Upon the whole, this circumstance gives us a very good idea of the nation
in every respect: If we consider the poor girl, who was thus exposed,
her bashful behaviour and her tears are certainly irrefragable proofs of
her modesty and repentance. She became the object of indelicate, but
sharp and salutary satire, and gave by her tears ample testimony of the
immorality of her behaviour, and that she felt herself aggrieved under
self-condemnation, and was not unwilling to become a fair warning to
a whole croud of young persons of her own sex. Lastly the whole
audience deserved in my opinion, likewise to be commended; If we
reflect upon the want of feeling in the frequenters of our theatres, their
indolence and inattention, and I may add their shameless effrontery, we
must give the palm to the O-Taheiteans, who, like the true children of
nature, have a sympathizing tear, and unrestrained feelings, the tribute
and glory of humanity, in readiness on all proper occasions.21
Forster is clearly an exponent of mainstream enlightenment thinking

regarding the function of drama and theatre as a moral corrective within
society. In this respect, Tahitians are a match for European civilization
or in some respect even surpass it, because, beyond their willingness to
shed empathetic tears, all inhabitants of the islands of every class practise
the performing arts as well as watch them: ‘When the polite arts become
the promoters of so great and so universally beneficial advantages, even the
most morose and gloomy philosophers must allow them a place among the
objects which ought to be communicated in a system of useful and moral
education.’22
Thirty years later, the arioi and their edifying sketches were to be
confronted by a small but determined band of decidedly ‘morose and gloomy
philosophers’ who could not discern the slightest beneficial advantage from
the polite arts at home or abroad. As we read missionary accounts of the arioi
performances, we should bear in mind that the disgust and repugnance they
elicited is framed by a more generalized opposition to the very sentiments
expressed by Forster and the Enlightenment position he represented. If we
add to the picture the aforementioned elements of religious function and

political power-broking, it becomes clear that for the missionaries the arioi
were a, if not the, force to be broken if control over Tahitian souls was to be
attained.
One of the earliest missionary responses to the arioi was published in
the periodical Transactions of the Missionary Society, under the heading
‘Otaheitean Journals’. In the entry for 10 February 1801 we find the following

description:
Arrived at Edéa’s [Iddeah, Pomare’s wife and herself an arioi] house a

company of travelling players, who go from one district to another to
exhibit their truly savage performances. They generally travel in large
companies, with a manager at their head. Their manner of performing is
thus: The actors place themselves in a ring on the ground, the manager
stands in the middle, and begins with a prologue, which he delivers with
much vehemency, and wild gesticulations of his arms, fingers and feet;
then a signal is given to the actors, who all break out into a most singular
and barbarous noise, which can be compared to nothing better than a
herd of swine, grunting in concert, at the same time they keep working
their hands and thighs as they sit cross-legged, like so many lunatics.23
It is clear from this report that these English spectators derived little if any
aesthetic pleasure or moral edification from the performances. Considering
that the missionaries had been in residence for some four years and were
reasonably proficient in Tahitian, their perception of the performers as ‘a
herd of swine, grunting in concert’ cannot be ascribed to linguistic incom-
prehension, but rather to fundamental opposition to the performances as
such. In a curious alliance between lower-middle-class missionary and aris-
tocratic arioi, the anonymous writer cannot help adding that ‘the higher
class profess to despise the actors, and speak of them and their performances
in a contemptuous manner.’ Indeed, this attitude of contempt was soon
assumed by the missionaries themselves. After the initial shock had worn
off, missionary reports quickly fall silent and contain very few descriptions
of performances of any kind. This silence was less a sign of actual eradication
than a strategy to document success for the home readership. In actual fact,
conversion proved to be a long and arduous process that was beset with
numerous setbacks.
Recognizing the highly stratified nature of Tahitian society, the mission-
aries focused their attention first on converting the chiefs, many of whom
were arioi. They first attacked the practice of infanticide and then the
performances. Forbidding these activities effectively deprived the arioi of
their raison d’être and Tahitian society of one of its central pillars of
belief. Without suitable performances, the god Oro was rendered effect-
ively obsolete and could be replaced by the Christian competition. With
the conversion of Pomare II in 1819 and the automatic Christianization of

all his subjects, the dissolution of the society was rapid. The missionaries
also noted frequently that the arioi proved to be willing and able converts.
There is some evidence to suggest that they in turn aided the rapid spread
of Christianity in the Society group.24
The interrelationship between performance and religious culture charac-
teristic of the arioi in Tahiti was, however, by no means unique to the Society

Islands. A similar situation pertained on the islands of the Hawaiian group,
where the performance culture of hula manifested a similar mutual depend-
ence between the two spheres. Missionization did not begin there until
1820 with the arrival of Hiram Bingham, who was sent out to the islands
by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1819.
Bingham, a New England Calvinist, had very similar views on Polynesians
and performance as his LMS brethren. The former were by definition savages
and sinners, their depravity made only worse by four decades of exposure to
Europeans; the latter tolerable only in strictly circumscribed circumstances,
and the combination of the two, a dire amalgamation to be opposed at any
opportunity.
Bingham very quickly perceived hula as competition to Christian activ-
ities. Writing retrospectively in 1847, almost three decades after his arrival
and six years after the end of his residence, Bingham depicts hula as a major
obstacle to the growth of the fledgeling Christian community. Looking back
on the year 1821, by which time the mission had been established for a year,
he observed: ‘While some of the people who sat in darkness were beginning
to turn their eyes to the light, and were disposed to attend our schools and
public lectures, others with greater enthusiasm, were wasting their time in
learning, practising, or witnessing the hula, or heathen song and dance.’25
Like many of his colleagues, Bingham was also a keen observer and some-
thing of a reluctant ethnographer. His description of hula performance is
detailed and one of the earliest accounts we have. The context is King
Liholiho’s transferral of his court from Kailua to Honolulu, an event that
provoked weeks of anticipatory hula performances. Bingham even provides a
rough notation of the chants and descriptions of the instruments, costumes
and physical arrangement of the dancers. Finally, however, the practice has
to be condemned:
The whole arrangement and process of their old hulas were designed to
promote lasciviousness, and of course the practice of them could not
flourish in modest communities. They had been interwoven too with
their superstitions, and made subservient to the honor of their gods, and
their rulers, either living or departed and deified.26
The charge of lasciviousness is predictable, but more important is Bingham’s

recognition of the hula’s religious function (‘superstition’). His persistent
opposition to, and finally almost total abolition of, hula was an important

stage in the conversion of Hawaiians to Christianity. The baptism of the

queen regent Ka’ahumanu, who effectively succeeded the ill-fated Liholiho
to the throne in 1825 (although technically the king was the latter’s 12-year
old brother), represented an important victory for Bingham, as she banned
all public performances in 1830. While this edict was ignored or rescinded
after her death in 1832, hula never regained its cultural and religious pre-

eminence.27
Bingham’s quick success in Hawai‘i was in fact uncharacteristic of
missionary endeavours in the Pacific, where it often took two decades or
more before the missions made any real inroads into replacing native with
Christian religion. However, the factors contributing to the adoption of
Christianity were the same on most islands. At best barely tolerated, at worst
simply killed, the first missions had to convince the ruling chiefs of their
usefulness. This insight invariably dawned as the islands became increas-
ingly exposed to European visitors and the calamities they engendered. A
combination of epidemics and weaponry plunged one island after another
into a state of serious and sustained crisis as population levels fell and tradi-
tional power structures became destabilized. The missionaries embodied a
link between superior technology and eschatology, and came to be seen as
honourable brokers between island and European cultures. Although they
had neither the training nor the inclination, the missionaries were frequently
co-opted into drafting constitutions and laws in order to provide a legal
foundation for intercourse between cultures. Once a chief or king (as in
the case of Hawai‘i, could be converted and publicly baptized, then it was
assumed that his people would follow. While this synecdochal relation-
ship was theologically dubious from a strict Evangelical perspective, which
emphasized each individual’s relationship to God, it became expedient to
allow it to work.
Ocular proof: baptisms and idols
Baptisms of royal or aristocratic personages were crucial events for the success
or failure of the early missions, for God’s work did not just have to be
done; it had to be seen to be done. Nowhere was this more spectacularly
demonstrated than in the ritual of baptism. The passage from heathenism to
faith was one that could be shown; and was not just a private affair between
the believer and his or her God. Ocular proof of God’s progress was also
needed back home to keep the sponsors satisfied. To provide evidence of
their success, the missionaries staged large-scale idol-burning ceremonies in
front of the new converts as well as the undecided, or they had the idols
ceremoniously packaged for removal back to England, with unintentional
echoes of Roman trionfi where vanquished enemies and their spoils were
exhibited. In both cases, we can discern clear reliance on theatricality on

the part of clerics who were doctrinally opposed to the concept in all its
manifestations.
Baptism as a form of mise en scène had a history, particularly within the
context of colonialism. The Spanish missionaries in Mexico had perfected the
theatricalization of baptism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with
large-scale passion plays culminating in the mass baptism of the indigenous

peoples to Catholicism. In these performances the dividing line between
ritual and theatre was completely obliterated. The first Protestant mission-
aries to the Pacific had of course not only more scruples than their Catholic
predecessors, but, as we have seen, they had little or no interest in genuine
theatre. Nevertheless, the act of baptism was too good an opportunity to
miss. The demonstrative conversion of a chief or even king (as in the case of
Tahiti and Hawai‘i), when marked by the ritual of baptism had the desired
effect of converting the whole group of whom the illustrious convert was
leader.
One of the most spectacular of these political baptisms was that of the
Tahitian king Pomare II on May 16, 1819. This ceremony provided a spectac-
ular breakthrough for the Tahitian mission, which had made little progress
since 1797. It was not until the paramount chief and aspiring King Pomare
had been defeated by his rivals and forced into exile on the island of Mo’orea
that he began seriously to entertain missionary teachings. He returned to
Tahiti in 1815 and won a resounding military victory over his opponents
whom he treated with uncharacteristic mercy. Although he had been under
missionary tutelage for some time, the LMS missionaries were uncertain as
to how genuine his Christian sentiments were. Material proof was provided
by the building of a huge chapel for missionary meetings at Paparoa in the
district of Pare. It was approximately 200 metres long and 18 metres wide
with 133 windows and 29 doors. It boasted three separate pulpits, each over
80 metres apart from one another.28 Pomare had also toured his domin-
ions praying, singing hymns and distributing a newly published Tahitian
translation of Luke’s gospel. The missionary Henry Bicknell noted:
He has lately expressed an earnest desire for baptism, engaging to devote

himself to the lord, and to put away every sin, and every appearance of
evil. [He] has also written a letter to us, expressing a deep sense of his
sinfulness and unworthiness, a firm dependence on the blood of Christ
for pardon, and an earnest desire to give himself to the lord in baptism. As
it appeared to be the voice of the whole nation, and particularly of the most
pious chiefs; and as his conduct has been so constant and persevering in
teaching and promoting good things, we resolved in humble dependence
upon Divine Grace, to baptize him.29
Noteworthy is particularly the import of baptizing the king. ‘As it appeared

to be the voice of the whole nation’, the synecdochal relationship between

the King and his subjects did not go unnoticed and was of crucial import-
ance for the whole missionary undertaking. Although strictly at variance
with Protestant teaching which sees the Christian religion as a relation-
ship between the individual and God, the LMS missionaries were in such a
case expedient enough to be somewhat more Catholic in their attitude to
conversion.

While the ‘whole nation’ did not gather on 16 May 1819, a great many
of its citizens did. In fact, the proceedings stretched over six days, endowing
the event with the temporal structure of a Polynesian ceremonial gathering.
The ‘brethren’, some 5000, assembled already on May 10 and set up an
encampment, which stretched for four miles. On the first day Pomare made
a gift of eight hogs to the missionary society and signed his names and those
of his ‘governors’ (chiefs). The next day was dedicated to opening the new
chapel, while on the day after, Pomare promulgated a set of Christian laws by
which the people were to regulate their conduct. These included the banning
of infanticide, which marked the beginning of the end of the arioi. The
proceedings culminated on the following Sunday with the actual baptism.
Bicknell estimated that about five to six thousand Tahitians crowded into
the chapel. The service was conducted not unlike a medieval passion play
as the missionaries preached simultaneously from the three pulpits. Bicknell
relates: ‘The scene was striking beyond all description: no confusion ensued
from three speakers preaching all at once. Pomare was observed to lift up
his eyes to heaven and move his lips in prayer. The sight was very moving,
especially to our older brethren who had been watching over him for so
many years.’30 This scene was repeated many times – certainly not on the
same scale but with the same attention to public spectacle and effect: The
conversion of the chief meant effectively the conversion of the whole tribe
or subtribe.
Shortly before Pomare’s ‘spectacular’ baptism, whose carefully staged theat-
ricality seemed to be at odds with the missionaries’ otherwise strict opposi-
tion to spectacular amusements, a front-page article was published in the LMS
organ, Missionary Sketches. It was entitled ‘The Family Idols of Pomare’ and was
framed by a wood-cut of the said idols. The article contains a letter from Pomare
in which he explains his desire that the idols be sent to the Missionary Society
in Britain ‘that they may know the likeness of the gods that Tahiti worshipped’.
He explains further that these were special family gods, but now he has come
to know the ‘true God’ they must either be destroyed or used to demonstrate
the foolhardiness of the old ways.31 Each ‘idol’ has a number and the bulk of
the article provides for the most part dispassionate ethnographic commentary
on the gods and their functions within Tahitian religion. Although the gods
can be identified and to some extent glossed, what the author of the article
cannot grasp is the power they evidently had and assumes the reading public
will be disappointed ‘on the view of these despicable idols’. The reason for this
disappointment lies in their lack of iconicity which the author assumes is the

usual characteristic of idols: ‘In general the idols of the heathen, however rude,
have been designed to bear a resemblance to something but these convey
no idea whatsoever of an animated being, and we are totally at a loss to account
for their form.’ The only satisfaction he can provide is through a citation from
a fellow missionary, Samuel Marsden, (who later gained prominence in New
Zealand). In a letter to the directors of the Missionary Society on 31 October

1816, Marsden wrote: ‘THE GLORIOUS SPOILS OF IDOLATRY – they are now
(continues Mr M.) lying prostrate on the table before me, and were we not
certain of the fact, we could not believe that any human beings could place
their salvation in these wretched images, and offer up human sacrifices to avert
their anger.’ The decisive phrase is the theatrical evocation of the vanquished
gods – ‘lying prostrate on the table before me’ – which mirrors the viewing
position of the reader who also has the image of the idols before him or her.
While the other culture remains explicitly incommensurable, this resistance to
European comprehension takes second place to the performative demonstra-
tion of defeat. This necessity for spectacular acts as proof of conversion is made
explicit at the end of the article, when the author cites another of his brethren,
the Rev. Mr Wardlaw who had preached a sermon before the Society on this
very theme. The title of this ‘admirable discourse’ was: ‘The Contemplation of
Heathen Idolatry an Excitement to Missionary Zeal’. Although his scriptural
authority is St Paul before the Athenians (Acts xvii, 16), his example is Pomare’s
gift of ‘foolish gods’. Again, it is the semantic field of visual demonstration
that guides Wardlaw’s argument and indeed the whole practice of publicizing
such evangelical spoils: ‘surely a view of these Otaheitean gods will fill every
Figure 6 Destruction of the idols at Otaheite

Source: Missionary Sketches, no. VI, July 1819. Collection of the author.

spectator with “amazement at the weakness and folly of human nature”.’ While
the interpolated quotation is scriptural the context is contemporary.
A year later, the same periodical published another title vignette in which
the theatrical demolition of the Tahitian belief system is depicted in the
conventions of a crudely manufactured history ‘painting’ (Figure 6). Rather
than focusing, however, on one pregnant moment within the dramatic

unities, the artist opts for a more medieval iconography of temporal progres-
sion across the image. On the left hand side, the Tahitians labour to pull
down a ‘Pagan Altar’, in the middle they consign their idols to a conflagra-
tion presided over by converted kinspeople clad in toga-like apparel, while to
the right others work to build a church. As usual the message is unequivocal:
after 20 years, the missionaries have finally accomplished their set task of
defeating paganism.
Plays and heroes
By the mid-nineteenth century the various mission societies could claim

major successes in Polynesia and progress in other parts of the Pacific as
well. This success had not been without cost, however. The missionaries,
like other breeds of explorers dedicated to opening up the uncharted parts
of the world, had their heroes and martyrs. Missionaries had been killed,
starved, drowned, had died of disease, and been tested in many other ways
over which they preferred to draw a veil of silence.
One figure stands out among all others in the Pacific: John Williams
(1796–1839), the David Livingstone of the South Seas. Active mainly in
Samoa and Raratonga, Williams combined and prosecuted preaching and
mercantile activities with similar degrees of vigour and success. In Vanessa
Smith’s succinct phrase: ‘John Williams’s career as a missionary was an
ascent of the rungs of capital.’32 Smith demonstrates that he was a forceful
advocate of missionary involvement in trading activities, which led finally
to a career as shipbuilder and owner, in the course of which he bought,
constructed and sold several vessels.33 Although this was done ostensibly
to obtain independence and mobility for his missionary endeavours, the
ships had to be financed by trading activities. He even established his son
as the first resident trader in Samoa. Quite apart from the financial bene-
fits, this combination of functions was one way of overcoming an estab-
lished rivalry on many islands between the missionaries on the one hand
and the European traders on the other, both of whom pursued different
approaches in their dealings with the native peoples. The enterprises of
John Williams were, however, by no means characteristic of missionary
endeavours in the Pacific. In fact other missionaries complained about what
they perceived to be an overt conflict between commercial and spiritual
interests.34

Competition extended beyond purely mercantile activities and included

interdenominational rivalry. In contrast to the anti-theatrically minded first
generation of missionaries, Williams was ruthlessly pragmatic rather than
narrowly doctrinal in his choice of instruments for spreading the gospel. He
had, for example, no qualms about bringing a magic lantern, the donation of
a well-wisher, to strike awe into new and potential converts. His biographer

Ebenezer Prout records that when asked what gift would be of service to his
project:
Mr Williams replied, that as the Romish priests were on their way to the
islands with electrifying machines, and other philosophical apparatus,
by which they expected to impress the natives with their preternat-
ural power, he thought he might legitimately, if it were necessary, turn
their weapons against themselves; and as he intended, on the voyage, to
translate Fox’s Martyrology, he should like to illustrate it by the magic
lantern.35
The choice of a magic lantern to prosecute missionary work was in fact

a delicate one. Since its invention in the seventeenth century, the laterna
magica had effectively divided Christians over whether it was an instrument
of the devil or of edification. Its ability to create optical illusions suggested
the former, its use for scientific demonstrations the latter. Until well into
the nineteenth century it remained suspended in an ambivalent field of
moral valency, oscillating between fear and fascination encapsulated in its
sobriquet ‘the devil’s eye’.36
The generous benefactor ordered a series of slides to be produced, illus-
trating ‘Scripture, English, and natural history’ as well as ‘the best plates in
the Martyrologist’s work, representing the tortures and deaths of the faithful
confessors of Protestant Christianity.’37 From Williams’s pragmatic rather
than doctrinal approach to missionization, the very same apparatus that
may be witchcraft and certainly a weapon in Catholic hands is to become
legitimate and useful in his own. The topic of martyrdom threatens a confu-
sion with Catholic doctrine, so that ‘Protestant’ must be introduced as a
term of distinction. Williams’s interest in martyrs was tragically portentous
in the light of his death and later career as a martyr of the LMS.
Other missionary groups were more cautious about distancing themselves
from what were perceived to be secular technologies. Otto von Kotzebue,
who visited Hawai‘i in the 1820s, reported the response of the American
Mission in Hawai‘i to the prospect of a magic lantern exhibition: ‘Lord Byron
had brought with him from England a variety of magic lanterns, puppet-
shows, and such like toys, and was making preparations to exhibit them
in public, for the entertainment of the people, when an order arrived from
Bengham (sic) to prevent the representation, because it did not become God-
fearing Christians to take pleasure in such vain amusements.’38 Williams,

however, had no such scruples, He used the magic lantern to great effect in
Samoa, as he reported in a letter to his son:
I may here inform you of the prodigious interest the exhibition of the
magic lantern produces. At the natural history slides they are delighted;
the kings of England afforded them still greater pleasure; but the Scripture

pieces are those which excite the deepest interest when the plate of
the crucifixion was exhibited, there was a general sobbing, their feelings
were overcame, and they gave vent to them in tears.39
A ‘general sobbing’ was also the reaction of the missionaries and their
supporters back in England when news arrived of Williams’s death. In 1839
he and another missionary were clubbed to death and then probably eaten
in Erramanga, today Vanuatu, and, as shown in Chapter 1, the scene of an
already unhappy landing attempt on Cook’s second voyage.
The legacy of John Williams, the entrepreneurial messenger of God,
however, lived on. By the late nineteenth century the LMS used his memory
for fund-raising, particularly to finance a succession of missionary ships
named after their illustrious and peripatetic hero. LMS records show that
children in Sunday School were targeted to donate money and fund-raise
for the organisation using the name and story of their idol. To this end the
society gradually began to employ dramatic and theatrical means to publicize
their activities. Despite the general Evangelical suspicion of the theatrical
medium, it could also be put to effective use within carefully circumscribed
limits. One genre was the so-called ‘demonstration’. The ‘Demonstration
for Boys’ Ship Ahoy!: The Story of the Missionary Ships John Williams I. to
IV, published around 1895, has a rudimentary dramatic form, in as much
as dramatis personae make appearances.40 However, even here the LMS
remained true to Platonic rather than Aristotelian principles, for diegesis
dominates over mimesis. The action consists mainly of a succession of char-
acters who narrate the history of missionary undertakings in the Pacific and,
in particular, the efforts to raise money to build the different ships. The
playlet ends with an injunction to the audience: ‘And may the children of
the Sunday Schools still continue the noble work of providing the means by
which this great labour of love can still be carried on.’41 Why the genre was
termed a ‘demonstration for boys’ remains unclear – perhaps the graphic
description of John Williams being clubbed to death and then eaten was
considered too strong for impressionable young girls. The term ‘demonstra-
tion’ is, however, clearly designed to demarcate a distinction between it and
normal dramatic forms.
Such demonstrations continued well into the 1930s and 1940s as the LMS
archives demonstrate. Apart from hagiographic depictions of Williams and
his exploits, popular topics included the first expedition of the Duff, and the
story of its cabin boy. In fact the LMS offered a series of ‘media packages’

on the topic of John Williams and his eponymous ships. These included a
‘South Seas Week-End: A fascinating week-end for a whole Church to include
a Cruise, Film, Tableaux, Games etc.’, as well as dramatized dialogues and
lantern lectures.42 The material could be hired from the LMS for a fee.
The most complex of these offerings was a theatrical presentation util-
izing the form of a living picture or tableau vivant entitled ‘The John

Williams Tableaux: Pioneer Missionary to the South Seas 1817–1839’. The
tableau vivant in which performers are arranged to depict significant images
usually familiar to the audience is a hybrid form combining narration,
visual effect and music, but no dramatic dialogue. The choice of form is
not surprising considering the traditional links between the tableau vivant
and liturgical drama. Although tableaux vivants tended from the eighteenth
century onwards to reproduce famous paintings, scenes from literature and
later even served as an excuse for socially legitimate theatrical nudism, the
origins of the genre are in fact religious. Tableaux were integrated into
different types of medieval theatre and have survived for example in the
Oberammergau Passion Play.
The ‘John Williams Tableaux’ consisted of 15 scenes, each of which was
subdivided into two or three ‘exposures’. The list of properties and costumes
provided by the LMS included ‘native costumes’. For men (or boys) these
consisted of brown jerseys and tights, loincloths and wigs. For women,
the same brown jerseys and tights plus grass skirts and shell necklaces. For
male native teachers, the LMS prescribed ‘white coats and loincloths, for
their wives long print frocks’.43 Apart from such ‘subtly’ allusive costumes
and suggestions for props, the booklet also included ideas for music. This
quite catholic assortment suggested ‘negro spirituals’ for a scene at a slave
market and ‘Death of Ase’ from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite for the final scene
depicting Williams’s ‘Martyrdom’; the Song of the Volga Boatmen provided
a rousing accompaniment to Tableau 13, ‘Launching the Messenger of
Peace’.
A variation of the genuine tableaux vivants were the so-called Moving
Tableaux. These consisted of story-telling and music, but instead of frozen
attitudes, pantomime and action on stage culminated in a moral or didactic
point. An example is Tableau 12, entitled ‘The Chip that Talked’. The stage
direction reads:
Very busy scene, hammering, sawing, carrying wood. Women plaiting

cord. J.W. going round directing. Comes to man sawing, he is followed
by a Chief to whom all this bustle is very strange. J.W. picks up a piece
of wood and writes a few words, looks round for messenger and sees the
Chief, gives it to him and points to Mrs. Williams, who for the sake of
being visible, can be seated at the foot of the steps leading to the stage.
The Chief takes the chip, looks at it and slowly walks over to Mrs. W.
She takes it reads the message and throws the piece of wood on the floor,

goes off to get the square. Chief picks up the wood and keeps looking it
over. Mrs. W. comes back, hands the square to the Chief, then follows in
‘dumb’ show, gesture suggesting the following dialogue.
‘Stay, daughter’ he said, ‘how do you know Viriamu wanted this’? ‘The
chip told me’ replied Mrs. Williams. ‘I did not hear it say anything’ said

the chief. ‘But I did – do now go and take it without more words.’
Chief hurries back holding the square in one hand and the ‘chip’ in the
other, hands the square to J.W. and holding up the ‘chip’ he points to it
round his neck and struts about with an air of great importance.44
The origin of this scene is an anecdote in Williams’s widely read account A

Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Seas. For Williams, it illustrates
‘a striking idea of the feelings of an untaught people, when observing for
the first time the effects of written communication.’45 As the later theat-
ricalization of the scene underscores, the medium of the written word was
not just all-powerful: its power could be staged with the indigenous peoples
as the unwitting players in comedies for the amusement of a metropolitan
audience.
∗ ∗ ∗
From the outset, the activities of the missionaries produced considerable

opposition from Europeans, many of whom regarded God’s messengers as
an extremist minority who interfered with the affairs of the native peoples.
The ‘war’, from the missionary point of view, was won on the islands by the
end of the nineteenth century. It is beyond dispute that the missionaries
managed to wipe out or suppress most forms of dancing, and many other
customs besides, such as tattooing. They succeeded in producing a kind
of theatrical tabula rasa by establishing and instituting the anti-theatrical
prejudice, the project that had so evidently failed in Europe and America.
Despite this ‘success’ on the islands, the conflictual tensions produced by it
had ramifications on the missionaries’ home territory. Far from disappearing,
the conflict re-emerges in the 1920s as an internal one in the play, Rain,
based on Somerset Maugham’s famous short story. American Samoa becomes
the setting for a moral conflict between a fundamentalist missionary and an
American nightclub performer cum prostitute. The indigenous inhabitants
are little more than supernumeraries in a Western conflict they were all too
familiar with. The success of Rain – apart from a long run on Broadway, it was
made into a musical and filmed four times under the title, Sadie Thompson, –
suggests that a century-long conflict had been displaced back to the country
of origin. As will be argued in Chapter 6, in Rain, America takes on its own
puritan heritage, which it had exported to the islands.

As we shall see in the next chapter, missionary opposition to Polyne-

sian performance forms also resulted in new strategies of adaptation on
the part of the indigenous people. As part of the wider colonial project,
missionization, motivated by staunch adherence to the outmoded ideology
of anti-theatricality repressed performance, but ultimately enabled it too,
albeit in new forms and with altered functions. The changes effected on hula

in Hawai‘i and the haka in New Zealand will be examined as two examples
of performative redefinition within colonial societies.

4
Dressing the Hula and Taming the
Haka: Performing Identity in Hawai‘i

and New Zealand
As we have seen in the previous chapter, missionary opposition to

indigenous performance forms could be implacable and was very often
efficacious. The first missionary in Hawai‘i, the American Congregation-
alist Hiram Bingham, opposed hula in all its forms and with the help
of the powerful queen regent Ka’ahumanu managed to ban all public
performances in 1830. Despite such opposition hula did not disappear,
but continued to be practised covertly and eventually overtly after Ka’
ahumanu’s death in 1832. By this time, however, Hawai‘i was being gradu-
ally Christianized so that the religious aspects of the performance form
became obsolete. Rather than withering away or fossilizing into touristic
folklore hula returned with a vengeance in the second half of the nineteenth
century, where it came to occupy important cultural and political functions
that continue until the present day. Every year, the foremost hula troupes of
the various islands compete for prizes in a variety of disciplines, traditional
and modern, in the Merrie Monarch Festival, a cultural event of considerable
magnitude.
In New Zealand, Maori performance forms underwent similar processes
of transformation. The famous haka, an intimidating dance involving
chanting, foot-stamping and aggressive gesturing, traditionally preceded and
in some cases surrogated actual hostilities. The first explorers to reach New
Zealand were continually greeted by hakas, both as preludes to attacks and
in the context of peaceful ceremonies. By the late nineteenth century, the
haka had become synonymous with European perceptions of the Maori as a
belligerent Polynesian people. Today the haka represents not just the Maori
people, but also on occasions bicultural New Zealand when it is performed
as a prelude to All Black rugby games.
In this chapter I shall explore what could perhaps be termed the roots
of these new performance phenomena. They can be seen as parallel devel-
opments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Against a
95

background of growing colonialist domination both cultures resorted to

a revitalization and redefinition of their performance traditions. In Hawai‘i
the hula revival dating from the late 1870s, and in New Zealand the new idea
of cultural performance festivals after 1900, resulted in a significant recoding
of performance forms. ‘Traditional’ Hawaiian or Maori performance forms
can in fact be located at a particular point in time, a moment of historical

crisis, where the remedial strategies were performative as much as political,
or indeed where the two merge.
Performative metonymy
Representation in the colonial context is anything but ‘neutral’. On the

contrary, in the conjunction ‘colonial representation’ it belongs to the
most maligned and at the same time expansive and therefore ill-defined
of concepts. The writings of Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, which can be
subsumed under the heading ‘colonial discourse analysis’, have identified
a set of discursive practices and reading strategies that have now solidi-
fied into established critical practice. This field of interdisciplinary research
is intrinsically open to all textual genres as Peter Hulme noted already in
the 1980s:
Underlying the idea of colonial discourse, in other words, is the assump-

tion that during the colonial period large parts of the non-European
world were produced for Europe through a discourse that imbricated sets
of questions and assumptions, methods of procedure and analysis, and
kinds of writing and imagery normally separated out into the discrete
areas of military strategy, political order, social reform, imaginative liter-
ature, personal memoir and so on.1
Colonial discourse becomes in this Foucauldian (or Saidian) reading a kind of

meta-perspective by means of which hitherto separate domains of knowledge
and action are reorganized into an interconnected field. Whether scholars
follow Edward Said’s technique of ‘contrapuntal reading’ or Bhabha’s decon-
structive analyses of the ‘colonial unconscious’, their frame is, however,
almost exclusively textual, only occasionally iconographic and almost never
performative. Colonialism, however, acted on bodies more directly than
it did on texts, and bodies responded to these impositions more often in
performance than they did in writing.
Self- or imposed representation by corporeal means in a colonial situation
leads to a form of theatricality that can be defined as metonymic represent-
ation, understood here in the sense of synecdoche, where a part stands for
the whole. The implications of metonymic representation have been much
discussed in recent years.2 What I wish to investigate, in particular, is the
situation where performance gradually becomes almost synonymous with

Dressing the Hula and Taming the Haka 97
an indigenous people, where a particular dance or ritual comes to have the

metonymic gesture of standing in for the whole of these respective cultures.
The interrelationship between performance and metonymy or perhaps more
precisely performance as metonymy of culture needs to be prefaced by a few
remarks on the concept of metonymy itself.
As a figure of speech, metonymy is suspended in an interesting paradox

between connotations of authenticity on the one hand and incomplete-
ness on the other. Viewed in this context, metonymy as a trope of cultural
discourse carries with it more than just the signature of abbreviation
typical of most figures of speech. It has inscribed in it already a discursive
strategy symptomatic of colonial discourse: the penchant to circumscribe
and contain. When Hawaiians or Tahitians perform for the (usually colonial)
other, they are rendering themselves observable and definable. The whole
tradition of folkloristic performance, which begins in the nineteenth century
in Europe and is then exported to the colonies for adaptation by the indi-
genous peoples, is framed within the metonymic notion that performance(s)
can stand in for the culture as a whole.
Cultural performances, whether folkloric dances or ethnographic show-
cases, tourist nightclub acts or nationalistic demonstrations, frame them-
selves, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has noted, more as ‘presentation
than as representation markers’ in order to convey the impression of imme-
diacy, the ‘illusion of cultural transparency in the face of undeciphered
complexity’:3
Semiotically, live displays make the status of the performer prob-

lematic, for people become signs of themselves. We experience a
representation, even when the representers are the peoples themselves.
Self-representation is representation nonetheless. Whether the repres-
entation essentializes or totalizes (you are seeing the whole through
the part), the ethnographic fragment returns with all the problems of
capturing, inferring, constituting, and presenting the whole through
parts.4
The locus classicus of the connex between metonymy, theatricality and colo-
nialism is Edward Said‘s Orientalism. In a much quoted passage Said defines
orientalism as a mode of representation:
The idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage

on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear figures
whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate.
The Orient seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar
European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to
Europe.5

The discourse of orientalism, according to Said, ‘theatricalizes’ the East

in the sense that it reduces and defines it, rendering it observable as
though the East or Orient were a stage on which the basically finite set
of dramatic figures peopling the Orient made their exits and entrances for
the delectation and edification of the Western beholder. Said’s concept
of theatricality is both metaphoric and metonymic. It is metaphoric in

the sense that he invokes the old theatrum mundi simile. It is metonymic
to the extent that the process he terms ‘theatrical’ or ‘theatricalization’
embraces more that the old trope. It is a pars pro toto concept and desig-
nates a particularly Western style of thought that ultimately was brought
to bear on most of the colonized world. Taking Said’s use of the term one
step further, we can postulate that metonymic theatricality and colonialism
are related phenomena. Theatricality in this synecdochal sense carries with
it a number of concomitant processes involving fixture and closure. The
staging of a culture, country or ethnic group implies that they can be repres-
ented by a finite set of mostly recurrent props, costumes and corporeal
signs. Within this limited repertoire, dance is perhaps the form of expres-
sion the West most often used and adapted for the purpose of theatrical-
izing other cultures. In the context of Hawai‘i, for example, the cultural
phenomenon of hula, which embraced dance, poetry and religious func-
tions, was reduced to its dance component, which in turn came to stand
for the indigenous people of the country. Thus, an essential part of the
process of colonization involved the theatricalization of the colonized people
themselves. Yet, at that same time the indigenous peoples quickly began to
adapt these theatrical processes to assist in creating new models of cultural
identity.
Reinventing the hula
In 1897 the German medical officer, and later Polynesian ethnographer and
physical anthropologist, Augustin Krämer undertook an extended tour of
the island of Maui, one of the larger Hawaiian islands. Although he and his
travelling companion had their minds set on ‘bones’ (the skeletal remains
of the ancient Hawaiian dead, concealed in caves), the urge to see a ‘real’
Hawaiian hula was equally strong, the opportunities, however, apparently
rare. Krämer records the following encounter:
We were namely desirous of seeing a genuine Hawaiian dance for once.

Because of its remoteness, I considered Wailuku to be particularly favour-
able for this plan and Mahelone was of the same opinion. He was most
enthusiastic at the thought of this rare diversion, even though, as he
said, dancing was prohibited. Like an experienced Cicerone he promised

to arrange everything perfectly for a few dollars, and we were in eager

anticipation. We proceeded down from the Heiau [temple] to our cart
and in a short time we had reached a grove of Kukui trees, in which we
caught a furtive glimpse of a small wooden hut. The dancing party could
certainly not be large, that was for sure; but in Samoa I had seen the
natives perform the most delightful dances in quite unbelievably confined

spaces. At the door we were welcomed by an elderly Hawaiian woman,
and in the room there stood a large bed, a table and two chairs, on which
two young girls were sitting, who rose as we entered and greeted us. There
seemed to be no sign of dancing, but that could still come. They invited
us to take a seat, but in view of the luxurious seating arrangements, we
preferred to stand and ensure that the people were acquainted with the
reason for our visit. ‘An old Hawaiian dance,’ I repeated. Yes, certainly,
the old woman said, just be patient for a moment, we are still waiting
for some girls. Soon enough, two slim shapes appeared, clad in straw
hats and long, loose Mother Hubbard dresses, in which they then began
to sway to and fro, in the style of a tarantella, to the accompaniment
of a guitar. This was in itself quite nice, and a globetrotter would no
doubt have been satisfied by it, if he could have added to it a some-
what piquant setting. We were not interested in that and I indicated to
Mahelone that we desired to see a hula in old Hawaiian attire. However,
the girls and Mahelone had as much idea of such things as an infant of
the stock market and they probably thought that for us old Hawaiian
meant nudity. As Mahelone continued his negotiations, some of the girls
removed their dresses intending to continue the dance in their indecent
underclothes. We quickly indicated to them that they had misunderstood
us and should get dressed immediately, to do which they did not need
to be asked twice. We looked at each other like two duped Europeans
and declared that we were satisfied and proffered payment. I considered
two dollars for the whole performance to be sufficient, but there I was
mistaken. Each of the four girls wanted a dollar at least and the old
woman too, so we were lucky to get away with paying five. Mahelone
put on an expression of neediness, whereupon I offered him a clip on
the ear. I was so furious with these Kanakas, who always cost me money
for nothing in return. But anger is no use with the Polynesians; you
always have to smile: cry smiling, punish smiling; it is ridiculous! When
we were back in the cart, with Mahelone seated proudly on the box, the
two dancers came rushing out and asked to be given a lift, because they
lived in town. We were kind enough to offer them a ride in our landau.
Useless as they were, laughing mischievously, they sat beside us as we
rolled towards Wailuku in the bright moonlight. Again and again they
sang the song that had accompanied the dance, so often that I can still
hear it in my ears: an example of that effusive, shallow but strange new
Hawaiian music.6


Krämer’s account of this ‘command performance’, riddled though it is with
ethnocentrisms, cultural condescension and sexual innuendo, touches on a
number of key issues regarding Hawaiian hula and its place in cross-cultural
interaction between Hawaiians and haole (foreigners). While it would be
very easy and ‘rewarding’ to read this text as an example of the exoti-
cizing/eroticizing gaze, which conflates the touristic and the ethnographic
perspective to the point where they are almost indistinguishable, it is also
fruitful to focus on another aspect of it. The ethnographers’ (Krämer is keen
to distinguish himself from common ‘globetrotters’) attempt to arrange (and
pay) to have a ‘traditional’ performance staged for their personal delectation
is met with the obvious counter-move on the part of the Hawaiians to cater
to what they perceive as European expectations. Yet, the cultural exchange
transacted here – money for performance – is interesting precisely because it
fails. The two travellers cum ethnographers pay to see an old Hawaiian dance
in appropriate costume. The Hawaiians, both the dancers and the interpreter-
guide, equate this request, erroneously as it turns out, with (near) nakedness.
What Krämer actually expects to see in terms of traditional hula costume is
never made entirely clear. It is apparently neither lascivious nakedness nor
certainly the ankle-length Mother Hubbard dresses.
Despite the evident cultural confusions, the narrative is underpinned by
a number of assumptions on both sides that point to very clear perceptions
concerning the place and function of hula as a metonym. And within the
larger cultural complex of hula, it is neither the movements nor the music,
both of which also evidently do not fully meet expectations, that provide
defining characteristics. The question of its dress codes is the crucial criterion
on which this performative encounter hinges. This assumption is based, it
will be argued, on a performative genealogy that is only understandable within
a broader historical context. The second major assumption pertains to the
‘place of performance’. Krämer’s narrative is constructed as an ethnographic
hunting trip with romantic overtones. There is the journey into the wilder-
ness (‘remote Wailuku’) for the purposes of the ethnographic search. The
further removed from the city, the greater the chance of finding unadulter-
ated forms, so the apparent assumption goes. Krämer’s description of the

place of the performance, the remote little house secluded yet beckoning in
a grove of Kukui trees, has strong connotations of the romantic haven, far
from the madding crowd. Yet, it turns out that the performers themselves
are not from the little haven in the forest, but from the nearby town and
have also made the journey out to the wilderness to meet the expectations
of the, so they assume, affluent European spectators.

This kind of situation, rife as it is with cross-cultural misunderstandings,
expectations of authenticity on the part of the Europeans, and genuine
attempts on the part of the ‘natives’ to cater to these expectations, which
they in turn misread, is endemic to the history of cross-cultural performance
situations. Failures of the kind recorded by Krämer provide, however, illu-
minating examples for performance research engaged in the history of such
performative encounters. For such situations have a history: when they func-
tion they go unnoticed, when they break down, however, the cross-cultural
performative code is probably involved in a process of renegotiation. This
process of renegotiation towards the end of the nineteenth century is linked
to a complex process of redefining the hula on the part of the indigenous
people, both for themselves and for the European colonists and visitors.
The framework of this redefinition is itself defined, however, in the main
by two interconnected European paradigms: folklorization and the creation
of a national cultural identity on the part of Hawaiians. The failure of the
performance recorded here can thus be attributed to a problem of choice on
the part of the performers (they chose the wrong option) and expectation
on the part of the ethnographers.
A further important factor to be considered is the status of Hawai‘i
as a colony of the United States. In 1893, American settlers, in conniv-
ance with the US government, had staged a coup d’état and effectively
deposed the ruling Hawaiian queen, Liliuokalani. The so-called ‘revolu-
tionary government’ aggressively petitioned the US government to annex
the Hawaiian islands. This was formally done in 1898, shortly after Krämer’s
visit. Having ruled the islands since the unification under Kamehameha I in
the 1790s, indigenous Hawaiians were, after a period of political autonomy,
by the end of the century effectively disempowered. However, the indi-
genous culture had been under cultural pressure a lot longer, as we shall
see. Despite the existence of a Hawaiian monarchy until 1893, we can
speak of a semi-colonial situation in a cultural sense. Also, the legal status
of indigenous Hawaiians was then, as it is today, unclear. No treaties
of cession were ever signed, as they were with Native Americans on the
mainland.7
The following analysis will proceed in three main steps. In a short intro-
ductory section some of the main features of traditional hula (hula kahiko)
will be outlined. This thumbnail sketch attempts to synthesize something
approaching an ethnographic conceptualization.8 This will be followed by
a commentary on two sets of images. The first group represents the earliest

iconographical documents relating to the hula, which reveal already consid-

erable variation concerning movement and dress. The second group consists
of photographs dating from the mid-1880s until around 1900. On the basis
of the costumes depicted here, I shall demonstrate the multiple functions
hula was performing in the colonial situation of late nineteenth-century
Hawai‘i.

Hula kahiko (ancient hula)
By the time Krämer made his journey into the Hawaiian countryside, hula
as it had been practised in pre-contact times was a thing of the past. It
had already in fact become an object of research and revival on the part of
European folklorists on the one hand and Hawaiian artists and politicians
on the other. While the two groups pursued different agendas in terms of
their interest, both were united by the common goal of reconstructing the
form as it had ‘once been’. The foremost scholar among the Europeans, the
Hawaiian-born doctor and folklorist Nathaniel Emerson, published a major
work on the subject in 1909 under the significant title Unwritten Literature of
Hawai‘i. Hula in pre-contact Hawai‘i he defined as:
a religious service, in which poetry, music, pantomime, and the dance

lent themselves, under the forms of dramatic art, to the refreshment of
men’s minds. Its view of life was idyllic, and it gave itself to the celebration
of those mythical times when gods and goddesses moved on the earth as
men and women and when men and women were gods. material, in
fact, which in another nation and under different circumstances would
have gone to the making of its poetry, its drama, its opera, its literature.9
Emerson’s account of the hula is structured around its texts and chants. As
the title suggests, it is an attempt to ennoble the oral tradition by rendering
it in written form, complete with the scholarly paraphernalia of philological
commentary, a strategy made even more apparent by the frequent analogies
with classical Greek tradition and nationalist, romantic ideals. This attempt
to litarize hula leads Emerson to a very clear hierarchization of the various
expressive modes employed in the pre-contact form. For him hula attains its
aesthetic status on the basis of its poetry rather than its kinaesthetic forms:
‘For the purpose of this book the rating of any variety of hula must depend
not so much on the grace and rhythm of its action on stage as on the
imaginative power and dignity of its poetry.’10 When Emerson says ‘poetry’,
he is referring to the chants (mele) that are an integral part of hula. The
texts are highly metaphoric, often couched in arcane language, and treat a
variety of subjects ranging from celebrations of nature and love-making to
self-reflexive comments on hula itself.

Although all accounts of the hula, both past and present, are deeply
embedded in various discursive agendas, certain elements of the aesthetic
and institutional place that hula occupied in Hawai‘i’s highly stratified pre-
contact society can be reconstructed with a fair degree of accuracy.11 The
first important point to note is the high degree of institutionalization hula
enjoyed. It was practised by trained performers who received instruction and

performed in specially designed buildings, halau (dance-houses). Although
troupes aimed to receive aristocratic patronage, most were self-supporting
and paid by gifts from audiences. Major performances were highly elaborate
affairs bound by strict etiquette, rules of tapu and were dedicated usually to
a deity or chief. A public performance consisted of ‘a series of dances chosen
from a not very varied repertory, the significance depending upon the grace
or passion of the rhythmical rendering and upon the novelties hit upon
by the hula-master.’12 The troupe was divided into two groups: those who
recited and played instruments (drums, rattles, nose-flute) and those who
danced. Dances could be performed individually or in groups of up to 100
dancers. Aesthetic excellence was judged according to the subtle footwork
and richly symbolic gestures. A hula (chant and dance) could be of a sacred,
religious character, have erotic and amorous themes or even include parody
and clowning. The interplay of chant (on both textual and musical level)
and dance depended on what Beckwith terms ‘double symbolism’. The richly
metaphorical language is rendered by allusive steps and gestures, which are
both subtly mimetic but also metaphoric. So complex and indirect was the
communicative and aesthetic code of hula that by the end of the nineteenth
century very few Hawaiians were capable of appreciating the textual richness
of the chants.13 Outside of such highly formalized performance situations,
hula was also practised on a more everyday, informal level by the ‘common
people’.
Early European visitors who witnessed hula kahiko often found it difficult
to describe the movements and gestures because the conventions deviated
so radically from Western conceptions of dance. It could be performed either
standing or kneeling and invariably involved subtle, undulating hand and
arm movements. The standing forms usually included vigorous genuflection
while keeping the torso relatively rigid. Weight was shifted rhythmically
from one foot to the other, which can give the impression of wave-like
motions. Hands and arms were often extended upright in supplicatory,
even mimetic gestures, which European observers construed, sometimes
correctly, as being of a lascivious nature. One hula often observed was the
hula ma’i, composed for the genitals of a chief and which ‘comprised the
traditional conclusion of a formal presentation of dances honouring that
chief’.14 Dances described range from individual young girls performing to a
small number of spectators to massed choruses numbering up to 600 dancers
and audiences of over 1000.
When the missionaries arrived in force in the second decade of the nine-
teenth century, there is no doubt that they encountered an institution of

considerable religious, cultural and aesthetic significance. As we have seen

in the previous chapter, their concerted and successful attack on it was
therefore a tactically astute move, as hula provided an easy target in their
strategy of conversion. The abolition or suppression of hula effectively meant
the removal of a part of Hawaiian religious culture. Missionary opposition
to hula and the suppression of hula from 1820 until about 1870 resulted

in an almost total enculturative breakdown. As hula depended entirely on
the direct transmission of performative knowledge from teacher to pupil, it
was hard put to sustain the loss of two generations of performance prac-
tice. When hula came to be revived under King Kalakaua in the 1880s,
it was within a substantially altered cultural and political context and, as
we shall see, in new visual forms. The period has left us, however, with
an interesting and sometimes contradictory iconographical record, which
provides an index of its redefinition within Hawaiian performance and polit-
ical culture.
Iconography of the hula
Even a cursory survey of the iconographical evidence – in the main photo-

graphs postdating the hula revival under King Kalakaua in the 1880s – reveals
a proliferation of costume forms. Judging by the outward attire, hula had
become different things for different people, a floating signifier of Hawaiian
identity(ies). The following comments are framed by the basic requirement of
all iconographical analysis, that is, that all pictorial images operate simultan-
eously on two communicative levels: a level of representation, the thing(s)
depicted; and second, a level of conventionality determined by the pictorial
media themselves, which is independent of the particular image depicted,
but nevertheless impinges on it.15 That the following comments focus on
costume as an index of cultural and performative change has two main
justifications. First, costume is subject to a low degree of mediation through
artistic perception and iconographical conventions. While the correlation
between the depiction of costume in images and that worn in performance
situations is relatively high, it is still not total and, in fact, the following
arguments are not predicated on a historicist attempt to ‘reconstruct’ hula,
‘as it really was’. Rather the images to be considered will be approached in
terms of their visual discourses and the way in which they constitute a mise
en scène of the artist’s perceptions of the phenomenon. Second, costume,
both in everyday life and in performance contexts, can be regarded as a
gauge of cultural self-fashioning. As Roland Barthes notes, clothing is both
a social and a theatrical sign, ‘a kind of writing’ with ‘the ambiguity of
writing , an instrument in the service of a purpose which transcends it.’16
This semiotic double function allows for a complexity of sign use that reveals
a high degree of reflexivity, and thus forms a privileged and productive site
for cultural and aesthetic analysis.

We can preface our consideration of the iconographical evidence relating

to hula by returning to Krämer’s desire to see ‘genuine Hawaiian dancing’,
which meant presumably the pre-contact or early post-contact phase of hula.
John Webber, who accompanied James Cook on his third (and fatal) voyage,
rendered the dance and its performance context in a number of images. His
‘Man of the Sandwich Islands, dancing’ (see jacket illustration) depicts a near

naked, heavily tattooed male dancer, adorned with leggings and holding a
feathered rattle. For this image we also have a rare example of direct verbal
corroboration. In the official account of the voyage we can read that this
dance, described as ‘buffooneries’, was witnessed by the ship’s company on
the beach. The description of the costume entirely supports Webber’s image
and an attempt is made to characterize the dance: ‘His style of dancing was
entirely burlesque, and accompanied with strange grimaces, and pantomim-
ical distortions of the face; which though at times inexpressibly ridiculous,
yet on the whole, was without much meaning, or expression. Mr. Webber
thought it worth his while to make a drawing of this person, as exhibiting
a tolerable specimen of the natives.’17 Unfortunately, this dance cannot
really be considered hula in its institutional sense, although it doubtless has
some relation to it. Hula was primarily a dance performed on a large scale
for various religious and ceremonial occasions.18 The verbal description in
fact suggests some kind of parodic taunting and clowning rather than the
measured solemnity characteristic of much hula. It is intriguing to consider
just what this ‘tolerable specimen’ was engaged in. Although the problem
cannot be pursued here, the short encounter raises a whole series of ques-
tions regarding cross-cultural performance and perceptions. Such questions
would include the discrepancies between the verbal and visual renderings,
for example. King’s stressing of the grotesque, the distortion of movement
and face, finds no expression in Webber’s drawing, which renders graceful
movement and rather finely drawn features. The perspective from the other
side must also be considered. If the performance was indeed a parodic
taunting, what was the point of it? This is perhaps interesting in the context
of the tragedy to come: Cook’s death.
If Webber’s ‘Man of the Sandwich Isles, dancing’ is a somewhat ambi-
valent image in terms of its relationship to hula (although it is frequently
reproduced as an early visual document of it), this is no doubt due to the
lack of direct observation of the performance as it was practised on formal
occasions.19 The same, however, cannot be said of several drawings executed
by the French artist Jacques Arago, who visited Hawai‘i in 1819 as the offi-
cial draughtsman to the scientific expedition commanded by Louis Freycinet
(1817–19). Entitled ‘Iles Sandwich: Femme de l’ile Mowi dansant’ (Figure 7),
the woman is depicted performing what modern scholars have recognized
as the essential features of the hula noha (seated hula). Naked from the waist
up, her costume consists of a full skirt, body paint as well as her heavily
tattooed breasts, chest and arms. The scene was reproduced by Arago in three


Figure 7 Jacques Arago: Les Isles Sandwich: Femme de l’isle Mowi dansant
Source: Engraving by Avgrand. Detail. Note the row of goats around the breasts By permission of
the Bishop Museum.
different versions with each one showing variations in hand movements,

costume and position.20 Together they provide a composite picture of the
essential features of this one dance and illustrate at the same time the prin-
ciple of variation in performance. Arago’s attention was attracted more by
the tattooed bodies of the hula dancers he drew than by the dance itself.
During his sojourn on the islands he produced several sketches of female
hula dancers, which quickly became part of the mimetic capital of Pacific
iconography. Arago was fascinated by the way Hawaiians had incorpor-
ated the outward signs of European presence onto their bodies. In place of
traditional patterns they decorated themselves with motifs depicting foreign
animals and objects. In his travel account, Souvenirs d’un aveugle: Voyage autour
du monde (1839), Arago reports on tattooing using foreign motifs among
Hawaiians across sex and rank, but particularly pronounced among women.
He writes: ‘If the men evidence a general taste for decorating their bodies,
then among women of all ages it is a passion, a rage, a frenzy.’ Tattooing
is carried out, he continues, ‘in all dwellings, in all public places, on the
beach, under the trees and neither artist nor subject seem to tire of it.’21

Amongst the women there exists, he believes, a clear hierarchy of motifs. At

the top are goats (introduced by Captain Cook in 1778), followed by checker-
boards, fans and birds, with which the women decorate their cheeks, forehead
and breasts. As far as the iconographical significance is concerned, Arago is
dismissive of established scholarly opinion:

Do not tell me that these images are hieroglyphics, with which the indi-
vidual and family history are conserved; in this regard I can refute the
ingenious fairy-tale dreamed up by travellers, for in Kaykakooah, as well
as Koiai, I worked without interruption applying designs to the legs,
thighs, shoulders, heads and breasts of women of the people, wives of
the governor and even princesses, and I can assure you that my inspir-
ation was derived solely from my imagination and from my studies at
the Collège. Today Ganimede und Mercury adorn more than twenty
loins of the Sandwich islanders, the gladiator graces approximately forty
young girls of Owhyee, and since my return to Paris I have encountered
seafarers who have assured me that the success of my Venus, my Apollo
and my other invented creations have inspired a great number of local
artists. They have also told me, which flattered me a great deal, that since
our voyage the old checkerboards, goats and wheels, have forfeited their
former popularity.22
Arago’s illustration and self-congratulatory commentary illustrate in

different ways processes of cross-cultural encounter whereby signs of alterity
are absorbed. The tattooed goats, as well as the motifs he mentions such as
fans, checkerboards and wheels, point to an attempt to assimilate perform-
atively the experience of the other culture. Read with the discourse of ‘fatal
impact’, according to which Pacific island cultures were exposed to successive
waves of destructive foreign influences, this change to the corporeal icono-
graphy of hula could be seen as the first sign of the demise of the performance
form, its visual pollution so to speak. Change does not signify, however,
by definition destruction or demise. At this early point in colonial contact,
one should be more circumspect in applying such readings. As we noted
in Chapter 1, Marshall Sahlins has defined pre-contact Hawaiian culture
as performatively assimilative, that is, ready to change rules and signs in
response to an altered cultural situation.23 Following Sahlins, the prac-
tice could be read differently, namely as a productive adoption of foreign
elements into an existing cultural system. These citations of alterity are less
an index of colonial power than a sign of indigenous strategies to harness
foreign elements for their own devices.
A further step along the continuum of performative assimilation of new
cultural signs within the framework of hula is captured in the dance scene
rendered by the French marine painter Bathélemy Lauvergne, who visited the
Hawaiian islands in 1836 on board the French ship La Bonite. The artist shows
a complex performance situation with a solo female dancer accompanied


Figure 8 Bathélemy Lauvergne: Scène de danse, aux Iles Sandwich. Hula dancing with
a solo female dancer
Source: Lithograph, sepia toned. Detail, c1836. By permission of the Bishop Museum (CP 76816).
by seated drummers and watched by a mixed audience of Hawaiians and

Europeans (Figure 8). The image includes European spectators, a feature
not uncommon in the performance iconography of Pacific voyages. It also
signals the beginning of a context for hula in which the dance is medi-
ated through European representations, whether iconographical or written.
Rather than attempting to conceal the context of the performance, these
early representations make little effort to disguise the fact that the dances
performed were probably staged for them; in fact the European visitors are
the occasion for the hula. This performance had been especially arranged
for the European visitors by King Kamehameha III at his country residence.
Roger Rose notes that by this time, hula ‘had already entered a period of
decline’ owing to missionary interference. In this scene the European influ-
ence on costuming is already apparent. Not only the Hawaiian spectators
but also the dancers are clad in elements of Western clothing. The French
consul for Manila, Théodore-Adolphe Barrot, who witnessed the perform-
ance, described the costume as a skirt made of calico, composed of ‘pieces
of cloth, suspended from the hips, and hanging in graceful folds, [which]
imparted a sort of originality to their movements.’24 The female dancer is
almost fully clad, in comparison to the drummers, who were, as another
witness noted, ‘naked to the waist; their arms and breast were tattooed,
and loose folds of tapa of various colours covered the lower part of their
bodies.’25 Sixteen or seventeen years after Arago’s depiction, hula is already
revealing clear signs of assimilation on the level of costume and performance

context into an altered, European paradigm. By 1836 formal performances of

hula were considered a part of Hawaiian hospitality to high-ranking visitors.
A process of secularization was setting in which would ultimately lead to the
touristic hula as a symbol of Hawaiian aloha.
Figure 9 Two Hula dancers. Ambrotype, 1858

Source: Photo, by permission of the Bishop Museum.
These earliest images of hula provide a framework in which to regard

the proliferation of contexts for hula towards the end of the nineteenth
century. The period following the establishment of the American mission
under Hiram S. Bingham in 1820 saw a severe curtailment in the religious
function of the hula in particular.26 As far as the iconographical record is
concerned, the next major changes in the middle of the nineteenth century
coincide with the development of photography. The earliest photograph
of hula (Figure 9), an ambrotype dating from 1858, already prefigures the

tradition of studio-produced studies for the tourist market.27 The floor has
been retouched to give the appearance of sand. The costumes depicted here
are also characteristic of one image of hula that was to persist throughout
the nineteenth century. The wide cloth skirts, tightly buttoned blouses, fibre
anklets bear little resemblance to the image of scantily clad hula maidens
that would soon dominate the popular imagination. This picture was taken

one year before the passage of legislation regulating public performances of
hula. The dance was permitted provided it was ‘not of an immoral character,
to which admission is obtainable by the payment of money.’28 Against this
background the image seems to be conveying a double message: on the one
hand an image of tightly buttoned respectability – anything less likely to
arouse ‘immoral passions’ is scarcely imaginable. This certainly holds true
for the photographic image and it is only this particular function we can
study. The effect of the dancers in motion, their kinaesthetic appeal, is,
it would seem, deliberately effaced in this static pose. The other implicit
message is a commercial one. Here we have to take cognizance of the context
and purpose of representation. Already hula was being manoeuvred into a
context of commercial exploitation as the tourist industry in Hawai‘i began
to grow in the second half of the nineteenth century. Further legislation
was passed in 1865 and 1870 to remove most restrictions, thus ‘opening the
way for wide participation in hula performances throughout the islands’.29
Within this context photography had already begun to establish itself as a
purveyor of commercial interests, particularly in the realm of theatre and
performance.
The final one and a half decades leading up to the close of the century see
an upsurge in the importance of hula within Hawaiian society and a multi-
plication of its functions. The photographs to be analysed in the following
section were taken within approximately ten years of each other (between
1885 and 1895) and are roughly contemporaneous with Krämer’s visit to
Hawai‘i. The images should thus be regarded not chronologically (some of
them cannot be exactly dated anyway), but rather as coeval and thus as
demonstrations of multiple performative identities and functions.
Under King Kalakaua (1874–91) hula flourished again, yet within a funda-
mentally altered cultural context. When Kalakaua, the ‘Merrie Monarch’,
assumed the Hawaiian throne in 1874, he called kumu hula (hula teachers) to
his court and revived the tradition of hula performers being part of the court
retinue as had been the case in pre-contact times. With Kalakaua begins
what might be called a conscious reinvention of tradition for the purpose
of cementing Hawaiian national identity and reinforcing indigenous polit-
ical aspirations, which were coming under pressure from the white settlers.
King Kalakaua’s revival of hula is to be seen in a context of increasing
political and economic disenfranchisement of indigenous Hawaiians. His
predecessors, particularly Kamehameha III (1813–54), had given up title to
all Hawaiian lands with the exception of certain large estates retained as

crown lands. From the 1850s onwards foreigners could purchase property
easily – which they did in large quantities, laying the foundations for the
huge sugar and pineapple plantations. With the plantations came inden-
tured labourers from China, Japan and the Philippines and the foundation
of Hawai‘i’s famous multicultural society. The nationalist revival initiated by
Kalakaua was, however, aimed at the indigenous population and was more

strongly cultural than explicitly political in orientation.
Although the reintroduction of ancient hula as a form of court enter-
tainment was initially conceived as a demonstration of indigenous tradi-
tionalism, it led ironically (or perhaps logically) to major innovations in
the performance form itself. It ‘became a breeding place for change’, as
Adrienne Kaeppler notes.30 These changes received dynamic public demon-
strations during the 1880s when Kalakaua staged large hula festivals on
various occasions. The celebrations were extensively photographed and we
have a large number of photographic documents in different contexts. The
various guises under which hula was demonstrated and promoted, even
within the same courtly context, can be seen by examining Figure 10. The
photograph depicts the hula master Ioane Ukeke with four of his troupe.
Ukeke was responsible for staging Kalakaua’s festivals and earned the name
‘Honolulu Dandy’. While the dancers are clad in ‘traditional’ attire, Ukeke
presents himself in an intriguing mixture of top hat, jacket, lei and cigar. The
backdrop is a painted view of Waikiki beach and Diamond Head, Honolulu’s
most famous landmark, quintessential touristland, even in the late nine-
teenth century. Thus we have a conflation here of a courtly dance troupe
dedicated to the preservation and practice of ancient hula with a stand-
ardized, even stereotypical vista and a somewhat hybridized Hawaiian male
presence.
It is one of the many paradoxes of performative identity presentation that
the cultural renaissance and self-assertion signified by the hula revival is
clothed in the outward signs of Western culture. At exactly the same time the
grass skirts and leis commonly associated with Hawaiian hula were beginning
to be introduced.31 The origin of the grass skirts is uncertain. They may have
been introduced by visiting Tahitian troupes, from whom the Hawaiians
certainly learned the famous hip-rotating dance, synonymous with hula, but
in fact entirely unknown to ancient hula. Other scholars identify Gilbert
Islanders, present in Hawai‘i as labourers, as the source of inspiration for what
was to become one of the most famous dance costumes of all time.32 The
ukulele is itself equally synonymous with hula and was incorporated into
the hula performance tradition at this time within the context of Kalakaua’s
court dancers, along with hymn singing and band music coordinated by the
Prussian bandmaster Heinrich Berger.33 European music was refashioned and
syncretized during these years to produce a distinctively Hawaiian music and


Figure 10 The ‘Honolulu Dandy’ Ioane Ukeke with his hula troupe, c.1880. The
women’s costume, closely resembling that of Figure 9, comprises calf-length dresses,
long-sleeved voluminous blouses and head wreaths. This set the fashion and standard
for ancient or traditional hula which has persisted with slight variations until today
Source: Photo: Dickson Collection, by permission of the Bishop Museum (CP 76818).
dance tradition, which found acceptance by both Hawaiians and Europeans

alike. They were introduced in one spectacular performance according to
Adrienne Kaeppler:
In Kalakaua’s court all these influences converged and at his jubilee celeb-
ration in 1886 a famous Hawaiian dancer appeared in a hula accompanied
by ukulele and steel guitar. The new music was sanctioned by the King,
teachers, and performers, and loved by the audience. Soon most new
compositions were in this style. This new idiom is now known as
‘Hawaiian music.’ In truth it has little indigenous Hawaiian music in it,
but is uniquely Hawaiian in that it was developed in Hawai‘i by Hawaiians
out of a combination of Western music ideas available to them in the
second half of the 19th century.34

Both process and performance document a moment of cultural and perform-

ative self-fashioning as a response to heavy acculturative influences. Girls
in grass skirts and ukuleles that began to feature on tourist postcards also
reveal, however, the ambivalence of this process. A multiplicity of images
and performative identities becomes apparent. Under the putative strategy
of reviving ancient hula, the court dancers created a completely new form,

incorporating new movements (Tahitian hip-gyrations), new musical instru-
ments and idiom. Out of an initially conservative, folkloristic impetus arose
a highly inventive syncretic performance form.
Figure 11 Hula dancers in a forest setting, c.1899

Source: Photo: Frank Davey, by permission of the Bishop Museum (CP 32352).
Finally, we will return to Krämer’s search for ancient hula in 1897. As

an answer we can offer two alternatives, both images coinciding within a
year or two with Krämer’s visit. His journey into the forest may have led
him to Figure 11, dating from 1899. In a grove of trees somewhere, two
bare-breasted hula dancers (or are they even dancers?) pose. They are accom-
panied by a woman in a sleeveless dress with a guitar and an elderly man
in a loin cloth playing a nose-flute. This photograph contains in one image
the multiple identities of hula at the end of the century and encapsulates

a range of projections. The forest setting corresponds with Krämer’s intu-

ition that genuine ‘old Hula’ might be best found in a remote area, far from
the madding crowd. The bare-breasted women correspond to the eroticized
tourist image of hula; one, however, which had more to do with European,
especially missionary, projections than with the actual costume codes of the
form, whether ancient or modern. The girl with the guitar suggests that for

the Hawaiians, or for the photographer Frank Davey staging the photograph,
the instrument introduced by the Portuguese in the middle of the nineteenth
century had become synonymous with hula, to the point perhaps where
it was inconceivable without it.35 The old man playing the nose-flute is,
finally, a marker of the pre-contact musical accompaniment and his presence
is somewhat at odds with the guitar-playing women, at least in the context
of staged primitivism, in which the photograph is clearly to be located. The
image is written over with the whole genealogy of European projections
regarding hula: the contradictions and impositions. It is a composite image
trying in a sense to cater for all these desires. It is perhaps the image that
would have met with Krämer’s approval, if he could have been convinced it
was authentic.
Figure 12 Backyard hula dancing in informal setting, c.1900

Source: Photo: Alonzo Gartley, by permission of the Bishop Museum (CP 90762).
The last image to be considered here (Figure 12) also dates from the late
1890s. It is a snapshot of hula being performed in a backyard, probably some-
where in Honolulu. Although this performance would certainly not have
met with Krämer’s approval – the urban setting alone would have been a
great disappointment – it is ‘authentic’ to the extent that it appears to be an
indigenous performance context. With the exception perhaps of the photo-
grapher, there are no European spectators. The dancers are clad in simple

dresses without decorative wreaths (leis) or anklets. They are accompanied

by two men playing calabash drums, a sign of hula kahiko, dances performed
in a broadly traditional way. The photographer has caught the characteristic
but subtle sway and hand movements of ancient hula, as performed today.
Of interest here, however, is less the question of ancient or modern: the
image suggests a conflation of both and the existence of a performance form

integrated into indigenous society. It is a formal occasion judging by the
attire of the spectators – a birthday or wedding perhaps – and hula dancers
have evidently been employed or invited for that special celebration. We see
here hula as part of a living tradition within the fabric of native Hawaiian
society. Performed neither for the tourist gaze nor for courtly delectation and
political self-representation, it appears here to be in a third space, somewhere
between the private and the public.
Taming the haka
If the hula is metonymic of Hawaiian culture, then the same function is

assumed by the haka, the war dance of the Maori in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
This dance, more than any other cultural manifestation, represented the
dominant image of the Maori as a fearsome warrior in the mind of Europeans
both at home and abroad.36 That the Maori had almost defeated the mighty
British Army in the wars of the 1860s was still very much in public conscious-
ness. It was thus only logical that for the 1897 Diamond Jubilee celebrations
in London, New Zealand chose to send along with its pakeha (white) troops
a contingent of Maori soldiers clad in modern army uniforms. Those same
soldiers then performed the haka in traditional costume at the Holborn
restaurant in London, watched by the New Zealand premier Richard Seddon,
the former New Zealand Minister of Labour and ardent imperialist William
Pember Reeves and assorted British guests (Figure 13). It is hard to imagine a
more ‘fitting’ image of the construction of performance under the imperial
gaze. The artist has individualized the guests of honour – Seddon is recogniz-
able (to New Zealanders at least) even without the caption – whereas the haka
party vies for iconographic attention with chandeliers and bowls of fruit.
Nevertheless, their presence here is remarkable. The enemies of yesterday
were now providing entertainment in an upmarket London restaurant on
the eve of a large-scale colonial conference, where Seddon, among other
things, promoted New Zealand’s claim to annex various Pacific territories.37
The success of this performance may have perhaps laid the seeds for what
four years later was to become the largest ever demonstration of Maori
performance forms for Maori and European alike. In 1901, New Zealand
and other British colonies were treated to a Royal tour by the Duke and
Duchess of Cornwall and York, the Duke being the grandson of recently
deceased Queen Victoria, Empress of India and Sovereign of many far-flung
dominions. The tour was clearly designed to reinforce the symbolic claim


Figure 13 Premier Richard Seddon attending a haka performance at the Holborn
restaurant, London, 1897
Source: London Illustrated News. Collection of the author.
to imperial sovereignty by the royal family after the death of the Empire’s
most important figurehead.
While the reception of the royal party on the part of the white settlers was
presumably never in doubt, – ‘a thousand miles of loyalty’ in the words of
the official historian of the tour38 – the same could not necessarily be said of
his majesty’s Maori subjects.39 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Maori
participation was focused almost entirely in one place: a three-day ‘carnival’
of Maori performance culture in Rotorua from 13 to 15 June 1901. This hui,
(the Maori term for a ceremonial gathering) brought together representatives
from all the major tribes in Aotearoa, who provided the royal party and
each other with an unprecedented display of indigenous performance forms.
The choice of Rotorua was not surprising. The town could already boast
an established touristic infrastructure dedicated to presenting Maori culture
to European visitors. The local people, the Arawa, were also famous, or
infamous, for having kept out of the Maori/European wars in the 1860s, or
rather for having deliberately sided with the settlers. The planning for the
hui was in the hands of a Maori committee under the chairmanship of the
Minister of Native Affairs, James Carroll, himself half Maori. The result was

a gathering on an unprecedented scale with over 6000 Maori from all over
the country in attendance.
The resulting meeting provided ample evidence of the dialectics of spec-
tacle: that is, the mutual desire to see and be seen in an aesthetically
controlled environment. While the Maori were certainly on display to the
Europeans, the latter, especially the royal party, were equally on display to

the Maori, and the different tribal groups were on display to each other.
The uniqueness of this event was apparent already to the participants, and
subsequent historians of Maori culture have drawn attention to its import-
ance in terms of scale and organizational ideas.40 The Maori contingent
consisted of 6000 people camped together for about ten days prior to the
actual ceremony. The camp was divided up along tribal lines and the time
was used for extensive rehearsals.
In the following examination of what was a multi-textured and complex
performance event, I wish to restrict my comments to the question of how
these extensive performances may have functioned as indicators of cultural
redefinition for Europeans and Maori alike. This ‘gathering of the clans’,
as Robert Loughnan, the official historian and ardent colonialist, terms the
coming together of the various tribal groups,41 was certainly unprecedented
in scale and form of interaction. As well as oratory, the main mode of
performance was by means of action songs and dances, haka and poi (a form
of dance employing light balls swung on the end of a string), costume and
waiata (songs). Perhaps the dominant chord in the plethora of information
provided is that of a tension between the past and the present. Loughnan’s
account stresses the occasion as an opportunity for the Maori people to
rejoice in the glories of their ancient, pre-contact culture. Using a theat-
rical metaphor Loughnan describes the preparations as a welcome chance
to revive past grandeur: ‘Once more the Maori lived in the past. For a brief
space the edge of the heavy curtain that screened it was raised, old memories
revived, old chords were touched anew, and hearts thrilled and vibrated
to the weird music of the dead ages.’42 The Maori past is represented here
as a stage on which an historical play dramatizing the ‘dead ages’ is to be
produced. It is not the ‘debased’ Maori present that is to be unfolded before
the royal visitors (and the New Zealand politicians accompanying them) but
an idealized version of a heroic and ‘Homeric’ past.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, theatrical performances only allow
themselves to be stage-managed to a certain degree. Theatre, like culture,
is always subject to the vicissitudes of time and change. This was nowhere
more obvious than in the costuming for the event. Like the hula in Hawai‘i,
the Maori performances were now subject to precise control and conceptu-
alization. The Rotorua performances saw a similar process of conscious and
unconscious adaptation to the special requirements of the unusual event.
Traditional clothing became increasingly refashioned as theatrical or folklor-
istic costume: at once a signifier of the ‘dead past’ and the cultural changes

of the present. During the preparations for the arrival of the royal party,
Loughnan describes the appearance of the Maori in the informal situation
of the camp:
There was a curious mingling of the old and new. Deeply tattooed
warriors, some of whom had witnessed a cannibal feast, rubbed noses

with young men who rode bicycles and pounded the big drum in the
brass band. It was one huge fancy ball, full of fantastic anachronisms
characteristic of a time of transition.43
While the quotidian, informal dress codes reflected indeed the cultural
syncretism characteristic of most ‘times of transition’, the formal perform-
ances revealed much tighter control and conscious fashioning. Not only did
each tribe adopt a special dominant colour, but most tried to emulate within
the bounds of Christian propriety the traditional past that was eagerly sought
after by European and Maori alike.
The extent of this ‘conscious fashioning’ can be illustrated by comparing
two photographs. Figure 14 shows the performance of a haka by members
of the Ngati Kahungunu tribe of the East Coast region of the North Island
to welcome guests at a wedding. The photo is contemporaneous with the
Figure 14 Hosts of the Ngati Kahungunu tribe welcome visitors to a wedding at

Taradale, East Coast, North Island, New Zealand
Source: By permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library (F-68581-1/2).


Figure 15 Haka party at Rotorua during visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, 1901
Source: Auckland Star Collection, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library (G-3142-1/1).
Rotorua festivities. Like the backyard hula, this is an indigenous perform-

ance context. Maori are performing for Maori. With the exception of the
figure right, all are dressed in formal, everyday European-style clothes. If we
compare this image with a photograph taken of the Wanganui haka party at
the Rotorua hui44 (Figure 15), all performers are now clad in traditional piupiu.
The dominant impression is a move from clothes to costume. Although both
occasions can be considered hui, ceremonial encounters in the Maori use of the
word, the Rotorua gatherings evidence a new configuration of performative
and cultural codes to cater to the European gaze at work.
This conscious staging of anachronism by means of costuming was
matched by careful attention to the type of weapons on display: ‘They were
admired by all who saw them – they and their good humour, and their
vigour, and their weapons. No weapon was there, however, of European
origin; no gun of any period from the time of Hingis [sic!] wars no pouch,
no belt, no tomahawk or axe of the whole fire-and-steel period of their
wars.’45 Already here we see a feature typical of the folklorization of colonized
cultures in general: the effacement of all signs of post-contact culture. All
material signifiers of culture – costume and properties (in this case weapons) –
were placed in the temporal frame of pre-contact times, the generic time of
folklorized performance forms.
At Rotorua we can observe the metonymic theatricalization of Maori
performance forms as they were adjusted to the new receptive code of

a European desire for performed primitivism. The ineluctable logic of

this discursive construction explains why Loughnan himself resorts to an
extended theatrical metaphor at the ‘climax’ of his account:
The carnival had not lasted more than an hour. But for the spectators
who saw it for the first time how many impressions had been crowded

into that brief space! It was something to dream of. In no theatre in
the world could a sight comparable to it be seen. The broad glare of the
sun played on stage and players; the stage might have been the whole
world, and the players children of Nature, untutored, yet endowed with
instinctive grace and the marvellous art of suiting word to action and
action to world.46
The theatrical performance being played out is, in Loughnan’s interpret-

ation, a kind of historical drama resurrecting ‘the buried treasures’ of the
Maori past and celebrating ‘the remnants of a proud race.’47 The metaphor
carries also the metonymic force of generalizing for colonial peoples as a
whole. When he claims that ‘the stage might have been the whole’ on
which children of Nature perform for their colonial rulers, then it needs no
sophistry to interpret this vision as one pertaining to all colonized peoples.
In this sense the Rotorua performance is not only highly specific, but also
symptomatic of wider issues and processes pertaining to performance in
cross-cultural colonial situations.
∗ ∗ ∗
Polynesian performance forms belong to those cultural aspects that are,

for outsiders at least, almost synonymous with these cultures. The aim has
been to explore a particular nexus between colonial contact and identity
formation as manifested during particular periods of substantial change
in Hawaiian and Maori society in the nineteenth century. Although this
general question has been much researched in recent years, the field of
performance is one area that has received little systematic attention, even
so. The aim of this chapter has been twofold: first, to demonstrate how two
particular performance forms – the hula and the haka – became subject to
double folklorization in the sense of ‘freezing’ a form in an imagined pre-
colonial past. The strategic folklorization of King Kalakaua’s court dancers,
who revived a putative traditional hula, also paved the way for the commer-
cialized touristic forms. The touristic manifestation of hula in turn reveals
itself to be a curious composite requiring the form to be deliberately prim-
itivized in a way in which it had never existed. Maori performance forms,
particularly the haka and the poi dances, had by the end of the nineteenth
century become subject to similar processes of revaluation. In Rotorua in
particular, these performances had been discovered and refashioned for the

tourist gaze. At the same time they continued to fulfil important func-
tions in their indigenous context. With the arrival of the royal party in
1901, the Maori were called upon to present themselves to the European
guests in a theatrical mode. Dancing and singing and brandishing weapons
of pre-European origin, they were induced to present a staged version of
an earlier period of ancient vigour untainted by European influence. Both

hula and haka are quintessential cultural signs, acting as focal points for
the cultural identity formation of their respective cultures. Of equal import-
ance, however, are their functions as theatrical forms, as acts of performance
combining music, symbolic and mimetic movement and, in the case of
hula, narrative and lyrical poetry. The changing dress codes during these
periods of change demonstrate that a clear binary of ‘traditional’ perform-
ance on the one hand and an ‘inauthentic’ touristic version on the other is
extremely problematic. In terms of its physical presentation hula and haka
were subjected to a complex dynamic of cultural borrowings and redefini-
tions that incorporate historical exigencies, aesthetic innovation and cultural
identity formation.

5
Kindred Spirits: Spectacles of Samoa
in Wilhelminian Germany

In 1951, shortly after his return to Frankfurt from American exile,
the German philosopher and connoisseur of avant-garde music Theodor
W. Adorno recalled that the sound of a kettledrum invariably produced asso-
ciations with the Samoan troupes he had seen as a 7-year-old child in the
Frankfurt zoo:
In the Zoological Garden there were not just the animals but there was a
music pavilion and occasionally exhibitions of exotic tribes, of Samoans
and Senegalese. Whether it is the memory of it or simply the condens-
ation of things long past – even today I associate with the beat of a
kettledrum the name Tamasese and at the same time: the drum is played
on his prisoners’ heads, or it is the pestle in which the savages cook
human flesh.1
Adorno’s associative recollections are remarkably accurate on a number of

counts. In 1910 a troupe of Samoan performers spent almost a month
in the Frankfurt zoo performing dances and songs, cavorting on specially
constructed water-slides and paddling their imported canoes. While the
demonstration of cannibalistic practices was certainly not on the menu,
boxing, wrestling, knife-dances and Samoan earth-cooking were. Even for
a precocious child the conflation was understandable. Far from wanting to
recall Samoa’s cannibal past, the troupe was in Germany for political as
much as entertainment purposes. In celebration of ten years of German
colonial rule in Western Samoa, Chief Tamasese Le Alofi was on his way, he
hoped, to see the Kaiser. The trip had been organised by the former police-
chief of Apia, Fritz Marquardt, and his amateur anthropologist brother Carl.
Unfortunately for Tamesese, the Marquardt brothers saw the tour more as
lucrative entertainment than as a diplomatic mission. In fact the chief and
his entourage were forced to make a number of prolonged detours to various
German zoos before they were finally granted an audience with the Kaiser.
122

Kindred Spirits: Spectacles of Samoa in Wilhelminian Germany 123
If, in the previous chapters, the connection between colonial experience

and indigenous performance has not always been explicitly political, in this
chapter we will examine the place of performance in a formalized colonial
context. From 1890 to the outbreak of war in 1914, Germany received visits
on six different occasions by Samoan performance troupes. All but one were
imported and organized by the impresarios Carl and Fritz Marquardt. While

Germans were well accustomed to the spectacles of exotic performances
thanks to the famous ethnographic shows (Völkerschauen) promoted by the
Hamburg impresario Carl Hagenbeck, the Samoan troupes were framed in
a different discursive context.2 If Hagenbeck aimed to capitalize on what
might be termed the maximization of alterity, the Marquardt brothers posi-
tioned the Samoan performers in an unusual balancing act between alterity
and familiarity, savagery and aesthetics. Their marketing of Samoan perform-
ance was closely keyed into the prevailing colonial discourse that attempted
to sell Samoa and Samoans, the Kaiser’s most recent colonial acquisition,
as kindred spirits of the Germans. Yet this latest addition to the German
colonial empire was far from uncontested at home. Its economic or strategic
benefits were doubtful to say the least. As we shall see, aesthetic as much
as economic or geopolitical arguments had to be employed to justify the
annexation of Samoa.
The spectacle of Samoans performing in zoos was not an unusual event.
Although by 1910 laws had made it more difficult to import native peoples
in general, and German colonial subjects in particular, for performance
purposes, Germans still expected to be entertained and edified by a regular
procession of native peoples on display. This phenomenon has been extens-
ively studied by scholars in the past years. Less well known, however, were
the reciprocal arrangements made in the colonies themselves. Therefore, in
the second part of the chapter we will examine the nexus of colonialism
and indigenous performance in Western Samoa itself, where the German
colonial administration made extensive use of local performance culture for
political ends. As I have stressed throughout, the relationship between colo-
nialism and theatricality is marked by a high degree of complementarity. The
performative genre of colonial ceremony, in which colonizer and colonized
perform to each, albeit in highly disparate positions of power, can be studied
as a formalization of the liminal and unpredictable performative encounters
examined in Chapter 1.
A place in the sun
By the end of the nineteenth century the Pacific, and especially the Poly-
nesian triangle, had been largely distributed between the colonial powers.
While there was no single ceremonial carving up to rival the infamous
1884 Berlin conference on Africa, Pacific island territories were nonetheless
gradually acquired and redistributed in a succession of deals and plays of

diplomatic one-upmanship. The major acquisitions were the British control

of New Zealand in 1840 through the Treaty of Waitangi, and the French
annexation of the Society Islands and the Marquesas in 1842 followed
by the declaration of a protectorate over New Caledonia in 1853. The
British annexed Fiji in 1874 and concluded a succession of ‘friendship’
treaties with other islands that amounted to making them protectorates.

It would, however, be erroneous to see the partition of the Pacific as the
result of imperial-driven game plans directed from London, Paris, Berlin or
Washington. In many cases, the annexations were forced on the Western
governments by local players – administrators, traders or even missionaries –
who compelled their respective governments to act in the best interests of
endangered commercial operations brought about by local conflicts.
Of all the island groups, with the exception of Tonga, Samoa remained
independent the longest. Here the rivalry was particularly complicated, as
it involved internecine tribal politics and British, American and German
interests. German activity in the Pacific had been spearheaded in the 1850s
by the Hamburg-based company of Goddefroy & Son, which established
a strong trading presence in Samoa as well as on other islands. When
the company went bankrupt in 1879, its interests were taken over by the
Deutsche Handels- und Plantagen-Gesellschaft, which worked closely with
the growing German colonial lobby. By the 1890s the company owned
approximately 50 per cent of the arable land in Western Samoa.
Throughout the 1880s and 1890s the German government became heavily
involved in the struggle for influence and control over the Samoan islands.
Although the archipelago was guaranteed independence in two different
treaties signed by the Germans, British and Americans, all three powers
attempted to gain influence by backing a succession of Samoan aspirants to
the ‘throne’. These complex power plays culminated several times in violence
involving not only inter-tribal bloodshed, as the major title-holders jostled
for influence, but also attacks by Samoans on Europeans and by Europeans
on each other. A particularly bloody incident took place in 1888 when the
aspirant Mata’afa Josefo attacked Apia and the Germans sent in their marines
who were defeated by the Samoans. He burned down the German consulate
and the American, British and German warships in Apia’s harbour came to
the brink of engaging each other until Bismarck defused the situation by
sending out a more diplomatic consul. Several months later, in March 1889,
a violent hurricane wrecked both American and German warships leaving
hundreds of sailors dead. This catastrophe sobered all parties and led to
a renewal of diplomatic negotiations.
German colonial policy in general, and towards its Pacific territories in
particular, has been the subject of intense scrutiny by historians in recent
years. Loosely adapting Hobbes, we could say that German colonial history
(outside Europe) was sometimes idealistic, occasionally brutish and very
short. Its brevity was the result of Germany’s late appearance on the inter-
national scene as a major power on the one hand and was compounded

by Bismarck’s well-known opposition to colonialism on the other. Despite

growing pressure from colonialist pressure groups, the Iron Chancellor
remained sceptical about establishing colonies under direct German admin-
istration. With his resignation as chancellor in 1890 and Wilhelm II’s ascen-
sion to the imperial throne, the mood changed perceptibly. In a recent study
the German historian Hermann Hiery has argued persuasively that German

interests in the Pacific had neither economic nor strategic advantages, a fact
that was available not just to later historians but also to German politicians
of the day.3 The question he asks is, then, why Germany invested so many
resources in the upkeep and administration of colonies that were manifestly
not paying their way. German colonial engagement belies the traditional
Marxist argument, made famous by Lenin in his pamphlet Imperialism: The
Highest stage of Capitalism (1916), which sees colonialism and imperialism as
direct extensions of capitalism. German investment in New Guinea, Samoa
and elsewhere in the Pacific was guided not by the crass fiscal requirements of
excess capital, but by the more intangible imperatives of prestige and cultural
self-fashioning. That German colonial and foreign policy were determined
to a large extent by notions of prestige has been long recognized,4 and is
indissolubly linked with the person of Kaiser Wilhelm II himself. Ultimately
it would play a not insignificant role in the disastrous events leading to the
July crisis of 1914.
Plays of prestige can of course take many forms: from belligerent sabre-
rattling to more subtle demonstrations of intellectual and cultural superi-
ority. The discursive justification for German involvement in the Pacific in
general and Samoa in particular made recourse therefore not to the hard
facts of economics and trade, but to soft-sell appeals to Germany’s role as a
cultural nation. The annual Reichstag debates on the colonial budget provide
persuasive documentation of a mental disposition that saw colonial involve-
ment motivated by aesthetic appeals as much as by political rationales. In
1902, Rudolph von Bennigsen, governor of Germany’s Melanesian territ-
ories, entreated members to disregard economic factors when assessing the
advantages such territories offered and to consider instead ‘our lofty ideal
purpose’, which consists of protecting ‘the Polynesians a proud, peace-
loving and handsome race and Germany should be consider it an honour
to ensure that the Polynesian population remains at its present level and
is gradually civilized.’ In the same session, Samoa’s governor Wilhelm Solf
appealed emphatically to the members’ sense of poetry: ‘I can assure you
that Samoa is indeed the pearl of the South Seas and in my name and on
behalf of my brown charges I would be most grateful to the house if you
would not spare on gold for this pearl’s setting.’ The metaphor did its work
and the parliamentary proceedings record ‘merriness and lively applause on
all sides of the house’. The budget was passed seconds later.5
Solf’s metaphor was a considered rhetorical device, which played on
a discursive tradition that for over a decade had constructed a close

alignment between German and Samoan cultures. The trope of Samoa as

the ‘pearl of the South Seas’ had been around for some time and resulted
in a particularly protective attitude to the inhabitants of the islands that
could certainly not be considered characteristic of German colonial policy
in general. It surpassed mere paternalism and took on occasional traits of
a kind of mythic affinity that gained in intensity after Samoa was annexed in

1900. Writing in defence of the practice of mixed marriages in the German
colony of Western Samoa 1906, a German colonist, E. F. Reye, even detected
deep-seated parallels between the two races:
Their habits of mind, their love of physical sports, their preference for
head decorations made up of flowers and wreaths are very reminiscent of
the descriptions Tacitus provides of the way of life of our ancient German
forefathers. The Samoans are not ashamed of their brown skin colour. The
full strong colour is admirably suited to the lively colours of the tropical
world.6
Particularly the final sentence, in which the people and their skin colour
are perceived as a naturalized component of a tropical (stage) setting, draws
attention to a recurrent topos in European writing about the South Seas and
to the Samoans in particular. Not only are peoples and places aestheticized
and theatricalized to a large degree, they exist primarily as extras on a stage
or theatre set, where the human beings and the surrounding foliage are part
and parcel of a unified Gesamtkunstwerk.7 As we shall see, this image was
literally staged in the tours of Samoan troupes in Germany after 1890.
Anthropological anxieties
Between 1890 and 1911 Germany hosted extended tours by Samoan

performance troupes on no less than six different occasions making them
the culture with the most frequent presence among the many exotic troupes
to visit Wilhelminian Germany. The presence of exotic performers was in
itself nothing new thanks to the entrepreneurial efforts of Carl Hagenbeck’s
Völkerschauen, the ethnographic shows that toured Europe from 1874 until
the 1930s. A child of the Gründerzeit, the economic boom that followed
Germany’s unification in 1871, Hagenbeck developed sophisticated advert-
ising campaigns, involved dramaturgical ‘stories’ to frame the exhibitions,
and even registered patents for panoramic backgrounds and, most famously,
for the first cageless zoo in the world in 1896. In 1907 he opened a
huge park-like zoo in Hamburg-Stellingen which became a model for other
cities. Over the course of Hagenbeck’s career one can observe a clear move
from exhibition to performance in the staging of his spectacles. A second
important move was the choice of zoological park as the preferred setting.
Although not the only setting for the shows, zoos remained the most

important locale for the Völkerschauen. In fact many zoos set aside special
areas or arenas to cater for the shows.
The Samoan troupes remained in Germany and Europe for periods ranging
from several months up to two years. They visited all major German
cities and many smaller centres besides. The unique aspect of the Samoan
performance troupes was, apart from their continuing long-term presence, an

increasingly complex involvement with their German spectators. No other
culture enjoyed the same degree of sympathetic identification that combined
political and anthropological discourses with aesthetic and commercial ends.
We find played out anthropological anxieties over authenticity as well
as direct political agendas prosecuted by both the German hosts and the
Samoan performers. A close examination of the troupes will show that, far
from being mere passive objects of commercial exchange and the exoticist
gaze, the performers were in continual contact with families and leaders
at home who monitored progress and reception and even intervened with
German officials when necessary.
On 21 June 1890 an evening session of the Berlin Society for Anthropology,
Ethnology and Prehistory was slowly coming to a conclusion after intense
discussion over archaeological finds from the Bronze Age discovered near
Heegemühle in Brandenburg. The minutes record controversial exchanges
over the possible provenience of bronze sword hilts with analogies ranging
from Caucasian bird figures to carts in present-day Troy. Despite their differ-
ences of opinion, all members agreed that the objects should be exhibited
in the Royal Museum in Berlin, and the donors were thanked for their patri-
otism and contribution to the advancement of science. The august members
then effected a seemingly effortless mental leap from the Bronze Age to
the present as the internationally renowned pathologist and founder of the
aforesaid society, Prof. Rudolf Virchow, moved to the twenty-ninth and final
item on the agenda, noted simply as ‘A Number of Samoans’.8 What the
proceedings go on to document is a lecture by Virchow on the ‘anthropology’
of Samoans in the presence of six male members of the first performance
troupe to visit Germany. One should add, the six remaining members of an
original troupe of nine.
In 1889, Robert A. Cunningham, an agent of the Bailey and Barnum circus,
visited Samoa and recruited the first troupe of Samoans to visit Europe at
a time when the islands were embroiled in one of their worst periods of
conflict. He was opposed by Mata’afa and other Samoan chiefs and finally
found eight men and one woman from the island of Tutuila in Eastern Samoa
willing to accompany him for a three-year contract. The troupe travelled to
Europe via San Francisco and New York. Finally, only three returned home,
the others having died of malnourishment or pulmonary diseases.9
Although best remembered today as the founder of cell pathology, Rudolf
Virchow (1821–1902) was a scientist with wide interests, liberal political
persuasions and a seat in the Reichstag. A pioneer of modern sanitation,

Virchow was also an advocate and practitioner of anthropometry, the

infamous measuring, cataloguing and photographing of indigenous peoples,
both alive and dead, for the advancement of science. His collection of skulls
was legendary and is still in the possession of Berlin’s Humboldt University.
Virchow’s lecture-performance with the borrowed performers encapsulates
many of the ‘urgent’ anthropological questions of the time. Analogous to

the debates on the bronze sword-hilts, he begins by confirming the supposed
provenience of the subject of his lecture, in this case the island of Upolu
in the Samoan group. He is able to exclude with almost complete certainty
the possibility of deception, a reference to other cases where supposedly
‘pure’ specimens had turned out to be adulterated racial mixtures palmed
off on him by eager agents.10 Virchow was particularly suspicious of troupes
appearing in variety shows and waxwork museums, which did not carry the
same guarantee of authenticity that had become the trademark of Hagen-
beck’s zoological-anthropological exhibitions. Cunningham’s troupe was
performing in the Flora of Charlottenburg, one of Berlin’s more luxurious
entertainment establishments that combined a park, palm garden and stage
with an excellent location beside the river Spree, so was, to Virchow’s mind,
by definition slightly suspect.
The ambivalences in Virchow’s anthropological project become evident at
the end of the evening when the lecture switches to performance. Compared
to the minutiae of toe length and skin colour, the text is unusually laconic
with respect to the performances by the Samoans:
After the lecture the Samoans sang first some traditional songs, then
danced and fought, whereby the confidence and power of their move-
ments manifested themselves admirably. Finally Manoje [the leader of
the troupe] demonstrated some highly dangerous skills with a long knife
which he spun into the air and caught again etc. (ZfE, 1890: 392)
At the conclusion of the performance, a heated discussion broke out over the
racial purity of the Samoans in question. Richard Neuhaus, doctor, photo-
grapher and amateur ethnographer, expressed the opinion that the speci-
mens in question had been adulterated with Melanesian blood. Virchow
countered in the same pejorative metaphor that the question of whether
present-day Samoans ‘have suffered adulteration with Melanesian blood’ is
not really the question since this is an accepted fact. The only question of
interest for Virchow was whether the people present corresponded to the
current Samoan ‘type’ which he was able to affirm. The attendant ques-
tion of whether Samoans were Polynesians could also in Virchow’s mind be
confirmed but he was conscious that the present performers might have left a
less than ideal impression. He continued: ‘One must not be deceived by mere
fashions, for example in the dancing, or by artificial hair-dos. Wigs such as
that worn by Manoje are also known in Tahiti, and no-one would claim that

the Tahitians are Melanesians. All natural traits of the Samoans belong to the
typical characteristics of the Polynesian race’ [emphasis added] (392). Clearly
the genre of performance was not conducive to serving the interests of an
empirical science. Nature was at war with culture here. The latter represented
metonymically by performance, that most ‘unreliable’ of cultural forms with
its penchant for costuming, make-up and unrepentant borrowing. Virchow

was in a sense forced to demonstrate the authentic Samoans beneath the
potentially deceptive signs of theatrical performance. Underlying Virchow’s
exhortations was, as already mentioned, a fundamental distrust of specimens
purveyed via ethnographic shows.
Since 1884 the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehis-
tory had worked hand in hand with Hagenbeck and other impresarios to
capitalize on the constant supply of human ‘data’ passing through the
capital. ‘With the enthusiasm and morality of entomologists’, as Sibylle
Benninghoff-Lühl has put it,11 Virchow and other physical anthropologists
subjected their specimens not only to exhaustive measurements but invari-
ably to photographic recording in their ‘natural state’. The basic procedures
were adapted from the Prussian military (Virchow had originally trained as a
military doctor), which required quick and reliable data about their recruits.
The provision of human material in the interests of empirical science was
not conducted entirely without self-interest on the part of the impresarios.
Publicity material contained not infrequently Virchow’s seal of approval in
regard to the authenticity of the troupe. By 1890, however, Virchow was
unhappy with the whole business, and shortly after the Samoan lecture-
performance, he complained: ‘An increasing degree of acumen is necessary
in order to distinguish between authenticity and inauthenticity, and even
the knowledge of older travellers has proven insufficient in light of the
puzzles produced by the various competing troupe leaders.’12 Virchow real-
ized that the epistemological basis of his understanding of anthropology was
in danger if he could not verify the provenience of his data.13
Samoan troupes and the politics of the colonial gaze
It was not until 1895 that Carl and Fritz Marquardt organized a second
visit by a Samoan troupe. During the 1890s Hagenbeck had largely with-
drawn from the Völkerschau business so there was considerable scope for
rival impresarios. A former journalist from Berlin, Fritz Marquardt had been
variously a shipping clerk, military advisor to Tamasese and chief of police
in Apia while his brother Carl was an amateur ethnologist and collector
of ethnographic curios. Altogether the Marquardt brothers organized five
tours with Samoan troupes before the First World War.14 During this 15-year
period, however, the ‘conditions of production’ altered dramatically. By
1910 it had become practically illegal to import troupes from German
colonies, and the final tour was made possible only under the guise of

a putative ‘diplomatic mission’. As we shall see, the spectacles of alterity that

had made Hagenbeck a millionaire and a household name were becoming
increasing problematic for a variety of political, ethical and aesthetic reasons.
In the same period, Samoa altered its status from being just one more exotic
location to official recognition as part of the German empire. The islands’
inhabitants changed from being just one more ethnic group on display to

redefinition as ‘fellow citizens’ of the German spectators. In the light of such
volatile political changes, it must be asked whether the apparently clear-cut
power relations that recent scholarship has ascribed to the Völkerschauen and
ethnographic spectacles in general bear up to closer scrutiny.
The first tour organized by the Marquardt brothers took place between
1895 and 1896. In comparison to Cunningham’s all-male troupe with its
emphasis on Samoan martial arts, the first Marquardt troupe was dominated
by the erotic appeal of the South Seas. Its 22 ‘beautiful girls’ far outnumbered
the four men. The publicity material also gave pride of place to the women,
with the men featuring more as musical back-up rather than as a dominant
presence. For the last time Virchow allowed his scientific judgement to
be used as a seal of approval. He was indeed impressed by these ‘natural
wonders’:
A race that combines such great physical merits with a great abund-
ance of natural grace and stamina is in itself one of the most remarkable
phenomena in the history of the development of the human race. The
persons selected by Mr Marquardt display these characteristics to a high
degree. I can only hope that many Europeans will see and appreciate these
natural wonders.15
The troupe travelled extensively in Germany and other European countries

over a two-year period. They appeared mainly in zoos but also included two
extended runs at the Berlin Panopticum, a kind of variety theatre.
The Völkerschauen came under direct pressure after 1900 with the passing
of several laws and regulations that made their activities extremely diffi-
cult. The influential Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft had been agitating since
the mid-1890s to outlaw the importation of German ‘colonial subjects’ for
the purposes of exhibition and performance.16 Their arguments combined
moral, economic and aesthetic anxieties over the destructive effects of
exposing native peoples to too much European culture. The threat of moral
debilitation for both Europeans and natives was omnipresent, but appar-
ently equally threatening was the practice of excessive theatricality in the
display of the peoples, as a memorandum written to the German chancellor
in 1900 made clear:
The attraction of just observing indigenous people in their typical dress

and customary jewelry surrounded by their weapons and tools, or even the

presentation of their native dances is not enough to attract the spectator

anymore. Therefore, one turns to methods that are geared to titillate the
masses to attend [the exhibitions]. The natives are dressed up so that
they laugh at themselves and the gullible spectators. They are taught
dances that they never knew before, and thus they deceive the public and
simultaneously become corrupted.17

The loss of authenticity signalled by an almost self-reflexive awareness on
the part the native performers of their own theatrical behaviour counter-
acted whatever educational value the Völkerschauen may have had in their
original and presumably less overtly histrionic form. The consequence of
the memorandum and its attendant agitation was a regulation passed in
1901 prohibiting the export or import of ethnographic troupes from German
Figure 16 Programme for the 1901 tour. It reads, ‘Our new compatriots. Samoa
Exhibition’
Source: Photo: collection of the author.

colonies.18 This legislation was also enforced in the new German colony
of Samoa, which required that the tours which subsequently took place be
framed in a new way.
Following their successful tours of the mid-1890s the Marquardt brothers
resolved to capitalize on Samoa’s status as a German colony. Their ‘exhib-
ition’ of 1901 was promoted under the heading ‘Our New Compatriots’.

The emphasis on the personal pronoun ‘our’ was presumably intended to
construct a different kind of gaze. Instead of purely exotisistic wonderment,
German spectators were required to admire their new fellow countrymen
with a curious mixture of complicity and distance. On the verbal level this
unusual perceptual balancing act was no doubt motivated in part by the
new legislation. It also reflected the aforementioned aesthetic colonialism
that figured Samoa as the ‘Pearl of the South Seas’ and its inhabitants as
Germans in spirit if not in skin colour. Amongst the plethora of promotional
iconography that was disseminated in the form of posters and postcards,
the cover picture of the performance programme (Figure 16) encapsulates
the new discourse. The Samoan warrior in traditional attire and brandishing
a fighting knife assumes a dominant stance, not unlike the familiar pose
of big-game hunters. He is framed by the German flag and his steady gaze
communicates to the viewer a relationship of assured equality: two warrior
peoples on equal terms.
Although designated an ‘exhibition’ to take advantage of the term’s edific-
atory connotations, Germany’s newest relatives presented themselves almost
entirely in performative situations. Besides the numerous dances, a variety of
other cultural activities with performative potential were adapted for theat-
rical presentation. Some, such as coconut-tree climbing, have since entered
the basic repertoire of Samoan tourist performances (see Chapter 7). Others,
such as Samoan cricket, provided entertainment value on account of its
mimicry of European practices. Even today cricket remains a completely
incomprehensible sporting activity to the uninitiated German gaze; in its
Samoan adaptation its performance presumably provided German spectators
with bemusement at English as well as Samoan culture. Particularly striking
are the broadly martial performances: boxing, war scenes, knife-dances, and
so on. They underscore the overall discursive frame of two warrior peoples
meeting in peace and mutual respect.
The performance itself combined the viewing practices of both exhibition
and theatre, as Carl Marquardt emphasizes in the programme booklet. The
overall purpose is to enable spectators to experience at first hand ‘tropical
nature’ and the ‘charming disposition of the Samoans’:
A mighty tableau permits him to form an idea of the splendour of the

Samoan landscape. A native village, situated in a circle of green palms,
transports him in his mind to the strands of the distant ocean. Selected
representatives of the people demonstrate that physical beauty and charm
have not only been bequeathed to the white race.19

Apart from its provision of vicarious touristic experiences, the dominant

tenor underlying the whole show was one of gaining sympathy for the ‘new
compatriots’ of Germany. Its combination of entertainment and education
(included was a large exhibition of ethnographic objects) was intended as
a kind of goodwill tour on the part of the colonial project.
The next tour organized by Carl and Fritz Marquardt in 1910 faced even

greater legal problems than the 1901 tour. Ten years on, the laws regu-
lating the movement of German colonial subjects had been tightened even
more, so that ethnographic shows from the colonies had become practically
impossible to organize. 1910 was however the tenth anniversary of German
colonial rule in Samoa where the German administration was itself planning
large-scale ceremonies and performances, as we shall see below. With the
help of Governor Solf the Marquardts constructed an argument that effect-
ively reversed the politics of the gaze. In a letter to Solf, Felix Marquardt
reported on the supposed Samoan view of the regulations. He argued that
Samoans now regarded themselves as Germans and therefore had a legit-
imate right to be able to inspect their fellow countrymen at first hand.
Quoting a putative prospective Samoan tourist, Marquardt writes: ‘We are
Germans after all. Why does one prevent us from seeing Germany? Why are
we not allowed to visit Germany?’20
Figure 17 Postcard of Samoan performers in Hagenbeck’s zoo in Hamburg-Stellingen,

1910. The performers belonged to the Tamasese troupe seen by Adorno
Source: Photo: collection of the author.

Finally, Solf reached an agreement with the Colonial Office whereby

‘Prince’ Tamasese, son of one of Western Samoa’s royal families, and his
entourage would visit Germany and the Kaiser on a diplomatic mission.
That the journey there entailed prolonged sojourns at a number of German
zoos was not explicitly stipulated but nevertheless accepted. That this diplo-
matic mission also included objects such as water-slides in imitation of the

famous Papasea waterfalls and several outrigger canoes could be justified by
recourse to cultural customs. These two properties added additional attrac-
tions to a programme that in other respects closely resembled that of 1901.
Whether these performances actually established a balanced politics of the
gaze as Marquardt claimed must be doubted. This last ethnographic show
from Samoa offered many Germans, however, one last opportunity to enjoy
the spectacle of their Polynesian relatives from the safe vantage point of an
animal enclosure (Figure 17).
‘Impressing the natives’: colonial ceremony in Samoa
Adorno’s childhood memories of Samoan performers refer, as mentioned,

to a tour led by Chief Tamasese Le Alofi. Tamasese’s theatrical-diplomatic
mission in Germany had its pendant back in Western Samoa. There, too, it
was decided that ten years of colonial rule should be marked by the appro-
priate ceremonial procedures. On 17 November 1909 the German governor
of Western Samoa, Wilhelm Solf, sent a letter to the State Secretary of the
Colonial Office in Berlin applying for special funds to celebrate ten years
of rule in Germany’s furthest flung colony with a flag-raising ceremony.
After stressing that the local population intended to mark the occasion with
festivities, he continues:
The organisation of an imposing ceremony on the occasion of the first

decennium of German rule is desired by the government in more than one
respect. It offers the government a welcome opportunity to demonstrate
to the natives a summation of the beneficial effects of German rule and at
the same time to convince those amongst them who have been talked into
believing that Germany’s ‘Pule’ would only last ten years of the absurdity
of this rumour.21
This letter is a significant document for two main reasons. First, it emphas-
izes with programmatic clarity the importance of a symbolic and ephemeral
act – the flag-raising ceremony and its attendant festivities – for reinforcing
colonial rule. Second and perhaps more importantly, Solf articulates in the
second sentence the double-edged function of colonial ceremony: its specific
aesthetic nature and its clear political mandate. With the phrase ‘a summa-
tion’ (zusammenfassend), Solf stresses further the particular efficacy of this

kind of ceremonial demonstration. Ceremony offers a concentration of signs,

supported by the full force of carefully chosen symbol, as a way of staging
political power. This demonstration contains a double message: at once bene-
volent and admonitory. In what was the single most impressive, expensive
and extensive demonstration of German colonial rule in its 14 years of
power, it is possible to study the interrelationship between aesthetics and

power as it manifests itself in the theatricality of cross-cultural encounter.
Colonial ceremony
The specific importance of theatricality as a theoretical construct lies in its
interactive, interrelational nature. Human actors in a broad range of activ-
ities are organized by means of staging procedures for perception by others.
Understood in this broad sense, ceremony can be regarded as a particular
form of theatricality. Anthropologists usually distinguish ceremony from
ritual. Although many of the outward signs may be identical, ceremonies do
not necessarily require the transformative efficacy that characterizes ritual
in its narrower sense. In Victor Turner’s felicitous phrase: ‘Ceremony indic-
ates, ritual transforms’.22 Ceremonies are a particularly complex form of
‘public events’, which conform to a number of anthropological principles
and, according to Don Handelman, function as ‘mirrors and models’ of the
societies that stage the ceremonies.23 Social and cultural practices are not
just mimetically imitated but are also refashioned to present an idealized
model of the society in question. In the colonial situation this twin func-
tion frequently became doubled, as the colonial powers instantiated their
ceremonial protocols in their new territories while often adding and even
incorporating the ceremonial practices of the indigenous peoples. More than
just adding ‘local colour’ to European displays, the integration of indigenous
performance forms demonstrated to the colonial rulers native acquiescence
and it was hoped that the same message communicated itself to the domin-
ated peoples.
The German colonial administration in Western Samoa provides a partic-
ularly fruitful field of inquiry for examining the interrelationship between
colonialism and theatricality. First, it was sustained with a minimum of
direct force. There was no continuous military or even police presence in
the colony. Police duties were carried out by locally trained Samoans (Fita
Fita) under German command. German military ‘might’ was underscored
by visits from the cruiser Comoran, which toured the German colonies in
the Pacific. Second, as we have seen, Western Samoa and its indigenous
inhabitants were themselves subject to aestheticization to a high degree.
Since the economic potential of the islands was limited to say the least,
the German colonialists prided themselves with possessing, if not the most
lucrative, then certainly the most aesthetically appealing colony. This partic-
ular German attitude to Western Samoa then fed into the wider European
discourse of South Sea paradise, which, while it had centred mainly on Tahiti,

had by the end of the nineteenth century extended its scope to include the
Samoan islands. One particularly efficacious way of fusing the necessity of
power demonstration with the desire engendered by the South Seas myth
was by the staging of elaborate ceremonies incorporating the insignia of
German colonial rule and the aesthetics of indigenous performance forms.
The particular strategy employed in Samoa by German officials was to incor-

porate indigenous performance forms at special points of the ceremonial
process. They were fitted into a carefully thought out dramaturgical struc-
ture which will be analysed below. Those involved in the ceremonies and
celebrations – colonial officials, European settlers and Samoans – were both
actors and spectators at the same time. The result was a complex theatrical
phenomenon, the reading of which requires ‘thick description’ in the Geert-
zian sense, whereby ‘piled up structures of influence and implication’ must
be unravelled.24
How the various parties and ethnic groups or cultures involved perceived
such ceremonies is a complex question. In order to address it, it is neces-
sary to consider the broader context of the frame(s) of reference which the
various parties might have had at their disposal. Reader response theory
speaks of the horizon of expectation that readers bring to bear on texts. The
horizon of expectation of theatre-goers is determined largely by a complex of
factors including the theatre-going experience, place of performance and by
signals such as genre designations. In the case of the flag-raising ceremony –
although it was a singular event in terms of scale – the actual components
were familiar to all participants through regular participation in the annual
birthday celebrations in honour of the German Kaiser. In terms of general
procedure the tenth anniversary celebrations followed closely the initial flag-
raising ceremony on 1 March 1900. In fact there was a conscious will to
evoke a number of obvious echoes of the first event.
Solf described this first ceremony in some detail in an article published in
the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, which, significantly, was reprinted on the
eve of the 1910 ceremony. Prior to the ceremony in 1900, he had negotiated
with the paramount chiefs Mata’afa and Tamasese to ensure the participation
of the Samoan matai (chiefs) and their followers. Almost the entire settler
population and about 5000 Samoans gathered in places allocated to them
to watch the ceremony. Of central importance for all ceremonies is the
special arrangement of participants. In the case of the German flag-raising
ceremony in 1900, great care was taken to reflect the various groups making
up Western society. A diagram (Figure 18) was published in the Samoa Times
following the official assumption of German colonial rule. It reflects first
of all the trilingual nature of Samoan society around 1900, as each spatial
coordinate is given in English, Samoan and German. The focal point of
this ‘theatre-in-the-round’ is the flag itself. The backdrop is the sea, and the
various groups constitute both the scenery and audience. The Samoans are
standing at right angles to the papalagi (the indigenous term for foreigners).

Meer.
Sami.
Sea.
Band. Ehrenwache
Municipalitaet.
Eleele Sa.
Municipality
Haus des Gouverneurs.
House of the Governor.

Faamamalu.
Guard of honour.
Alii uma.
Fale o le Kavana.

Tagata o Samoa
Flagge
Samoaner
Schulen.
MULINUU
Schools.
Samoans
A‘oga.
∗
Fu‘a.
Flag
Missionen.
Missions.
Faifeau.
Deutsche und fremde Einwohner
Samoas.
Papalagi.
German and foreign residents of
Samoa.
Strasse.
Ala.
Road.
Figure 18 Arrangement of spectators for flag-raising ceremony, Apia, Western Samoa,

1 March 1900
Source: Samoa Times, 1 March 1900. Collection of the author.
Opposite the Samoans are the schools and missions: two groups which are
made up of Samoans and Europeans.
The Kaiser’s proclamation was read out in German and Samoan and the
flag then raised. This was followed by speeches from the bishop of the
Marist mission and the representative of the London Missionary Society.
The ceremony was continued with a prayer and a song from pupils of the
German school:
A rousing cheer went through the whole population; the natives, who
behaved superbly during the ceremony, joined in the cheers of the Whites
in Samoan fashion with long drawn out, powerfully swelling sounds. After
it died down all the schools sang the German national anthem together.
Then Mataafa stepped up to the flagpole and held an appropriate speech
in which he thanked the powers for finally solving the Samoan question.25
Mata’afa’s speech was followed by one from Tamasese who reiterated in his
oration the same loyalty to the German flag he had pronounced during
the Kaiser’s birthday celebrations a month before. The actual ceremony was
followed by festivities including separate receptions for the ‘non-coloured
population’ and the Samoan chiefs, a garden party for the school children,
a procession and performances organised by the missions (presumably of

Samoan song and dance), a feast for the Samoan chiefs, and an evening
dance for the white population.
In this carefully orchestrated performance proclaiming the assumption of
colonial rule, we find in nuce both general and specific principles. General,
because flag-raising ceremonies in the German South Seas colonies followed
basically the same script, especially in regards to integrating indigenous

performance forms. Of specific interest to the Samoan situation, and here the
ceremony prefigures the ‘success’ of Solf’s administration, is the integration
of the chiefs Mata’afa and Tamasese into the proceedings, on whose cooper-
ation German rule was largely dependent. Their speeches to their followers
must be seen as a parallel discourse to the European components of the cere-
mony. Of particular interest in Solf’s representation of the ceremony (and
we must stress that it is principally what we have at our disposal) is the evoc-
ation of political unity and cultural separation. The image of European and
Samoan voices joining together in unison, Samoan children under the baton
of an English missionary singing the German national anthem, but each
race retaining, as it were, its cultural specificity (the Samoan cheer (Hurrah)
is different from the European one) anticipates Solf’s colonial practice of
promoting separate development of the races in Samoa.
The final point to be mentioned in regard to Solf’s official report is
that he stresses the harmonious and peaceful nature of the festivities. On
the one hand, this refers back to the strife that had beset Samoa over
a long period: Samoan internecine warfare, Samoan versus Europeans, and
squabbles between the Europeans themselves. On the other, he is alluding to
the precarious nature of ceremony itself. This generalized anxiety becomes
clear when reading the newspaper reports of the annual Kaiser’s birthday
celebrations, which almost invariably close with the remark that everything
went peacefully and without incident. Ceremony required the gathering
together of different races and cultures and such promiscuous contact
seemed to have contained the potential for violence in the minds of the
colonial officials. Each ceremony, for all its outward festive appearance
and harmony, concealed an underlying dramatic tension and potential
for disaster. Each ceremonial drama, although conceived and planned as
a festive comedy, could potentially tip over into the destruction of tragedy.
For this reason, the dramaturgy of the ceremonies was subject to particularly
careful planning.
This model was continued and repeated each year on the occasion of the
Kaiser’s birthday. As far as Samoan participation was concerned – principally
in the form of dance and the ceremonial presentation of gifts (ta’alolo) –
the colonial administration was dependent on missionary cooperation. Each
year, the governor, or his deputy Erich Schultz, sent the same letter to the
three missions requesting their involvement and assistance. From this corres-
pondence one can form a generalized picture of the basic principles behind
missionary and Samoan involvement in the mind of the colonial admin-
istration. He requested from the London Missionary Society in particular

the celebration of a German church service in Apia and from all three
organisations church services in the outlying areas, ‘in order to impress on
the natives as well the significance of this day’. Here we can see quite expli-
citly the reliance of the Germans on the missions as cultural brokers for
their administration, a question to which we shall return below. The other
general principle is that of the effect of ceremony outside the circle of those

who are present. While the actual ceremony could not be repeated outside
Apia, the use of church services as multipliers was considered part of the
overall strategy. This is made quite explicit a year later in Schulz’s letter
to the missions. Here he requests from the Catholic bishop of the Marist
mission a church service in the cathedral in Apia in honour of the Kaiser’s
birthday, ‘and furthermore to ensure that outside Apia in the native church
services the national significance of the day is commemorated’. In this brief
remark a problematic area of the colonial enterprise becomes apparent. The
use of ceremony to forge an idea of nationhood is a difficult task not just
in relation to the Samoans with their strong familial allegiances, but also
for the European settlers, who were by no means a homogeneous group.
The Church (and a French Catholic one at that) is being asked to act via its
religious celebrations as a political amplifier of German colonial intentions.
Tenth anniversary celebrations
An anonymous journalist responsible for the English language section of the

Samoanische Zeitung noted the theatrical or dramatic nature of the impending
tenth anniversary celebrations. On the 26 February 1910, a day before the
celebrations commenced, and with diplomatic regard to the German admin-
istration, he remarked:
Annexation imposed on Germany a difficult task; that of bringing a proud

and turbulent race into subjection without destroying them; of dealing
justly with them without leading them to suppose that this was done
through weakness of force or purpose. All this has been successfully
accomplished, and the leading personage in the political drama can,
with those who were his fellow workers, not only congratulate himself
on what has been done, but look forward with reasonable hope to its
continuance.26
That the English commentator perceived Governor Solf as the leading figure
in a ‘political drama’ was more than borne out in the dramaturgy and
staging procedures of the commemorative celebrations. The actual activ-
ities extended over five days from the 26 February to 2 March 1910 and
culminated in a solemn ceremony on 1 March. Indeed, the sheer length of
time involved suggests that indigenous practices were being followed where
ceremonial gatherings frequently involved several days.27

The official Vorspiel was marked by the arrival of the German cruiser
Comoran on 26 February, carrying Samoan chiefs from the island of Savai’i to
Apia. They were greeted the next day with a large ta’alolo. In the course of the
day numerous village groups gathered at the ceremonial space around the
flagpole on the Mulinu’u peninsular adjoining Apia. At 3 p.m. the German
government party took its place in the fono house. After the distribution

of food the villages performed a large number of different dances (siva) in
a spirit of competition. It was estimated that approximately 10,000 Samoans
attended.
On Monday 28 February, European festivities began with a torchlight
procession, directed by the Concordia and Military clubs. It commenced at
8 p.m. accompanied by a brass band and was led by a detachment of sailors
from the Comoran. On each side of the brass band marched Samoan pupils
from the government school carrying burning torches. They were followed
by various clubs, each with their own bands. The procession proceeded
amidst loud cheers from the spectators to the market hall where the distin-
guished guests were waiting. On arrival the various groups threw their
torches onto a bonfire to the strains of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’.
The participants entered the decorated market hall for the Kommers (drinking
ceremony). German songs were sung, before governor Solf delivered a short,
but spirited toast to the Kaiser. His peroration was followed by songs and
more speeches praising Solf’s political achievements, particularly in regard
to race relations.
This extended Vorspiel was but a prelude to the main celebrations on
1 March that began at 8 a.m. with a procession. Even larger and more spectac-
ular than that of the previous evening, it involved almost the entire European
population. The procession was led by the sailors from the Comoran, followed
by the Fita Fita (Samoan policemen), pupils of the government school for
whites and the various church schools. The rearguard was made up of pupils
of the government native school. All pupils were clad in shining white and
adorned with the colours of the German flag. The procession and the other
guests gathered around the flagpole at Mulinu’u. Within a fenced off area
around the flagpole a smaller group of honoured guests and representatives
of the clubs and missions assembled. Outside the fenced-off area the rest
of the procession formed a large square but remained in their groups. Solf
held a speech in praise of German colonial achievements, mentioning the
English and American settlers, and the missions for their work among the
Samoans helping the new government. This speech was followed by a short
address from the commander of the Comoran who ordered the flag to be
raised, accompanied by cannon fire. Solf returned to the podium and gave a
speech directed at the assembled Samoans, in which ‘he explained to them
the significance of the day in a manner suited to their culture.’ Solf’s address
was followed by one from Mata’afa, the paramount Samoan leader, who
urged his people to always obey the governor as the representative of the
German Kaiser.

Throughout the ceremony the pupils of the LMS school had been
concealed by the Fita Fita. On a sign, the latter stepped aside to reveal to
the spectators a spectacular sight: the pupils were dressed and arranged to
depict the German flag. As they sang ‘Wir sind nun Deutsche’ (Now we are
Germans) the individual schools, each of which formed a strip of the flag,
waved hand-held flags in rhythm to the music. At the end of the ceremony,

the sailors and Fita Fita took up positions beside the fono house whither the
governmental party had repaired. The Fita Fita paraded before them under
the command of their German officer. This was followed by addresses from
the missions, Samoan dancing and later in the afternoon a children’s festival
in the market hall.
The 2 March was set aside as a sports’ day for the Samoans. Running
races and games were organized along divisions of sex and race. The main
attraction was, however, the boat races (fautasi) featuring the swift Samoan
canoes: ‘It was a spectacle that has no equivalent anywhere on the globe.’
The end of the festivities was marked with a ball, opened by Solf and
his wife with a polonaise. This dance was seen as a symbol of the unity
demonstrated by the festivities: ‘where all follow the paramount leader
undivided’.
The primary end of ceremony of this kind, especially with regard to the
genre as it was developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, is to
provide a display of national unity by means of carefully staged signs. The
underlying teleological function is to give the appearance of harmony to
those disparate interest groups, classes and races which had to be welded
together under the banner of nationalism and colonial rule. The purpose is
to demonstrate by sign and action the existence and creation of an ‘imagined
community’, as Benedict Anderson termed the problem besetting nation
states and their colonial extensions.28 The celebrations on 1 March, 1910,
in Samoa represent in a sense a microcosm of European ceremonial staging
procedures. Yet, in another and more interesting sense, the colonial cere-
mony developed into a genre sui generis, because it had somewhat more
complex tasks to perform than the European model. The most obvious and
difficult one was that of negotiating and disguising the racial and cultural
conflicts attendant on any colonial enterprise. The overt and covert conflicts
and frictions were transformed into a demonstration of willing acceptance of
colonial rule by the Samoans. In addition to the European–Samoan fault line,
there were numerous micro-conflicts to be smoothed over as well: between
the colonial administration and the missions; between the government and
the non-German settlers; between Solf and some of the more reactionary
German settlers; between the settlers and the missions; between the Samoans
and other ethnic minorities such as Chinese and Melanesian labourers. All
these potential and to some extent overt conflicts find expression in the
planning, arrangement and execution of the festivities.

Mixing ceremonies
The genre of German colonial celebration, if indeed it can be termed that,

is in the main an adaptation of the nationalist ceremonies that became
widespread in most European countries towards the end of the nineteenth
century. These ceremonies fulfilled a number of functions in their respective

countries, the chief of which was perhaps what Hobsbawm and Ranger have
termed in their famous collection of essays ‘the invention of tradition’.29
Both in the ‘Mother Countries’ and in their various colonies considerable
energy and large sums of money were expended in visible demonstra-
tions of ‘ancient’ traditions that served in the main to legitimate claims to
domination or to monarchical rights. Under its Wilhelminian Kaisers two
main forms of demonstrating tradition became common in Germany. One
was the mania for erecting monuments and statues, usually of immense
dimensions, the other was the institutionalization of celebrations, the most
important being the victory at Sedan in 1871 and the Kaiser’s birthday.30
These celebrations, which were organized in most larger towns, were in
the main the responsibility of local organisations and clubs. The practices
were transported intact to the colonies. Samoa had its monuments to fallen
German servicemen, to Bismarck and even to the paramount Samoan chief
Mata’afa.31 Western Samoa under German colonial rule also had extensive
annual celebrations commemorating the Kaiser’s birthday. In the context
of this kind of festivity culture, it is important to remember that the flag-
raising ceremony, although exceptional in terms of scale, marked in a sense
the culmination of what became a regular calendar of such ceremonies.32
The basic pattern of Samoan ta’alolo and siva dances, European processions,
speeches and ‘native’ sports, was an annual event, repeated at least once a
year on the Kaiser’s birthday, or even more often if a suitable occasion could
be found.
If we return for a moment to Solf’s letter to the Berlin Colonial Office
quoted above, then it is clear that the celebrations were to be directed
primarily at the Samoans. One can argue that ceremonial and theatrical
display was a key, but previously overlooked element in the subtle mech-
anisms of colonial administration. The reasoning behind it may have been
expressed unconsciously by Captain Siemens, the commander of the station
ship Comoran during his speech on the eve of the flag-raising ceremony
at the Beer Evening when, evidently moved by the spectacle of events, he
remarked: ‘Now as the Samoans are also great friends of festivities, they were
thereby predestined to become Germans, and I do not understand why it
took until the year 1900 to resolve any doubts in this matter.’33
In order to analyse the relationship between ceremony and colonialism, it
is essential to look more closely at Samoan involvement. The most important
Samoan ceremony was the ta’alolo, the ceremonial presentation of food to
a chief. When surveying the documents contained in the file ‘Ceremonies

and Etiquette’ of the German colonial administration, one gains the impres-
sion that ta’alolo were veritably ordered by the administration. Because of
the importance attached to the ta’alolo ceremony within Samoan culture –
it was by no means an everyday event but normally reserved for person-
ages of high standing and for special occasions – it was eagerly used by
the German colonial administration to enhance its own standing.34 Apart

from the actual food offerings, the ta’alolo consisted of spectacular dances
performed normally by the manaia, the chiefly sons adorned in spectacular
headdresses and brandishing knives or ceremonial clubs, which were tossed
into the air and caught again.
In the case of the Kaiser’s birthday celebrations for which a ta’alolo was
invariably performed, the recipient was of course absent, and in his place
stood governor Solf, or his deputy, Erich Schultz.35 This situation poses an
interesting anomaly within the Samoan cultural frame where the actual
recipient of the ta’alolo, the Kaiser, was continually absent, or present only
by representation through another person. This too was constitutive of colo-
nial ceremonies which always required strategies to make manifest absent
power.
The ta’alolo thus fulfilled a double cultural function. By virtue of being
performed, it reinforced the high status of the European ceremony into
which it was integrated. It provided the necessary ingredients of ‘spec-
tacle’ for the European participants/spectators. But most importantly, the
co-opting of the ta’alolo ceremony provided the colonial government with
an opportunity to reinforce its position of power by aesthetic means.
For the Samoan participants the ta’alolo offered a familiar ceremonial
procedure. To borrow Erving Goffman’s term, it ‘keyed’ them into the frame
of the European ceremony that was to follow.36 It also provided a forum for
the discussion of Samoan matters. More importantly though, the ta’alolo as
a component of colonial celebrations meant that there was a double focus
for the Samoan participants: on the one hand, on the semantics of their
own intricate inter-tribal configurations, disputes and alliances, and on the
other, a kind of refracted focus on the absent addressee, the German Kaiser.
While the administration viewed the Samoan participation in entirely instru-
mental terms, fulfilling a teleology of guaranteeing political stability, the
very act of bringing together 10,000 Samoans (the official figures for Samoan
attendance) inevitably generated internecine repercussions.
A further integral component of the ceremony was the performance of
Samoan dances. An analogous bi-cultural function or double focus can be
detected in this component of the celebrations as well. By the turn of the
century siva had become part of the touristic image of Samoa, along with
the Papasea waterfalls and Robert Louis Stevenson’s grave. That Samoan
dance had become a focus of tourist interest by this time is made clear from
the large number of commercially available photographs depicting siva in

various settings.37 In his account of Samoan dances published in 1903, but

based on research conducted in the 1890s, Augustin Krämer remarks that
the word siva originally meant a song accompanying a dance, and implies
that a semantic shift in the meaning of the word has taken place under the
influence of European receptive codes:

[A]nd the Samoans certainly know what the Whites want to see, when
they ask for a siva, because most of them do not have much understanding
of dancing, even if they have been living in the country for a long time.
What the foreigner wants to see today and gets to see is a kind of poula,
if possible with headdress, garlands of flowers, song, beating of mats,
performed by girls, but almost exclusively in a group, whereas in the
genuine large poula which the Samoans perform amongst themselves
group follows group (soa).38
The poula referred to here is a generic term for night dances performed on
festive occasions. Soa is defined by Krämer as a very old dance performed
outside by over a hundred dancers on important ceremonial occasions. Quite
apart from the terminological differentiation, the important issue raised by
Krämer is that the Samoans had already adapted their dance forms into a
synthesized version catering to European tastes. Even the indigenous word
itself has two discrete referents, meaning different things in the Samoan
context specifically as a dance song) and for the Europeans as a synonym
for Samoan dance.
The function and perception of the siva for the Europeans is well illustrated
by a newspaper article published in January 1910, announcing preparations
and plans for entertaining the German sailors and marines during the flag-
raising ceremony:
It has been mooted from several sides to give the ‘men-of-wars’ men a
Samoan ‘taumafataga’ and ‘siva-faa-Samoa’ on the afternoon of February
28th, in order to give them an opportunity of learning something about
Samoan customs and life Without doubt the Samoans themselves will
do their best to give the bluejackets a glimpse into the secrets of Samoan
culinary art.39
The sailors’ encounter with Samoan ‘customs and life’ was thus to be
presented in the concentrated form of Samoan dance. At the same time,
though, the dances were enjoyed by the Samoans themselves in an evident
spirit of intense competition, each village trying to outdo the other in skill
and presentation. What we see here is once again the basic pattern of colo-
nial theatricality whereby indigenous dance and song is required to assume
a metonymic function, concentrating and encapsulating cultures as a whole.

The indigenous culture itself integrates the performances into a completely

different set of values.
∗ ∗ ∗
Although colonial ceremonies continued in Western Samoa until 1914,

when New Zealand took over administration of the islands from Germany,
the dimension of the 1910 celebrations remained unsurpassed.40 At roughly
the same time, Tamesese’s travelling Samoan diplomatic troupe provided
Germans at home with a similar spectacle, albeit on a more modest scale.
Canoe races, oratory, dances, sporting competitions, all these performative
events were staged in Samoa and in Germany within an explicitly colonial
context. The structures of colonialist theatricality encountered thus far reveal
a conjunction of seemingly disparate elements – authenticity and exoti-
cism, metonymy and metaphor, scientific and touristic curiosity – that the
organized performances of Samoans and others welded together to form a
seemingly unified perceptual field. Most importantly, the theatrical processes
examined here demonstrate that aesthetic as much as economic pressures
were at work to make the colonial project succeed. As we move into the
twentieth century, we shall encounter both continuity and disjuncture, as
the United States moves into the Pacific and plays out its own colonialist
and aesthetic agendas there.

6
Birds of Paradise: American-Pacific
Dramas of Displacement

In the 1890s the United States emerged as a fully-fledged imperialist and
colonialist power in the Pacific. In 1893 American settlers in Hawai‘i staged a
coup d’état and deposed the ruling Hawaiian queen Liliuokalani. The so-called
‘revolutionary government’ aggressively petitioned the US government to
annex the Hawaiian islands, which was formally enacted in 1898. In 1899 the
United States was granted Eastern Samoa as a territory, a colonial possession
it still holds. Between 1941 and 1945 in the course of the Pacific war against
Japan, the US military occupied many islands throughout the Pacific, a pres-
ence with far-reaching ramifications for the islands’ economies and cultures.
This de jure or de facto colonial presence led to an upsurge of interest in the
territories which found expression on the US stage in three major works.1 In
1912, Richard Walton Tully’s Hawaiian drama The Bird of Paradise premiered
in New York and was performed for over 12 years in North America and
London. Ten years later, in 1922, Rain, an adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s
novella of the same title, opened to critical and popular acclaim. In 1949
the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific dramatized the Pacific
theatre of war. In all three plays internal racial issues were played out in
Pacific island settings. In all cases we can observe a strategy of geograph-
ical displacement and semiotic substitution, whereby theatrical performance
functions to camouflage and reveal unresolved domestic conflicts. In our
account of performative genealogies these three works occupy a central place
in early and mid-twentieth-century representations of the Pacific. They feed
into one another, providing dramaturgical patterns and theatrical devices
that are adapted and altered to fit new geopolitical situations and cultural
concerns. They are bound together by their ‘flora and fauna of paradise’,
heroines who are either indigenous Hawaiians like Luana in Tully’s musical
drama, or socially marginalized like Maugham’s ‘savage’ prostitute Sadie.
South Pacific offers two or three exotic birds: the alluring Tonkinese virgin
146

Birds of Paradise: American-Pacific Dramas of Displacement 147
Liat and the equally exotic because displaced racial bigot with a heart of
gold, Nellie Forbush from Little Rock, Arkansas. Seen chronologically, the
three works kept the Pacific on the mainstream American stage or in the
cinema continuously from 1912 until the early 1960s. Because of their heavy
reliance on music and dance, The Bird of Paradise and South Pacific make
a significant contribution to what now can be called the commodification

of the Pacific with its ramifications for the tourist industry (Chapter 7)
and for the recent indigenous theatre and performance movement
(Chapter 8).
The term ‘displacement’ should be understood here in a more complex
sense than just geographical transposition. In Freudian psychoanalysis,
displacement refers to a process of transferral of an image (Vorstellung) from
one object to another via association. In this sense it is a semiotic process
involving semantic substitution. Displacement is, however, not merely a
function of language or a poetic device or stylistic tendency but also lived
experience as Homi Bhabha has stressed:
Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational. It

is transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted
in specific histories of cultural displacement. Culture is translational
because such spatial histories of displacement – now accompanied by the
territorial ambitions of global media technologies – make the question
of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex
issue.2
The term displacement should be understood in the following remarks as a

dramaturgical and theatrical strategy whereby local issues are played out in
remote milieus whose existence is only possible because of colonial projects.
Colonial settings are both microcosms of the colonializing power and also
liminal spaces where Western patterns of behaviour and control never fully
pertain. Such liminal settings and displacements foster the possibility of
re-examining cultural questions. In the twentieth century the South Pacific
had become just such a space.
Displacements, however, require concrete forms as well as recognizable
visual and acoustic signs in order to function on stage. In the three theatrical
versions of the South Pacific to be examined, the central site of recognition
was the female body in performance. This is not surprising in the light of the
discursive and representational history examined thus far. A new element
in the equation, however, is race. The Polynesian female body, especially in
performative mode, had certainly been figured in sexualized terms. Yet its
ethnic make-up had never really occasioned moral or philosophical discom-
fort. In the twentieth century old desire meets new theories of race. The
American stage finds different solutions to reconciling the indigenous body
as a necessary site of desire for the audience with their preference for white
rather than coloured bodies.

The Bird of Paradise
Richard Walton Tully’s Broadway and West End success The Bird of Paradise
is set in the early 1890s, the period in which the Unites States annexed
Hawai‘i and forced the native queen into house arrest until her death. Its
background is eminently political, although the main theme is romantic

and exotic, a variation on the popular theme of cross-cultural romances
and thus heir to a long chain of mainly orientalist Western dramas and
operas where indigenous heroines enter into ultimately disastrous liaisons
with European men. Within this framework, Tully manages to articulate a
number of pressing issues affecting indigenous Hawaiians, introducing them
both literally and thematically to the New York stage and thus into the
centre of US media attention. The following plot summary is based roughly
on Tully’s own précis.3
A young man, Paul Wilson, fresh from college comes to Hawai‘i to work
among the lepers of Molokai. The steamer stops at the Puna coast of Big
Island, where he meets and falls in love with a beautiful Hawaiian girl,
Luana, who is a descendant of the Hawaiian king Kamehameha and has been
brought up by a Hawaiian priest. They marry, and instead of proceeding to
Molokai, Wilson stays on the island with her and her friends and family.
Luana is happy, but the young husband loses all ambition and increas-
ingly his self-respect. Other characters include Captain Hatch, a sugar-cane
planter; the missionary Sysonby and his wife; Diana, a young American
who wants to write a psychological study of Hawaiian magical practices;
and Dean, a college-educated beachcomber critical of missionary practices.
Hatch and Sysonby pressure Luana to become queen in Honolulu after the
present one has been deposed. For love of her husband she follows Wilson to
Honolulu, into a world of Western conventions, only to find that there she is
an incubus upon her husband. On learning that her people are endangered
by an imminent volcanic eruption, she leaves him, returns to Big Island
and casts herself into the molten maw of the nearby volcano to appease the
wrath of the goddess Pele.
As the plot summary suggests, the play combines popular nineteenth-
century South Seas themes – human sacrifice and witchcraft – with contem-
porary political issues and cultural questions regarding the impact of Western
civilization on indigenous cultures. The play reveals detailed knowledge of
Hawaiian geography, history and performance culture; in this complexity
it is unique among Western representations of the Pacific of this period.
In terms of its scenic devices the play is an exemplary child of its time
with a predilection for hyperrealism and ethnographic exactitude. Tully, for
example, suggests an olfactory scenic effect: ‘Electric fans to carry the smell
of wet kelp out to the audience.’4 Slavish attention to cultural and sceno-
graphic detail is of course typical of fin-de-siècle theatre and synonymous
with the production style of David Belasco and Oliver Morosco with whom

Tully was so closely associated. The play became famous, however, not for
its evocation of the smell of kelp but for its authentic rendition of Hawaiian
dance and music and for a stunning volcanic eruption in the last act.
The Bird of Paradise was premiered on 11 September 1911 in Los Angeles at
Oliver Morosco’s Belasco Theater. Morosco, an erstwhile acrobat and one of
the leading theatrical impresarios of the day, had worked with Tully before,

and commissioned him to write the play on the basis of a scenario. After a
tryout in Rochester, in New York state, in December of the same year, the
play opened in New York City on 7 January 1912 at Daly’s Theater before
transferring to Maxine Elliott’s on Broadway where it completed its run. The
New York production launched the career of Laurette Taylor (better known
today perhaps as the original Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie), who
played Luana. Taylor went on to attain a place in the Broadway pantheon
with her role in Peg o’ My Heart, which opened later the same year and was
also produced by Morosco. The reviewers were struck by the production’s
‘scenic beauty’, the spectacular effects and, as the New York Times critic
remarked, ‘the introduction of the weirdly sensuous music of the island
people’. It is, however, the final scene, the active volcano ‘in its suggestion
of molten rock, broken by jets of steam and flame’, into which Luana throws
herself, that seems to have left the most lasting impression on reviewers.5 The
critics were, to put it in a nutshell, respectful but not ecstatic. Although its
impact on Broadway was considerable, the play’s actual long-term effect was
generated by the multitude of stock company productions that the original
spawned. The play was seen throughout the United States and Canada over
a period of 12 years. A special feature of this play was the artistic control
that Tully exerted. By the mid-1920s he had supervised around 30 separate
productions.
The Bird didn’t transfer to the West End in London until 1919, a delay
caused by the outbreak of World War I, where it was produced by Sir Alfred
Butt in conjunction with Tully. The former, a leading London producer,
acquired the rights in 1912 but, as The Times explained, ‘preferred to keep
it back rather than produce it during the abnormal conditions created by
the war’.6 Although the London production, which opened at the Lyric
on 11 September 1919, was entirely recast and redesigned, Tully, as usual,
supervised it and once again organized the importation of Hawaiian musi-
cians. Finally, the London production outperformed the New York original.
It closed on 7 June 1920 after 310 performances, but enjoyed a brief revival
in 1922 when it ran for another two months.
Attracted no doubt by the ‘peerless play’s’ commercial success and
Morosco’s relentless publicity machine, a young California schoolteacher by
the name of Grace Altman Fendler filed a law suit in 1912 claiming that Tully
had plagiarized a play of hers entitled ‘In Hawaii, a version of which she had
submitted to Morosco for consideration in 1911. The case was, however, not
heard until 12 years later in 1924. Fendler was able to prove her case; the

court granted an injunction and ordered an accounting of the profits of the

defendants. A judgment was awarded to the plaintiff for more than $780,000,
a not unsubstantial sum and an indication of the play’s commercial success.
At its prime, the play was estimated to be grossing about $100,000 a year.7
The Appellate Division upheld the judgement unanimously thus precluding
the possibility of immediate appeal. This ruling forced ‘The Bird’ off the road

for good. It was not until an eminent New York Lawyer Charles H. Tuttle
found a loophole in the law that Morosco and Tully were able to justify
an appeal.8 The final ruling by the New York Court of Appeals, passed in
1930, reversed the previous decision and required Fendler to pay back the
damages awarded plus all costs. The ruling became an important precedent
in US copyright law and is still cited today in plagiarism cases.
The decisive argument causing the original decision to be overthrown was
that Tully’s original scenario antedated the submission of Fendler’s manu-
script. While he could certainly have theoretically plagiarized the script for
details, the original concept was definitely his own. In his close reading of
the two versions the judge set out not only legal principles – ‘there may be
literary property in a particular combination of ideas or in the form in which
ideas are embodied. There can be none in the ideas’ – but also provides
some insight into contemporary attitudes regarding such subject matter. He
notes:
In spite of the entire dissimilarity of the two plays in theme and story
there are many similarities in detail. Perhaps this is inevitable in two plays
about Hawaii. The very name Hawaii seems to suggest to Americans the
hula dance and the sport of swimming; flowers and sunshine and music.
It suggests too the dread disease of leprosy.9
This may have appeared obvious to an American judge in 1930. It was,

however, by no means such an automatic association in 1912. That
Americans inevitably associated the name Hawai‘i with hula and music
in 1930 was in fact in no small degree due to the play itself and its
success.
Popularizing Hawaiian performance culture

A special feature of the productions was the extensive use of ‘authentic’
Hawaiian music and dance. ‘Authentic’ meant that the musicians were
imported from Hawai‘i. Although Laurette Taylor and other New York
actresses rendered the hula, real Hawaiians provided the music. Its distinct
style, especially the guitar-playing, known as slack-key played on a steel
guitar, had been developed in Hawai‘i.10 As only Hawaiians could at this
time play in this style, for the first productions Tully imported a Hawaiian
band known as the Hawaiian Quintette, which included the famous steel
guitarist Walter Kolomoku. The band became so successful in their own

right through their performances in the play that they recorded for the
phonograph company Victor the play’s incidental music, which sold well
into the 1920s.11
The appearance of Hawaiian popular music via Tully’s play and its fore-
grounding of ‘real live’ Hawaiian musicians resulted in a craze for the new
music and its icon, the ‘Honolulu girl’ in songs by Irving Berlin such as
Figure 19 Sheet music cover featuring Laurette Taylor. A photograph of Taylor has
been superimposed on the background picture. The song is ‘Mai Poina Oe’ (Forget me
not), composed by W. A. Aeko with English lyrics by Arthur Denvir
Source: John Franklin Music Co. 1912. Photo: collection of the author.

‘My Bird of Paradise’ issued in 1915, a ragtime parody of the play and the
Hawaiian craze engendered by it. By the end of World War I, Hawaiian
recordings were the biggest selling records in the United States, especially
acoustic steel guitar and vocal recordings.
Apart from recordings, sheet music of the songs was also published and
satisfied a huge demand for merchandizing and spin-off products. The sheet

music was invariably illustrated (Figure 19) with the images of Luana in her
native costume. The music itself, scored for piano and the moderately trained
voice of the home parlour, provided the most accessible way for consumers
to process the Hawaiian experience they had had at the theatre. While Tully’s
original play only had provision for Hawaiian songs motivated by plausible
Figure 20 Poster for Federal Theatre Project presentation of Bird of Paradise at the
Belasco Theatre, Los Angeles, showing a woman wearing a bikini top and skirt,
standing next to a palm tree. The poster was produced under the auspices of the
Federal Arts project, like the Federal Theater Project, a division of the Work Projects
Administration, a New Deal programme of the US Government
Source: By permission of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, WPA Poster
Collection (POS - WPA - CA.01.B549, no. 1).

occasions for singing, (but does not contain exact titles or lyrics), subsequent
developments of the production included more and more numbers, pushing
the play closer to ‘opera’ or ‘musical’. Owing to the growing prominence of
Hawaiian music and popular songs, it is perhaps not surprising that ‘The
Bird’ was revived – and quickly flopped – as a musical in 1930 under the title
Luana. The original play was also presented under the auspices of the Federal

Theatre Project at its birthplace, The Belasco Theater in Los Angeles in the
late 1930s. Its poster (Figure 20), which features a bikini-clad maiden rather
than the more traditional grass skirt, demonstrates that the former was now
an integral part of the iconographical repertoire of Hawai‘i, although such
images have nothing to do with the original play.12
The images produced on sheet music and posters alluded almost always
to the hula. By the time the play was first produced, the hula had become
a standard feature of entertainment in the growing tourist trade to Hawai‘i,
although pre-World War I tourism was by no means comparable to the
mass industry of the post-World War II period. The version presented to the
tourists was a composite of Polynesian dance forms developed in the latter
half of the nineteenth century. Despite the increasing prominence of the
dance form on the Hawaiian islands themselves, there was at the time no
real popular conception of the dance on the mainland. This was to change
with the impact of the play and above all its dissemination in stock company
productions throughout North America.13
As we have already mentioned, Laurette Taylor and her many successors
danced the hula.14 She received instruction from (in her own words) a ‘fat
little Hawaiian who moved like a fat little wave, S. M. Kaiawae, one of the
members of the Hawaiian Quintette. ‘When she could balance a gourd full
of water on the back of each hand and undulate her hips without spilling
a drop, he pronounced her proficient.’15 She even learned some words of
Hawaiian – certainly enough to sing the songs, and anecdotal legend has
it that the intensive rehearsal sessions in the tenement flat she shared with
her mother generated so much adverse interest from the neighbours that
she was threatened with eviction. Not amused was Tully, who objected
not only to Taylor’s Irish accent but also to her, in his eyes, less than
authentic hula dancing.16 He advised to ‘merely “indicate” the hula with
a few motions’, which he demonstrated in rehearsal.17 Authentic or not,
Taylor’s rendition of the hula took New York by storm, and Kaiawae was able
to cash in on the craze by providing instruction to enthused epigones – at
a price.
By 1930 the theatrical commodity, The Bird of Paradise, had run its course.
Its cultural, mimetic and financial capital seems to have been expended,
milked of its last drops of novelty and selling power. This cultural exhaustion
is best demonstrated by the fact that it was now made into a film, directed
by King Vidor and starring Dolores del Rio.18 The only links with the play,
however, are the title and the heroine’s self-immolation in a volcano.

Racial imperatives
US imperial ambitions on the one hand, and race debates on the other,
form the ideological framework for the play’s success. The play’s treat-
ment of the native Hawaiians oscillates between sympathy and antipathy.
Tully is a clear proponent of the ‘salvage paradigm’, to use James Clifford’s
term, whereby anthropological, or in his case theatrical representation,

may serve to preserve what is ultimately seen as a doomed culture.19 Indi-
genous Hawaiians are represented as being in a transitional phase, caught
up in various stages of maladjustment to Western culture. The opening
scenes highlight such dissonances acoustically and visually: for example by
a ‘quartet of male voices’ singing a Hawaiian song to a European melody,
and visually by the disparate costumes worn by two girls. Makia, ‘a convert’,
appears in the full-length Mother Hubbard dress, while Liliha, ‘a Hula
dancer’ cavorts in a skirt of coconut leaves, ‘the old-fashioned dress of the
Hawaiians’.20
As already mentioned, the play engages directly with the coup d’état of
1893 and the ensuing American annexation of the islands in 1898.21 The
unholy alliance of missionaries (Sysonby) and money (sugar-cane planter
Hatch) had been much discussed in the debates leading to final annexation.
In this regard the play is explicitly political in its exposure of the background
to the annexation and articulates unmitigated sympathies for the indigenous
perspective – rendered, however, somewhat romantically and improbably
via the unlikely story of a Hawaiian princess.
Less obvious today is another thematic complex, which at the time,
however, would have been immediately accessible to a contemporary audi-
ence. This is the rise of eugenics and the ensuing debates over racial intermar-
riage and questions of non-white immigration. This theme is made explicit
by Tully in the original scenario:
The disappearance of the so-called inferior races before the advancement

of the Anglo-Saxon race. Degeneracy and death is the penalty that has
always been paid by the higher race that seeks to raise the lower by
amalgamating with it. The play thoroughly dramatizes the well-known
fact that though we dress, educate and polish the members of a lower
race to the superficial religious and social equality with the Caucasian, at
heart he is still the fetish-worshipping savage who will become atavistic
in every moment of stress. The play is only a tragedy in one sense – that is
for the girl who represents the weaker race and the man who mates with
her. Hope and salvation are working out for the dissolute beach-comber
who climbs from degradation to the highest honor among men through
his having kept himself racially pure and his mating with the clear-eyed
intelligent girl of his own kind.22

Despite such statements, the play cannot be simply dismissed as an exercise

in dramatized eugenics. Although ideologically justifiable, such a reading
would bypass its popularity and place in theatrical and cultural history.23
From the perspective of its author The Bird was a serious play, an attempt
to explore the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter, the major theme of his
oeuvre. Julian Johnston, of the Los Angeles Times and the play’s first reviewer,

attested to its ‘keen philosophic observation’ and ‘literary solidity.’24 Its
appeal to contemporary audiences was, however, probably less philosophic
than corporeal, as we have seen. Nevertheless, the subject of interracial
encounter was clearly one that interested US audiences over and beyond the
teachings of eugenics.
Colonial politics and racial exoticism are of course by no means separate
spheres but closely intertwined. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatre
predicated on exotic sexual relationships – the tradition extending from
Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine through to Madama Butterfly and South Pacific – has
always had to work through, and even against, a growing tension between
erotic desire on the one hand and anxiety over miscegenation on the other.25
The play’s passage into American popular culture was supported by imperial
fantasies on the one hand, and a geographical displacement of American
race issues on the other. The ‘failure’ of the relationship between a white
American man and a young Hawaiian native woman can clearly be read as
an admonitory enactment of a local predicament from the safe distance of
a Pacific island.
Rain
Two years before ‘the Bird’ came off the stage for good following Fendler’s
successful lawsuit in 1924, New York audiences were to be privileged to what
could be termed the final chapter in the drama of anti-theatrical prejudice
in the South Seas. We have already noted that many Europeans viewed
missionary activities with considerable disparagement. This opposition often
had straightforward mercenary motives: traders and missionaries had very
different ideas as to what suitable dealing with the local people entailed.
Perhaps the most severe critics were visiting writers, a tradition that begins
with Herman Melville and continued into the twentieth century culmin-
ating as we shall see in W. Somerset Maugham’s most famous novella ‘Miss
Thompson’ (1921) and its various adaptations for stage and screen.26 By the
time he published the story, Maugham was generally considered to be one of
the most successful writers of the century. Although he began as a novelist
with the publication of the autobiographical Liza of Lambeth in 1897, in his
lifetime Maugham was best known as a playwright, in which capacity he
dominated the London stage from 1903 to 1933. In the course of his career
he travelled to most parts of the world, and visited the remotest outposts

of the British Empire. These experiences invariably found their way into a
huge output of stories, novels and plays.
When Maugham embarked on the SS Sonoma in December 1916 at
Honolulu en route to Sydney, the ship’s passengers included a certain Miss
Thompson and a missionary with, as Maugham noted in his notebook, ‘a
look of suppressed fire’.27 The ship called at Pago Pago, the main port of

Eastern Samoa, where the passengers were forced to spend several weeks in
quarantine because of an outbreak of cholera on board. Miss Thompson was
an American nightclub performer and probable prostitute who had been
working at Iwelei, Honolulu’s notorious red-light district. Her destination
was Apia where she planned to work in a hotel bar. With uncharacter-
istic directness, Maugham translated these bare facts complete with actual
name into the novella, ‘Miss Thompson’, which was published in April 1921
in the progressive magazine Smart Set and then in September of the same
year in his most famous collection The Trembling of the Leaf: Little Stories of
the South Seas. Descriptions of the real Miss Thompson, which Maugham
recorded in his later published Writer’s Notebook, we find almost verbatim
in the story.28 What Maugham did not directly observe but imagined is
the dramatic confrontation between the nightclub performer cum prosti-
tute and the missionary Davidson who resolves to convert sinful Sadie and
send her back to San Francisco for lawful punishment for an undisclosed
crime. After several all-night prayer sessions Davidson is discovered dead
one morning on the beach having cut his own throat. The mystery of the
suicide is disclosed in Sadie Thompson’s famous words: ‘You men! You filthy,
dirty pigs! You’re all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!’29 For all his religious
fervour and puritan convictions, Davidson succumbed to his own repressed
urges.
The dramatization by John Colton and Clemence Randolph, which was
renamed Rain because of a legal dispute, follows the novella in respect to
setting and main characters, although it embellishes what Maugham’s story
only indicates and concentrates time and space to adhere to the demands
of dramatic convention.30 The action of the play takes place entirely in
the living room of Joe Horn’s hotel-store in the port of Pago Pago, Amer-
ican Samoa, whereas Maugham begins his story and introduces the main
characters on board ship. The play focuses the action into one week, while
Maugham extends it over several. The most important additions, however,
are the American marines who in the story are nameless but in the play
are fleshed out in the form of a private, a corporal and, above all, Sergeant
O’Hara of the US Marine Corps. The latter becomes a major player in the
battle for Sadie’s soul, offering her the worldly prospect of a new life in
Sydney as his wife.
A group of five travellers are stranded in Pago Pago during the rainy season
by an outbreak of cholera on their ship. Dr MacPhail and his wife are en route
to Apia, Western Samoa. The reverend Davidson, an American missionary

and his wife, are returning to their mission on a remote island after a sabbat-
ical. They are forced to take up lodgings in Joe Horn’s general store, where
they are joined by Sadie Thompson who identifies herself as a ‘singer’. Both
women immediately take exception to Sadie’s raucous behaviour and evident
lack of social graces. Davidson surmises that she is a prostitute escaping
from Honolulu and intent on pursuing her profession in Apia. Coexistence

proves impossible. Sadie starts on the wrong foot by inviting the ship’s
quartermaster and three marines into her room, where she cranks up the
gramophone. The marines manhandle Davidson when he tries to turn off
the music. He has considerable influence in the region and importunes the
local governor, insisting that she be deported on the first available boat. At
the same time he begins a relentless campaign to force Sadie to repent and
accept spiritual salvation and secular punishment. Davidson is unyielding
in his decision that she must be sent to San Francisco – and a probable jail
sentence – and not to Australia, to where Sadie has now decided to head on
O’Hara’s suggestion. After many all-night prayer sessions he finally triumphs
and at the same time yields to the temptation of the flesh that Sadie repres-
ents. On the morning of Sadie’s deportation, Davidson is discovered dead
on the beach having cut his own throat. Sadie resolves to accompany the
marine sergeant O’Hara to Sydney.
With the exception of the local Samoans, all major and minor charac-
ters in Rain are ‘displaced persons’ of one kind or another. Either they are
stranded against their will in the Pacific outpost of Pago Pago because of
the quarantine, or they are stationed there for professional reasons. The
US marines Griggs, Hodson and O’Hara are counting the days until their
term of duty is over. Indeed, the latter has no intention of returning home
but plans to start a new life in Australia. Even the store-owner, Joe Horn,
who has a native wife and is a permanent resident, exudes an air of incon-
gruity. Quite apart from his excessive love of the bottle, his ‘ludicrous
figure’ (51) is the visual counterpoint to his propensity for reading Nietzsche
and quoting Samuel Johnson, activities that find little or no resonance in
his immediate surroundings. Ironically, the only European characters who
are ‘at home’ in the setting are the American missionaries Davidson and
his wife. Their many years of residence on another island have provided
them at least with familiarity with their surroundings, yet their attitude still
remains contestatory and dismissive, especially with respect to the port of
Pago Pago where missionary endeavours appear to have been only partially
successful.
The setting is indeed crucial to understanding the cultural and spiritual
drama that is played out. Since the entire action takes place in the public
living-room of Joe Horn’s hotel-store, its ‘milieu’ becomes a determining
factor for the ensuing action. The stage directions make clear that the
authors were true disciples of naturalistic theory. Zola’s famous requirement
in Le naturalisme au théâtre (1881) that setting (décor) act as an extension of

the dramatic text by demonstrating the effect of the environment on people

was of course by 1922 a common place in European and American theatre
practice.31 The meticulous stage directions stress above all images of decay
and dilapidation. The floor of the room is covered with ‘greasy matting’,
while the walls are covered with patches of old wallpaper: ‘Where the paper
has peeled, crumbling plaster and whitewashed laths show through.’ A

‘bedraggled Japanese bead curtain, stringy, bitten, and very old’ marks a
doorway to the room that Sadie Thompson will later occupy. Chairs, dining
tables, umbrellas and even books are invariably ‘shabby’, ‘dreary’, ‘dilap-
idated’ or ‘battered’. The pictures on the wall commemorate queens and
presidents of 30 years ago. In contrast to the decrepit man-made habitation,
the natural surroundings visible in the background provide a ‘vista of sky,
sea, beach and distant mountains’ (59). Yet the scenic beauty of Samoa is
only one aspect of this environment. That ‘brilliant flowers grow in riotous
confusion’ suggests a premonition of nature’s implacable and uncontrollable
side. Indeed, once the eponymous rain sets in, the stranded characters are
subjected to a sound- as well as a landscape that becomes the dominant
trope of the play. As Horn explains to Dr MacPhail: ‘It’s getting you! – all
this lush, dripping world – outside, everything growing with a sort of savage
violence! Tomorrow you will see strange flowers where yesterday there were
only roots. For myself I like it. This rain you hate – it wipes out, it kills –
and it begins ’ (67). As the play nears its climax at the beginning of the
third act the sound of the rain ‘beating persistently on the roof’ blends
with the ‘ominous beating of festival drums’ (81). By now the rain and
Davidson have worn down Sadie’s resistance so that she is willing to return
to San Francisco to face imprisonment. The milieu depicted suggests that the
attempts at civilization are at best skin-deep, in decay and finally doomed
to failure.
The beating of festival drums marks another figure of displacement central
to the play. The ‘natives’ as they are called (never Samoans) feature as
visual and verbal accessories to the ‘savage violence’ of nature. Compared
to Maugham’s story, however, where they are little more than a shadowy
presence, the Samoans in the dramatic version do attain occasional, if not
centre, at least upstage visibility. The play in fact opens with a dumb-
show procession of ‘natives’, not unlike the ethnographic spectacles and
world’s fair displays that had attained popularity at the turn of century (see
Chapter 5):
A native girl enters from down R., on the veranda. She wears the lava lava,
the native costume of the South Seas, and carries on her head a basket
of pineapples. She crosses indolently and gracefully to L., and enters the
store. She is followed by a native boy, and an old man, also wearing
the lava lava. The boy carries fruit and the old man a basket of toys
and ferocious masks of Kanaka workmanship. They are all chattering and

laughing good-humoredly. After them comes an old woman, chewing

betel-nut and balancing on her back a pole to which are attached fish
bladders and pieces of dried shark. (50)
The model for this exotisistic procession was probably Maugham’s own play
East of Suez, which had premiered in New York two months earlier. Its famous

long opening scene consisted of a street scene in Peking in which dozens
of Chinese and European actors playing coolies recreated the hustle and
bustle of rickshaws, water carriers, street vendors backed up by atmospheric
Chinese music. While not quite on the same scale, the opening of Rain aimed
for a similar effect. The scene has no model in the story and the indigenous
supernumeraries fulfil no recognizable dramatic function. They exist rather
on the level of spectacle, remaining visually and acoustically present during
the first act during which they ‘disappear aimlessly and unobtrusively’ (50).
Like Maugham’s own writing, the play cannot conceal a condescending
attitude to the native characters. The only one to achieve name status is
Ameena, Joe’s native wife, ‘a large and darksome lady, the color of deep café
au lait, and ten years ago very pretty. Now she is enormously fat and oozes
rather than walks’ (50). Ameena, like all the other Samoan characters, speaks
a generic pidgin English, which is designed to obey more the laws of stage
comedy than verisimilitude. Her fright on catching sight of the approaching
Davidsons – ‘Mis-sion-ary! Goddam! I run!’ (52) – is calculated to achieve
a certain degree of sympathetic identification with an audience that may
harbour similar misgivings.
Such lines are rare, however. Overall, the ‘natives’ appear to have a more
important diegetic than mimetic function despite their ‘unobstrusive’ pres-
ence. They are primarily talked about, figuring more as subjects of conver-
sation than themselves attaining the status of autonomous subjects. As
topics of conversation, the ‘natives’ feature mainly in the Davidsons’s self-
congratulatory disquisitions on their own ‘good work’ or as caveats regarding
the incorrigibility of certain ‘practices’. It is the latter which establish a
discursive line stretching back to the first reports sent to London from
the missionaries on the Duff. Like some of the early missionaries, Mrs
Davidson in particular is caught between fascination and repulsion, and
cannot conceal a prurient interest in the very practices she and her husband
have dedicated themselves to eradicating. She uses in fact Mrs MacPhail as
a kind of projection screen for what in the play’s uncomplicated under-
standing of Freudian psychology are easily to be seen as her own repressed
desires. Her marriage has been, as she admits, entirely spiritual and without
physical consummation:
Mrs Davidson (to Dr Macphail): Well? I hear that Mrs. MacPhail has been
telling you some of the things about these islands which I couldn’t,
even though you are a doctor.

Dr Macphail (mildly interested): What things?

Mrs Davidson (warming to her subject): About the moon dancing, the sugar-
cane festival etcetera! Can you imagine such depravity! Such dances!
(53–4)
MacPhail suggests that in terms of function they are probably little different

to the Maypole dancing Mrs Davidson admits to having participated in as a
little girl. The comparison is, however, lost on her.
The play moves through what was by the 1920s a predictable critique of
missionary interventions. Dr MacPhail’s admiration for the native physique
(‘Notice how their muscles mould into the flesh without one ugly line’)
provokes Mrs Davidsons’s rejoinder that she and her husband are concerned
with their souls not their bodies, and that ‘we have practically eradicated the
lava lava in our district’ (57). From a secular point of view – represented by
the trader Horn and Dr MacPhail – the arrival of the missionaries was a mixed
‘blessing’, sentiments expressed almost a century earlier by Melville, as we
have seen. For the trader Horn, the Islanders were ‘naturally the happiest, most
contented people on earth then along comes Mr. Missionary in broadcloth
and spectacles and tells ’em they’re lost souls and have to be saved whether
they want to be or not!’ Dr MacPhail notes the paradoxical condition that the
coming of the missionaries ended an Edenic state: ‘Too bad that man couldn’t
develop a soul without losing the Garden of Eden ’ (58–9).
In the context of a displacement theory this attack on missionary endeav-
ours in the South Seas must also be read against the background of contem-
porary American debates on the influence of Christian doctrine within
secular society. The connection becomes conspicuous with the arrival of Sadie
Thompson. The play, more so than the story, follows a clear strategy of
displacing tropes of savagery from the tacit natives to the extremely voluble
‘performer’. The stage direction describing her first entrance provides an
almost overdetermined explication of such a transposition: ‘There is some-
thing of the grace of a wild animal in her movements, something prim-
itive perhaps, even as her clothes suggest savage and untutored responses to
cut and color’ (55). Sadie’s appeal and identificatory potential for a 1920s
American audience lay of course in just this liminal position between the
‘savagery’ of the social lower depths, her ‘immunity’ to the civilisatory
dictates of fashion and taste on the one hand and the religious advances of
Davidson on the other. Throughout the play, Sadie is aligned metaphoric-
ally with the Samoans so that she becomes figuratively at least another savage
soul to be converted. Although she announces almost immediately that she
‘wants to see the cannibals’ (56), it becomes quickly clear that she herself
is one.32
The displacement of missionary zeal from the natives to Sadie manifests
itself in the second half of the first act during the protracted onstage dance
scene (Figure 21), which incurs the wrath of the Davidsons. Not only is


Figure 21 Jeanne Eagels as Sadie Thompson dancing to her gramophone
Source: Original New York production. Publicity material. Photo: collection of the author.
it the Sabbath, but Sadie’s choice of dances – mixed of course – would

have provided George Burder (see Chapter 3) with ample proof of ‘unlawful
amusement’. The reaction of Davidson and his wife mark them as Burder’s
true disciples. Needless to say, they have eradicated dancing on ‘their’ island.
Their attempts to curb Sadie’s Sunday pastime – an American girl dancing
with American marines – transfer the conflict into the internal cultural
sphere. While she retires to her room with her gramophone and marines to
continue dancing offstage, the onstage debate shifts to perhaps the key issue
underpinning the displacement strategy of the play. Against the acoustic
background of ragtime and a Spanish tango, Davidson states not surprisingly
that he has ‘no patience with Darwinian Theory In my opinion it should
be prohibited by law’ (63). This pronouncement transposes the conflict from
a minor social irritation at a far-flung Pacific trading post onto the frame of a
major US political debate. Spectators would have made the connection with
the campaign by William Jennings Bryan to have the teaching of evolution
banned from schools. By the mid-1920s he had succeeded in 15 mainly
Southern states. Although the famous Monkey Trials did not take place until
1925 (and their dramatic and filmic reflection in Inherit the Wind much later)
the issue was being debated throughout the country when the curtain went
up on Rain in 1922.33
From the missionary perspective Sadie’s predilection for dancing and
professional promiscuity places her in the same category as the arioi, the
professional Tahitian performers we encountered in chapter 3. As we have
seen, for the Evangelical missionaries performance and prostitution were

related professions. Like her extinct predecessors Sadie is also peripatetic,

moving from Honolulu to Pago Pago to Apia, spreading, in Davidson’s eyes,
sin wherever she goes. For this reason, Davidson compares her to an infec-
tious disease that must be quarantined like the cholera that has broken out
on board ship: ‘Sin must be segregated until it can be stamped out’ (72).
The parallel between Sadie’s and native performance is re-established at the

beginning of the third act. By this time Sadie has succumbed to Davidson’s
relentless proselytizing. She has had her epiphany – ‘a big, bright, beautiful
place’ (84). Davidson and others are attending a native festival on a neigh-
bouring island. Horn describes it, not without irony, as a ‘native witch dance’
and a new field for Davidson’s evangelistic endeavours ‘now he has nipped
poor Sadie Thompson out of the flames.’ O’Hara is therefore convinced that
Davidson will ‘bust the whole show up when the dancing starts’ (82).
The displacement of native depravity onto Sadie is echoed even in the
famous climax in which, after Davidson has declared his new convert to
be ‘one of the daughters of the King – radiant – beautiful’, he succumbs to
his own basic instincts (and presumably 30 years of self-imposed celibacy).
The stage directions demand a silent movie-like ‘realization’, a legible panto-
mimic display of Davidson’s contest between moral injunction and libid-
inous drives or, in the words of the play, ‘a bitter struggle between Davidson,
the man of God, and Davidson, human creature’ (90). This is the same
predicament in which not a few of Davidson’s brethren found themselves,
especially in the early days of the mission. From the very first Tahitian
mission, members, both single and married, occasionally succumbed to the
temptations offered by native mores, which usually resulted in expulsion
and invariably undermined the larger enterprise of convincing the local
people of the benefits of pre-marital chastity and monogamy.34
Rain opened on 7 November, 1922 at the Maxine Elliot Theatre in New
York, produced by Sam H. Harris and directed by John D. Williams. Jeanne
Eagels played the title role with Robert Kelly as her adversary, the Rev.
Davidson. The controversial production was a huge success and Eagels played
the part of Sadie for 174 weeks in New York.35 Looking back 30 years later,
the journalist and theatre historian Ward Morehouse, who witnessed the
play’s premiere in New York, could claim that ‘the opening brought forth an
emotional demonstration never exceeded in the theatre of this country and
century.’36 Even if we allow a certain idealization and exaggeration char-
acteristic of retrospective memory, there is no doubt that Rain generated a
response of remarkable emotional intensity. The audience reaction seemed
to echo involvement of the type more familiar to nineteenth-century melo-
drama than to finely drawn psychological drama. The critic for the New York
Times, John Corbin, mentions in his review that ‘the gallery fairly booed and
derided him [Davidson]’, whereas ‘the house fairly rose to Miss Eagels and
acclaimed her.’37 Lines of identification were clearly drawn both dramatic-
ally and theatrically, as the contemporary audience reaction suggests. This

can be explained by the fact that the audience recognized that the drama
being acted out was one of local significance rather than exotic distance.
John Gassner terms Rain an ‘early anti-puritan melodrama’ and regards it as
evidence of ‘the new generation’s assault on Puritanism.’38 According to this
reading, Rain, like The Bird of Paradise, is a drama of displacement. Internal
cultural conflicts – in this case the tension between the ‘liberated’ Charle-

ston generation and the still strong puritan heritage in the United States –
are displaced and acted out on a remote Pacific island. The play belongs to
the anti-Calvinist tradition that gathered momentum towards the end of
the nineteenth century and which regarded the Puritan legacy as a major
impediment to America’s cultural modernization. H. L. Mencken’s essay
‘Puritanism as a Literary Force’ (1917) is perhaps the best-known attack on
the cultural heritage but it was echoed by many other intellectuals, including
George Santayana and Randolph Bourne. As the editors of a recent volume
on the Calvinist legacy in the twentieth century put it: ‘Together, these
works replaced the popular image of Puritan as originator of American demo-
cratic institutions and guarantor of personal moral rectitude with the image
of the Puritan as theocratic killjoy who repressed the individual’s ability to
experience beauty and create art.’39
Although the lines seem to be drawn with Manichean clarity – the
‘progressive’ spectators clearly side with the good-hearted, if immoral, Sadie
against a bigoted Davidson – it would be unwise to interpret the audience’s
vociferous rejection of the Calvinist standpoint represented by the latter as
evidence of a ‘clean break’. The Puritan legacy and the Calvinist doctrine
underpinning it – antinominalist rebellion, fierce individualism, communal
conformity – were central to American national identity formation. The play
provides therefore not just a psychological analysis of the Id in conflict with
the Ego and Superego but also the unusual spectacle of a nation at war with
itself and some of its foundational ideals. In Rain, it can be argued, the
‘voyage out of the civilizing mission’ (Bhabha) has returned home to one of
its main points of departure, the New England Puritan heritage, and hence
back to metropolitan consciousness. The play focuses both strategies: the
transnational moment of geocultural transposition, and the translational
figures of sign and symbol.
The history of representations of the Pacific is a chronicle of displacements,
of libidinal and other energies, which move from object to object, image
to image, changing in their rhetorical form. In Rain the savage object of
conversion has been transferred onto the body of a US citizen whose perform-
ative exuberance and possible sexual promiscuity become the battleground
of cultural values. As we have tried to show, such a drama does not arise by
chance, but reflects a complex genealogy of performative and discursive prac-
tices stretching back over a century. Regarding Sadie Thompson as a latter
day arioi should not be discounted as hermeneutical imagining but rather as a
way of conceptualizing genealogies of performance which function as much
through strategies of displacement as through clear lines of influence.

Pacific and Oriental lines: South Pacific
Historians of the Pacific are unusually united in their evaluation of the events
of World War II on the region. No other chain of events since the initial
Western exploration and colonization produced more disruption than the
Japanese invasion of the islands and the ensuing war by the Allies against

the invaders between 1942 and 1945. Whereas the European invasion of the
region had been a gradual process with substantial changes, the Japanese
occupation was exceedingly swift but with equally massive disruptions. It
should not be forgotten, however, that even before the outbreak of hostil-
ities, Japan was already a colonial presence in the Pacific. Under the auspices
of a League of Nations mandate, Japan had effectively annexed a number of
Micronesian islands that had been part of the German colonial empire until
World War I. Thus, by 1939 Japan was already well-prepared geographically
to extend its infamous Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere further into
the Pacific.
The Pacific theatre of war produced unusual divisions of loyalty, which
often ran against the traditional European versus indigenous divide. In
French Polynesia, French planters were split between supporters of the Vichy
regime and the Free French. In Fiji, there was a general reluctance among the
Indian population to participate on the Allied side, a position that greatly
exacerbated existing tensions and divisions between them and indigenous
Fijians, a conflict that has in one way or another persisted in maintaining
the divide between the two majority cultures on that island. On contested
islands such as the Solomons or New Guinea, the indigenous people were
confronted with the spectacle of their former colonial masters being humi-
liated militarily by a non-European country. But also those islands that
did not see direct occupation or military conflict were subjected to major
disruption, mainly due to the mighty American logistical machine. The
Americans ‘destabilized existing colonial power relations both economically
through excessive spending and the huge amount of material goods that
they brought with them, and socially, among many other things, by the
presence of black soldiers who seemed to enjoy equality’.40 The war also
refocused attention on the existing Asian presence in the Pacific, most of
whom had been brought there under the system of indentured labour: the
so-called Tonkinese on French plantations in the New Hebrides and New
Caledonia; Hawai‘i with its large Japanese, Chinese and Filipino populations
but other islands as well, whose loyalties from the Western perspective could
not always be relied upon.
The reconfiguring of Western perceptions of the Pacific through the
impact of the war, and particularly the American presence, found its earliest
and commercially most successful literary, theatrical and finally cinematic
treatment in James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories
Tales of the South Pacific and its subsequent adaptation into a musical play by

Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. All three versions
have earned themselves acclaim for different reasons,41 but together, the
stories, play and film must be regarded as perhaps the most important Amer-
ican treatment of the Pacific war in fictional media of the 1940s and 1950s.
And by extension, this ensemble of media texts must be regarded as one of
the seminal contributions to the history of Western representations of the

Pacific, alongside Melville’s Typee, some of Stevenson’s tales, Loti’s Le mariage
de Loti, Somerset Maugham’s The Trembling of a Leaf and Murnau’s Tabu.
Leaving aside questions of literary, theatrical or cinematic complexity and
‘value’, the sheer popular impact of all three versions as mass-media products
guaranteed the work’s importance as a defining moment in Western percep-
tions about the Pacific. Among other things, it is still ranked among the
longest running shows in Broadway history, attended by over 3.5 million
people in New York alone, and by more than that number on its extended
national tours. It was also one of the first musicals to be released as an LP, a
new long-playing medium that enabled consumers to have all the songs on
one disc. The name ‘South Pacific’ was even ‘licensed for dolls, cosmetics,
dresses, lingerie’.42
The Pacific theatre of war has of course been the subject of a seemingly
interminable number of American war films, varying a fairly narrow thematic
spectrum of US heroism, sacrifice, hardship, failure and victory, while pitted
against an implacable Japanese foe. While the general historical background
is the same, South Pacific must be differentiated from the generic war drama.
Especially when one brings the whole collection of Michener’s stories into
focus, and not just the three adapted for the musical, then it becomes clear
that, while its focus is on US American troops, South Pacific is on another
level concerned with the interaction between the different cultures gathered
together on the islands: the Americans, Tonkinese, Chinese, Melanesians,
Polynesians, French planters, and other nationalities besides. On a second
level, this ethnic propinquity can be read as a further variation of the same
displacement strategy that we have analysed in the previous two plays. It
can be argued that American racial issues, already virulent by the 1950s, are
played out in a kind of Never-Never Land of the South Seas, which was by this
time well and truly over-determined by Hollywood films and other products
of popular culture. This setting provides, as it were, a kind of protective
cocoon behind which an engagement with the real problems in the United
States could be neatly avoided. A variation on the displacement thesis has
been put forward by Bruce McConachie in his analysis of all the Rodgers and
Hammerstein ‘Oriental’ musicals as he terms them (besides South Pacific, The
King and I and The Flower Drum Song). McConachie places these works in
the context of the United States’ increasing involvement in South East Asia
and more exactly Vietnam, as Bloody Mary and her daughter Liat hail from
Tonkin, on the border of Vietnam and South China.43

The drawback, however, of reading the musical play exclusively as an

essay in American racial politics, although it certainly is this, is to over-
look the multifaceted exploration of cross-cultural interaction beyond the
binary of Polynesian women and Euro-American men. In my reading I
shall attempt instead to resituate South Pacific in its very complex cultural
setting. Rather than focusing primarily on the narrative of racial conflict,

I want to inspect some of the other cultural signs that may appear at first
glance to be tangential. The analysis will alternate mainly between the film
version, Michener’s stories, on which the film seems to have drawn, and
the musical play. All three versions – the stories, the musical play and
then the film – reveal different emphases. My thesis is that South Pacific
engages with the question of Pacific alterity in ways unbeknown to itself. It
oscillates between secure footing in an empirical world of historical fact –
revealing an almost ethnographic discernment in regard to cultural differ-
ence – and the deliberate blurring of this difference so that Polynesian,
Melanesian and Asian ethnicities kaleidoscope in ever-changing images of
otherness.44 In addition to the many signs of ethnic alterity in which the
film abounds, we also have undertones or indeed ‘overtones’ of homoeroti-
cism, as Victor Burgin has rightly pointed out. In addition then to the very
obvious orientalist narrative of the work, there is a kind of overdetermining
excess of alterity that threatens to destabilize the dominant line of a fairly
predictable essay on racial prejudice and its resolution in the apotheosis of
human love.
The authors of South Pacific, the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein the Second
and the stage director, Joshua Logan, interwove three stories from Michener’s
collection: ‘The Heroine’, ‘Fo’ Dolla’ and ‘A Boar’s Tooth’. From these three
stories the authors gained not just their two main plots, but also an assort-
ment of ‘characters’. ‘The Heroine’ covers the relationship between the
French planter Emile de Beque and the nurse Nellie Forbush from Little Rock,
Arkansas, a place-name that today has other resonances, but then no doubt
stood for small town bible-belt bigotry. ‘Fo’ Dolla’, arguably the best story in
the collection and perhaps some of the best writing Michener ever produced,
relates the attempts of the Tonkinese trader, Bloody Mary, to embroil the
Marine Lt Cable in a relationship with her daughter Liat, who is living on
the island Bali Ha’i, along with all other women of the main island where
the US forces are stationed. ‘A Boar’s Tooth’ focuses on the Seabee trader
Luther Billis and his attempt to attend the native ceremony of the same
name, which takes place on an off-limits island, infamous for its inhabitants
recently having renounced cannibalism.
Before studying more closely a number of scenes, it is essential to look
briefly at Michener and his famous collection of stories. As an intelligence
officer during World War II, Michener served in the Pacific, and his duties
evidently took him to most if not all of the islands on which US troops
were stationed. Whatever one may think of Michener as a writer, and his

reputation has seemed to shrink in inverse proportion to the length of his

books, the Tales of the South Pacific are not merely a populist addition to the
trivial literature on the region, although they doubtlessly owe much to this
tradition.45
The stories themselves counterbalance the accreted myths and stereotypes
of the South Seas with the material facts of life on the islands during wartime.

Michener also shows that his characters, in the main US servicemen and
women, are themselves both seduced and seriously disturbed by this tradi-
tion. The islands are depicted both in terms of the lived material world of
conflicting cultural interests and agendas but also as tourist sites where the
local people exploit the Western demand for curios and souvenirs of a savage
Pacific. To borrow Jonathan Culler’s term for the semiotics of tourism: in
Michener’s stories the Pacific is already a sign of itself; the characters are in
search of the Pacificness of their place of abode and the local traders are only
too happy to reinforce this notion.46
The local traders are in the main of Tonkinese extraction, as the Viet-
namese indentured labourers were then known. They are represented by two
antonymical characters. The repulsive, foul-mouthed Bloody Mary is both
literally foul-mouthed in that she is forever chewing betel nut, and meta-
phorically in that the little English she knows consists of obscenities acquired
from the US Marines. Her daughter Liat, on the other hand, embodies every
male orientalist fantasy: she is young, slim, attractive, a virgin and very
willing. If Bloody Mary represents the capitalist mercantile side of Asia, then
her daughter stands for its seductive allures, both of which are seriously
unsettling for an upper-class American from the eastern states.
Bloody Mary is the Asian character who occupies centre stage in both
story and musical. She is independent, resilient, but also involved in
negotiating a dangerous performance between ingratiation and militant
autonomy. In the terms of postcolonial theory, she is a product of colonial
mimicry, having been instructed by the Marines to repeat ‘their roughest
language’:
Mary would grin, not understanding a word of what they were saying,
but after they came to see her for many days in a row the old miracle of
the subdued races took place again. The yellow woman learned dozens of
white words but the white man learned not one yellow word. When she
had mastered their vilest obscenities, they made her an honorary Marine,
emblem and all.47
In the stage version, this translates into a slightly less obscene exchange but
the mimicry is retained:
Marine: Tell ‘em good Mary!

Mary: What is good?

Marine: Tell him he’s a stingy bastard!

Mary: (Delighted at the sound of these new words) Stingy bastard! (She turns
back to the marine for approval) That good?
Marine: That’s great Mary. You’re learning fast. (283)48
She mimics the Western other parrot fashion, but this mimicry can also be

unsettling, as Homi Bhabha has instructed us.49
Bloody Mary’s mimicry is also a spectacle in itself. Her daily perform-
ances of buying, selling and hurling obscenities at the US servicemen are
themselves worthy of viewing and recounting:
Then Mary would scream at him, thrusting her nose into his face, ‘Bullshit,
brother!’ She wasn’t quite sure what the words meant, but from the way
new men would jump back in astonishment as if they had been hit with
a board, she knew it was effective. And so she used it for effect, and more
men would come back next week and say, ‘Four bucks for that? Not on
your life!’ just to hear the weathered old Tonk scream out some phrase
they could report to the fellows in the saloon back home, ‘and then, by
God maybe those guys would know us guys was really seein’ somethin’
out here!’50
Mary’s use of language is performative rather than semantic. She knows

the effect of words, not their meaning. And, Michener suggests, for most
servicemen their only direct experience of South Seas enchantment worthy
of recounting is the spectacle of a Tonkinese woman hurling abuse at them.
In such passages it becomes clear that Michener is not just a peddler in
outworn South Seas fantasies but a critical observer of the perceptual confu-
sion such traditions can cause.
Bloody Mary functions also as a kind of cultural mediator, brokering not
just marriages between her daughter and European suitors (first Cable, then
the French planter Jacques Benoit), but also between the Americans and the
indigenous population, who scarcely feature at all in either the stories or the
film. Her mediator function is illustrated by two main activities: she moves
between the main island and Bali Ha’i, and she runs a kiosk selling island
curios.
In the film version, the audience is introduced to the South Pacific island
setting by a wide shot from the perspective of Lieutenant Cable from his
approaching aeroplane. The next shot is a close-up of Bloody Mary with one
of her curios, a shrunken head. By intercutting the vision of a South Seas
paradise from above, with the visage of Bloody Mary clutching a shrunken
head, the director Joshua Logan picks up on Michener’s thesis that the Asian
Mary has in no small way corrupted the pristine nature of what was perhaps
once an unspoilt Pacific paradise. Bloody Mary’s kiosk, run on the best
capitalist principles of profit maximization, is for most American servicemen

in the film and play the meeting ground with ‘local culture’. Besides the
shrunken heads, which move Luther Billis to part with $100, Mary has a
most eclectic assortment of objects with which to ‘represent the Pacific’:
‘her merchandize, laid out in front, comprises shells, native hats, local dress
material, outrigger canoes and hookahs. Several grass skirts are hanging up
around the kiosk.’ Her stage costume is metonymic of the cultural mixing

fostered by colonialism and exacerbated by the war: ‘She is small, yellow,
with Oriental eyes. She wears black sateen trousers, and a white blouse over
which is an old Marine’s tunic. On her head is a peach-basket hat, around
her neck is a GI identification chain from which hangs a silver Marine
emblem’ (282).
The grass-skirts, as we learn, are being mass-produced to meet Amer-
ican demand. The story and play outline in considerable detail how this
new tourist economy has begun to destabilize the older colonialist planter
economy. Because the production and sale of grass-skirts is much more
lucrative, the indentured Tonkinese workers have stopped working for their
colonial masters. They also use the anti-malaria atabrine pills distributed by
the military as a colouring agent for the skirts. Mary’s kiosk contains signs
of Asian culture as well: the peach-basket hat and of course the hookah, the
object most readily associated with pejorative overtones of ‘Oriental’ corrup-
tion. In fact, local indigenous culture has been debased and reduced to a few
fake grass-skirts and toy canoes.51
Real indigenous culture can only be viewed on Bali Ha’i, the site of the
barbarous Boar’s Tooth Ceremony and the repository of most of the island’s
women of all ethnic backgrounds. The play and film conflate what in the
stories are kept apart. In Michener’s story, the ceremony takes place on the
neighbouring island of Vanicoro, which is clearly figured in the discourse of
the Pacific as purgatory: ‘It was a large and brooding island, miasmic with
malaria, old fetishes, sickness and deep shadows Only the bravest dared
live on Vanicoro, and they were the last to give up cannibalism.’52 Bali Ha’i
on the other hand, is the Pacific as Paradise and the embodiment of all
Western fantasies: it is ‘a jewel of the vast ocean and it seemed to curve
itself like a woman’.53 This is only fitting for the repository of all the local
women: ‘The French, with Gallic foresight and knowledge in these things,
had housed on this haven of the seas all young women from the islands.
Every girl, no matter how ugly or what her color, who might normally be
raped by Americans was hidden on Bali-ha’i.’54
For reasons of dramatic economy, the musical merges the two islands into
one great conglomerate of South Seas spectacle. The arrival at Bali Ha’i is
perhaps the most intense theatrical moment in both story and film in the
sense that it emphasizes the act of seeing. The stage version renders the
scene much less spectacularly. Groups of ‘French girls and native girls’ sing
‘Bali Ha’i’ in front of a tapa-cloth curtain before Cable and Billis enter (320).
In the film it is clear that the arriving Americans are a spectacle for the

inhabitants on the island, whereas the inhabitants are a spectacle for the
Americans who stand in for the gaze of the cinema viewers. This moment of
first encounter on the beach is, of course, a stock situation in the history of
the theatricalization of the Pacific, where two cultures meet one another, if
not for the first time, at least, it seems, always in a situation of heightened
expectation. Michener’s story emphasizes the theatricality of the situation

even more so by two devices. First, he intensifies the erotic, voyeuristic
moment by focusing on Cable’s unashamed fascination with the spectacle
of a cultural smorgasbord of pubescent girls:
Then came the girls! There were native girls with breasts, and red sarongs
about their hips. There were inquisitive Chinese girls who were pulled
back by equally inquisitive Chinese mothers. Tonkinese girls, as yet
unmarried, stood close to their distinctive white and red shacks. And in
the distance, properly aloof, a few French girls demonstrated their inher-
ited superiority by looking with disdain upon the entire proceedings. They
wore white dresses, and you could not discern whether their breasts were
conical or flabby.55
As it happens, Cable is not much interested in the French girls and their
breasts, surrounded as he is by 30 native girls wearing only sarongs and
offering him a selection of native fruit. At one point even the sarong slips
awry and Lt Cable is ‘unable or unwilling to look away. Like the jungle,
like the fruits of the jungle, adolescent girls seemed to abound in unbeliev-
able profusion.’56 Michener intensifies the theatricality of the scene even
more by adding a further observer or spectator perspective. While Cable is
looking at topless pubescent girls whose sarongs occasionally fall ‘awry’, this
scene is being observed by the Melanesians on the neighbouring island of
Vanicoro: ‘And from the hills of Vanicoro the watchers looked at the boat
and then at one another! It could not be believed that for a few pineapples,
for some papayas, and such little papayas, one could get cloth!’57 Evidently,
the same spectacle is being read from two different perceptual and economic
perspectives.
The scene is also noteworthy for the importance attached to cultural
differentiation: Polynesians, Melanesian, Chinese and Europeans – all are
described and valorized. While the ‘brown’ Polynesians are held up as being
almost acceptable, the Melanesians occupy their traditional place in the
Pacific’s discursive history: the men are semi-savage cannibals – see the Boar’s
Tooth dance, whereas the women seem to epitomize ugliness, so much so
that the soldiers send home pictures to placate their girlfriends and fiancées
that they are not being tempted. One soldier produces ‘a horrendous picture
of a Melanesian woman with frizzled hair, sagging breasts, and buttocks like
a Colorado mesa. She was wearing a frond of palm leaves. “Look, Cable!”
one officer cried “The real South Seas!”.’58

Meanwhile Lt Cable has experienced the erotic side of the ‘real South Seas’
through his affair with Liat, Bloody Mary’s daughter. The stage play renders
this act of cross-cultural coitus with all the climatic and allusive means that
1940s American theatre had at its disposal:
(The music builds in a rapturous upsurge. CABLE gathers LIAT in his arms.

She reaches her small arms up to his neck. He lifts her off her feet. The lights
fade slowly as his hand slides her blouse up her back toward her shoulders. The
lights dim to complete darkness. Light projections of large and lovely Oriental
blossoms are thrown against the drop. Native couples stroll across the stage only
dimly seen. The music mounts ecstatically, then diminishes.) (323)
The musical orgasm is at least as old as Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Jo

Mielziner’s scenographic device of ‘oriental blossoms’ on the gauze drop
paired with dimly lit native couples utilizes a metaphorical montage more
familiar from Eisenstein’s cinema than from the stage. In moments like
these there appear to be no obstacles to inter-racial liaisons. Thanks to the
discursive history of orientalism and its countless narratives of relation-
ships between Western men and Asian women, from Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine
to Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, which never speak of a basic erotic incom-
patibility between European men and Asian women, but certainly of the
impossibility of any kind of equal relationship, there is no real problem in
squaring up the economy of desire of the characters with those of the audi-
ence. In the Cable–Liat relationship, Michener, like Tully, follows a basic
Madame Butterfly scenario with the significant difference that the conflict is
resolved over his and not her dead body.
The situation is somewhat more complicated as soon as the American
characters begin to calculate the costs of erotic desire in the currency of long-
term cultural capital. Bloody Mary’s allusion to the ‘special good babies’ that
her daughter will produce with Cable makes the latter ‘deeply disturbed’
and ‘tortured’ (339). The same fear and loathing of miscegenation forces
Cable into an alliance with Nellie Forbush who feels incapable of marrying
the French planter Emile because of the latter’s mixed-blood children by a
Polynesian mother. His musical contribution to the nature/nurture debate,
the song ‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’, was certainly understood in
the United States where the musical ran into trouble and was even banned
in some Southern states.59 The two situations are of course not strictly
analogous. Cable’s situation would lead potentially to – from a racist point of
view – genuine miscegenation, whereas Nellie must only become a surrogate
mother to children of a previous interracial marriage. Her own will be racially
pure. Whatever the outcome, the two love stories demonstrate that the
Pacific has become a culturally hybrid place. The conjunction of European,
Asian, Polynesian and Melanesian cultures in the South Pacific point forward
to increasing complex geopolitical and cultural equations in the post-war
period.

This cultural hybridity is echoed on another level in the play, but not
in the stories. The theatricality that we have been tracing throughout this
book resurfaces in the musical version with a vengeance. Semiotically this
hybridity is located in the figure of the business-minded Seabee Luther Billis.
Dramatically, he is responsible for the comic business the musical genre
demands. In terms of our performance genealogy he can be seen as a nodal

point for the complete commodification of South Pacific signs. At the same
time he stands in an ambivalent relationship to the signs of Asian and
indigenous alterity. He is evidently fascinated by something other than just
pecuniary motives. And he justifies his urge to visit Bali Ha’i with: ‘It is
boar’s teeth and women!’ (288). Spatially and visually, Billis is in fact more
closely aligned with Bloody Mary than with the other American characters.
His laundry and her kiosk occupy the same stage space. Both are involved
in the same trade in grass-skirts and curios. Bloody Mary’s hybrid costume
of Asian and US Marine articles finds an echo in Billiss’s stage costume in
the Thanksgiving show in Act 2.
The Thanksgiving troop entertainment provides a theatrical version of the
South Seas tourist trade prosecuted with such vigour by Billis and Bloody
Mary. Strictly speaking, the popular vision of the South Pacific with its grass-
skirt clad native women is represented only by a carnivalesque parody. The
only ‘South Sea sirens’ we see are in a rough drag act by ‘Lutheria’ Billis and
navy nurses clad in fish nets and parachute cloth. The stage directions make
explicit the deliberate travesty:
(Now BILLIS enters, dressed as a South Sea siren in a straw-colored wig, long
lashes fantastically painted on his eyelids, lips painted in bright carmine, two
coconut shells on his chest to simulate ‘femininity’ and a battleship tattooed on
his bare midriff. The girls are dressed in home-made costumes representing
island natives. The materials are fish-net parachute cloth, large tropical leaves
and flowers – anything they could find and sew together.) (342–3)
Lothar Billis’s coconut bra can of course be read in a number of ways: as a

sign of a concealed homoerotic undertone in the work, made more explicit
in the bare-chested dance routines of the Seabees; or as a reference to the
pantomime dame tradition. Whatever the reading, the sign will reappear in
the final chapter (see Chapter 8) when it is reappropriated in the night club
acts of Polynesian transvestites who are more than familiar with the visual
and musical vocabulary of Western representations of the South Seas.
∗ ∗ ∗
The exigencies of makeshift amateur theatricals provide only a partial

explanation for such ramshackle representation of Pacific culture. This bric-
olage approach to the Pacific is emblematic of wider cultural commodifica-
tion processes. The reduction of the Pacific area to a hotch-potch of clichés

and curios was, it seems, complete by the end of World War II. It reached its
‘apotheosis’ in 1950s America with a fad for Polynesian kitsch that decorated
bars, restaurants and motels from California to New England. The number of
establishments labelled Tiki, Hula Hut and Bali Ha’i increased exponentially,
only to disappear by the late 1960s.60
As the Pacific as a space of imaginative geography slowly sank under

the burden of sheer commercial exploitation in the late 1950s and early
1960s, and disappeared from stage and screen in the United States and
Europe, it re-emerged shortly afterwards in situ so to speak. New forms of
tourist performance were developed in Hawai‘i and elsewhere. But more
importantly, the indigenous people in the Pacific, at home or in the diaspora,
began to explore the possibilities of theatrical performance to prosecute a
wide range of artistic, political and cultural agendas. The next two chapters
will explore this significant shift in locale and strategies.

7
‘As You Always Imagined It’: The
Pacific as Tourist Spectacle

As we saw in the last chapter, Bloody Mary’s trade in yellow grass-skirts,
shrunken heads and model canoes documented that the South Pacific had
well and truly become a tourist space. Her US servicemen customers were
evidently more than eager to document their Pacific experience (which for
many would end in death or wounding) in terms of authentic native curios.
By this time, the Pacific had begun to trade on its discursive history. It had
become a sign of itself, which is a prerequisite of the tourist experience. For a
place or culture to attain this state of virtual existence, whereby the phoney
and contrived version of cultural experience is perceived as more authentic
than the actual state, a sustained process of verbal, visual and very often
performative representation must have occurred. The preceding chapters
have engaged in different ways with this historical process. The redefini-
tion of hula and haka in the nineteenth century (Chapter 4) created two
performance forms that, in their versions at least, became metonymic repres-
entations of their respective indigenous cultures. The popular ethnographic
spectacles of late nineteenth-century Europe (Chapter 5) could be considered
as armchair-tourist performances. The popularization of Hawaiian music
and dance in the wake of Richard Walton Tully’s play The Bird of Paradise
(Chapter 6) had an important influence on the growing tourist trade to
Hawai‘i.
Those islands on the main steamer routes, such as Samoa or Tahiti, had
a small but active tourist trade by the late nineteenth century. An integral
part of the tourist experience by this period was indigenous performance
of various kinds. As we shall examine in the present chapter, performance
is an integral part of tourism that has developed into a genre utilizing a
specific set of theatrical techniques. Touristic performances highlight in
particular the paradoxical relationship between theatricality and authenti-
city in cross-cultural performances, the central theoretical concern of this
book. As we have encountered in many examples beginning with the first
theatrical representations of the Pacific on the European stage in the 1780s,
the supposed antonyms theatricality and authenticity are in fact folded into
174

‘As You Always Imagined It’: The Pacific as Tourist Spectacle 175
one another in a close relationship of mutual interdependence. This paradox-

ical affiliation is nowhere more apparent than in the largest tourist complex
in the Pacific designed especially to represent Polynesian cultures, the Poly-
nesian Cultural Center (PCC) on Oahu, Hawai‘i, funded and managed by
the Mormon Church. As we shall see, the PCC is predicated on the idea of
presenting to an international tourist public Polynesian culture as ‘it used

to be’, in which notions such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’ are writ large.
Yet the performance of authenticity is an undertaking with an oxymoronic
resonance and the performers at the Center exploit to the full the subversive
potential provided by a remit requiring them to perform a way of life that
has long since disappeared. The performances call to mind ‘first contact’
situations, as most of the visitors have probably never seen a real Polynesian
in the flesh before. They are also intrinsically mediated because the theatrical
presentation makes direct appeals to the history of Western conceptions of
the Pacific.
As visitors to Hawai‘i’s famous Polynesian Cultural Center disembark from
their buses, they find themselves standing in front of a huge, grass-roofed
house nestled in lush tropical growth. Before it stands a large carving of
some kind of warrior god that glares at the guests as they enter. As most
of the visitors have come directly from the high-rise congestion of Waikiki
they may feel for a moment they have moved back in time, that the promise
of the Center’s brochure, ‘The islands as you always hoped they would be’,
has in fact been fulfilled.1 Should they chance to glance a little to the right,
however, they will catch a glimpse of a MacDonald’s restaurant on the far
side of the car park. This initial visual impression, which conflates the prim-
itive with the commercial, represents the first of what will be a whole series
of contrasting images. The first stop on the usually nine-hour encounter with
seven Polynesian cultures is the Samoan village. Here a Samoan chief treats
tourists to an extended stand-up comic routine, demonstrating, among other
things, traditional coconut-husking techniques, while the tourist audience
is required to sing ‘Jingle Bells’ in their various languages. By this point it
should have become clear to even the most culturally disinterested visitor
that the promise of ‘authentic’ material culture highlighted in the publicity
material is a negotiable term. This apparent contradiction will in fact become
clearer at every turn as the tourists make their way through the land- and
mindscape of the 42-acre complex.
What tourists witness at the PCC is a network of apparent conceptual
contradictions or paradoxes woven into a seamless whole of commercially
successful tourist entertainment. These contradictions can be best encapsu-
lated in the oxymoron ‘staged authenticity’, coined by Dean MacCannell
to define one of the central paradoxes of the tourist gaze.2 The purpose
of this chapter is to elucidate a set of issues revolving around the ques-
tion of establishing and negotiating authenticity in tourist performances.
The central tension to be explored is that between the notion of a fixed

and immutable authenticity and that of performance, which, by definition,

creates alteration through repetition. Performance is understood here as a
potentially subversive process by virtue of its ineluctable slippage between
script and realization, between perception and object. On the basis of two
particular performances at the Center which will be analysed in detail, I
shall try to expose a deeper contradiction in the notions of authenticity

and authentification as it pertains to material culture and its impossibility in
the realm of performance culture, even though performance procedures are
steadily dominating the whole structure of the complex. It will be argued
that two of these performances, from Samoa and Tonga respectively, are
engaged in a playful deconstruction of the tourist gaze with its expectation
of authenticity in respect to Polynesian culture. It will be argued that the
deconstructive performances in the Samoan and Tongan villages manipulate
disparate culturally coded spectator positions. The different activities and
performances demonstrate numerous ways in which discourses of authen-
ticity and staging continuously merge and refine themselves. This decon-
struction employs a variation of what has been called colonial mimicry in
postcolonial theory. It is a variation because the mimicry involved is in
most cases not directed at the tourists themselves, but rather at the tourists’
tacit expectations of Polynesian culture. Due to the dissonance between the
expectations and projections, authenticity must be examined from a double
perspective, so as to grasp the dynamics at work in the tourist gaze. At stake
is not only the meaning of the performances or cultural artefacts on display,
but also the various spectator positions of the tourists which, as we shall see,
are remarkably susceptible to reversal and manipulation.
Amongst the theatrical genres, tourist performances have possibly the
worst reputation because they seem to embody various negative features:
inauthenticity, lack of aesthetic innovation, and a symbolic collusion with
Western imperialism in the Third and Fourth Worlds. While anthropologists
have concerned themselves occasionally with tourist performances within
the framework of tourism and cultural change in their traditional fields of
inquiry, theatre studies have until recently ignored the whole phenomenon.3
Richard Schechner was perhaps one of the first to call for a concern with
‘theatre for tourists’ within the framework of performance theory.4 From
a disciplinary perspective it is necessary to create a critical awareness of
tourist performances as a field of inquiry and to demonstrate ways in which
techniques of performance analysis and postcolonial theory can be prof-
itably employed in reading what is clearly one of the major performance
phenomena of our time. It shall be argued that despite the obvious commodi-
fication processes at work in tourist performances they also contain the
potential for considerable performative agency on the part of the indigenous
performers. In this chapter we shall be tracing the move, already evident in
Chapter 5, from strategies for purely Western representations of the Pacific to
self-representation, albeit under the aegis of a commercial tourist operation.

The Polynesian Cultural Center and tourist performance
The Polynesian Cultural Center, situated on the north-eastern coast of Oahu,

the main island of Hawai‘i, offers a spectacular example of the theatricaliza-
tion of Polynesian culture. Founded in 1963 under the aegis of the Mormon
Church, this ‘cultural theme park’ (the PCC’s self-description) houses seven

Polynesian villages. The Polynesian cultures represented (Hawai‘i, Tahiti,
Marquesas, Samoa, Tonga, Maori, and Fiji) are staged in various ways for the
tourist gaze. The ‘actors’ are in the main students of the adjacent Brigham
Young University, who assume various theatrical tasks as they perform their
own cultures in a putatively ‘traditional’ form, as a means of paying their
way through college.5
Performances of different kinds shape the visitors’ experience from the
very moment of entering the Center to departure in the evening. It is neces-
sary therefore to differentiate between the following strategies of cultural
self-presentation:
• Welcome and performances of the individual villages. These routines vary

greatly between villages. Some rely heavily on comedy and entertain-
ment (Samoa, Tonga), while others assume the air of quasi-ethnographic
seriousness (Hawai‘i).
• ‘Ancient Legends of Polynesia’ is a theatrical presentation of traditional
legends. These dramatized myths with modern musical accompaniment
are performed twice a day on the lagoons.
• The Night Show ‘Horizons’ is a carefully choreographed, opulently
costumed and decorated stage spectacle. It consists of a series of scenes
and numbers involving each of the island groups. Each scene is made up
of songs and dances depicting historical and mythical events. In addi-
tion there are spectacular stage-effects such as a jet-fountain water curtain
and, presumably in unconscious reference to The Bird of Paradise, volcanic
eruptions. Much of the music is pre-recorded and requires the performers
to lip-synch.
Although each of these three levels can be analysed discretely, they can
in fact also be viewed as three interlocking performance complexes, which
build on each other to provide a cumulative effect in the course of a visit.
The whole complex is thus arranged according to precise dramaturgical and
theatrical principles: it is, in the words of the anthropologist Terry Webb,
‘highly structured tourist art’. Webb comments: ‘In the night show, the
unaffected, clever villagers are presented as polished performers, reputedly
superior to any other Polynesian troupe in the world. Simplicity is trans-
formed into excellence.’6
The PCC is ‘a complex work of tourist art’, as Webb argues, demanding
interpretation and exegesis in terms of its aesthetic structures and not just

explication of its organization or commercial function. While compelling,

this hypothesis is a bit too neat, since Webb constructs a teleological reading
based on Mormon doctrine. He tries to fit the different elements of the
Center into a unified artistic and ideological structure pattern held together
by the affiliation to the Mormon Church. Whereas Webb is concerned to
demonstrate how the parts fit together to form an aesthetic whole, my

reading is more concerned with particularities of cultural staging in specific
villages, with their considerable differences in terms of mise en scène and the
differing audience responses they elicit. Furthermore I will demonstrate how
the Samoan and Tongan performances work to subvert whatever aesthetic
‘master-plan’ may or may not be in place.
During its over 40-year history of catering to tourists, the PCC has
developed a wide range of performance genres. The three levels of perform-
ance outlined above correspond to some of the basic forms of entertainment
and edification designed for the tourist gaze. These include:
• Theme parks and living museums

• Hotel entertainment
• Fictionalized real encounters
The PCC terms itself a ‘cultural theme attraction’ and fits broadly into the
first category.7 Theme parks and living museums are certainly the most
widespread examples of recreated and staged realities, which often include
within their programmes a number of performances in the narrower sense,
such as song and dance demonstrations.8 The PCC, especially in the early
period of its operation, stressed its museum function as a preserver of Poly-
nesia’s ‘cultural heritage.’ Cultural villages such as the PCC, also known as
ethnic theme parks, distinguish themselves from living museums in so far
as the workers do not perform roles from the historical past, but supposedly
represent their own cultural identity. Although the Polynesian Cultural
Center is the most famous and longest established example of the ethnic
theme park, this is a fast-growing area and similar undertakings can be found
in many parts of the world, where ‘the performative primitive’ (to use Dean
MacCannell’s term) allows itself to be staged and commercially exploited.9
The PCC provides an increasingly rich offering in performances fitting
the second category, so-called hotel entertainment or ‘port folklore’ as it is
known in the Caribbean. The term is understood here to mean perform-
ances, usually song and dance, but sometimes decontextualized rituals such
as Fijian fire-walking or Brazilian candomblé, designed specifically to enter-
tain the cultural tourist. Such performances do not necessarily have to
take place in a hotel, but very often do, because they must be located in
the touristic space. Hotel performances seldom contain a didactic element.
Mainly because of its entertainment and commercial bias hotel entertain-
ment is associated with the most negative aspects of tourism. It has come

to stand for cultural self-abasement, a form of fast-food culture for quick

consumption, or the performative equivalent of airport art.
The third category, fictionalized real encounters, refers to a growing tend-
ency among tourist operators to provide clients with ‘encounters off the
beaten track’. In Egypt, for example, this would mean an afternoon with
a tribe of Bedouins in the desert; in Papua New Guinea, a visit to a male

ceremonial house (see below); in the Trobriand Islands, a stop off at a village
to witness a ritual dance. The premise behind such encounters – and the
performances that almost invariably accompany them – is that the tourist
is privy to a slice of real ‘primitive’ life which s/he allegedly encounters by
chance. That this ‘slice of life’ is structured and ordered according to a precise
dramaturgy arranged by tour operator and village chief is of course not
immediately evident. If it were, the whole exercise would lose a large degree
of legitimacy. The popularity of such encounters is due in large part to a
form of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, where the expectation of authentic,
non-staged experience overrides any doubts about primitive manipulation.
The theoretical questions regarding this discourse of authenticity shall be
addressed in the fourth section, ‘Framing Authenticity’. The PCC, because
it is framed so clearly as a tourist space, can never lay claims to this kind of
‘encounter’ dramaturgy, although the cultural presentations in the villages,
as we shall see below, do flirt with this idea.
Because of its special location in Hawai‘i, the complex also offers an oppor-
tunity to study a number of converging lines of cultural and performative
vectors, which break open the traditional binary of Western versus Polyne-
sian cultures. Originally one of the fabled South Sea islands, Hawai‘i is now
a part of the United States; its Polynesian inhabitants are both quantitat-
ively and economically very much a minority. A cosmopolitan society, the
largest single ethnic group in Hawai‘i is of Japanese origin. Japanese capital
has a very strong stake in Hawai‘i, particularly in the tourist and financial
sectors; in addition ‘real’ Japanese constitute the single largest group of tour-
ists visiting the island, who in turn constitute a large potential audience at
the PCC. Many of these undercurrents resurface, albeit in subtle ways, in the
transactions enacted between performers and spectators at the Center.
Staging Polynesian culture(s)
This analysis will concentrate on performances from three villages: Samoa,

Tonga and, very briefly, Hawai‘i. Although the PCC originally intended
that tourists would move informally through the villages and mingle with
the ‘inhabitants’, who answer questions about traditional arts and crafts,
including performance forms, this casual movement has evolved into highly
formalized performance situations with (mostly) clearly defined perform-
ative functions and spectatorial frames.

In the Samoan village, tourists are welcomed by a Samoan chief. He

performs on a raised dais, aided by a microphone, before quite a large
audience seated in rows before him. The backdrop is a mixture of natural
scenery (palm trees) and Samoan houses. The only ‘modern’ emblem is the
microphone, a necessary aid for outdoor performances buffeted by the trade
winds. The ‘performer’ is a real Samoan chief, as he hastens to add, and

one of the few full-time professionals at the PCC. The style of presentation
is reminiscent of an American-style stand-up comic routine. This routine is
structured around the demonstration of material culture, including husking
coconuts, making fire with two sticks, and climbing a coconut tree; it also
invites the audience to participate in the drinking of coconut juice. The chief
interlaces these demonstrations with wry humour, which continually links
a pre-modern material culture with modern technology:
We are happy to have you all here. There is so much to do and learn
today. At the Center we have seven different islands. We also have seven
different cultures and seven different languages, so we don’t understand
each other. That’s why we have to speak English. (laughter) Any questions,
talk to me. All of us that work here are from Samoa. The culture of Samoa
is strong because Samoa is still controlled by chiefs. So the chiefs make
the rules and they tell you what to do. Whatever they say, we do it, so
it’s good to be chief. (laughter) People of Samoa are known as the happy
people of Polynesia: ladies and gentlemen we are the happy people. (looks
sad) Please be happy. Are you happy? (audience: Yeah!!) Me, too (looks sad).
Korea, are you happy? (translates the question into Korean) Every time
we cook, we use the ground-oven. When I go back some day, I’m going
to take a microwave oven. Allow me to share with you one of the most
important parts of cooking: making fire. You can make fire by rubbing
two sticks together. While you flick your bic, we rub our sticks. It’s very
simple: it takes about five and a half hours. (demonstrates; applause) Do
you want to see how we put it out? It’s not what you’re thinking. Any
questions about making fire? You can do this anytime you want, because
any wood works. Make sure the wood is dry and the two pieces come from
the same tree. You know the name of this wood? Firewood. (laughter)
Now I’m going to show you how to open a coconut. Get a coconut. Look
for the ripe ones. This one is ripe; you can tell by its color. It turns brown
like me when it’s ripe, which tells me that some of you are not ripe yet.
That’s a joke. (laughter) Husk the coconut using this instrument. We call
it ‘mele’. Please say ‘mele’. (audience responds) Come on everybody: mele!
(audience responds) English: Sharp Stick! (Audience: ‘Sharp stick!’ He says the
word in Korean and Spanish) First kill the coconut. (demonstrates husking) I
was doing that in slow motion for your convenience. On the islands this
is one of the competitive sports: record for the men three seconds; ladies
two days. That’s why we men cook. To crack it you have to hit it between

the eyes. You can use hammers, knives, screwdrivers, dynamite. (cracks
the coconut and pours the juice) This is not the milk, some people call it the
milk. It’s the juice. It’s good to drink – we call it seven-up because there’s
no caffeine – never had it? Never will. (he asks spectators to come up and
sample the juice) You don’t like? Drink it! Drink the whole thing.
(He demonstrates how to remove coconut meat using a sharpened stick. The

audience is requested to sing ‘Jingle Bells’ while he does this) The Koreans are
not singing. Koreans: sing ‘Jingle Bells’! In your language. (they begin to
sing in English) That’s not your language! (sings the first verse in Korean)
Sing faster!
(This is followed by a coconut-tree climbing demonstration performed by a
young Samoan man) Jump to the next tree. Everybody say jump! Don’t
look up, but you can take pictures.10
The Tongan drumming demonstration with audience participation also takes

place on a slightly raised stage with audience members seated opposite. It is
cast in the same comic mode as the Samoan village, although it uses different
means. Three audience members are selected at ‘random’ by a performer and
return some minutes later clad in grass skirts.11 They are subjected to a few
questions – ‘What is your name, where do you come from? etc. – receive
basic instruction in the ‘fundamentals’ of Tongan drumming technique, and
are then required to imitate successively the main drummer and thus make
fools of themselves.
Mimicry and resisting the tourist gaze
Although these performances appear to offer little more than superficial

entertainment, I would like to argue that both are cast in a double mode of
resistance: on the one hand, they practise subtle forms of resistance against
the official PCC philosophy of staged traditionalism because each village
has a certain degree of autonomy in the staging of these presentations (as
opposed to the ‘Ancient Legends of Polynesia’ or the ‘Horizons’ Night Show),
where PCC management is in total control. On the other hand, strategies
of resistance against the tourist gaze itself operate under the guise of comic
routines. To achieve this subversive resistance, both Samoan and Tongan
performances use a reflexive citational mode, which draws upon the expect-
ation of authenticity that the PCC promulgates and that the tourists in the
main deploy. Authenticity in the Polynesian context consists of a combin-
ation of discursive elements constructed over the past 200 years of colonial
and postcolonial contact, and solidified into fixed but intermedially transfer-
able and thus quotable preconceptions. The performative demonstration of
Samoan culture is clearly aimed at this expectation of a pre-contact authentic
traditionalism merged with elements of contemporary culture, whereby the

uninformed spectator would be hard put to distinguish the self-ironic cita-

tion from actual lived practices. Judging by the exterior signs of the perform-
ance itself, Samoan culture is made up of happy people run by chiefs (‘it’s
good to be chief’) where the men are evidently superior to the women. The
standard clothing is lava lava plus palm fronds and fire is made by rubbing
two sticks together. The staple food is the coconut which is obtained by

climbing trees and opened with a sharp stick.
This performance, superficial though it may seem, is interwoven with
various discursive intertexts that are the result of a history of touristic
encounter between Samoans, on the one hand, and Europeans and Euro-
Americans, on the other. Allusion to this history, albeit in an ahistorical
way, provides the form and occasion for a variation on colonial mimicry,
which I will call reverse colonial mimicry. The locus classicus for this crit-
ical term is Frantz Fanon’s psychological analysis of colonial self-hatred.
Here, the process whereby the colonized apes the colonizer, a process of
continual role-playing and the assumption of attitudes, signifies the former’s
self-alienation.12 More recently, Homi Bhabha has drawn attention to the
deep-seated ambivalence (in the psychoanalytical sense of the term) of colo-
nial mimicry. Mimicry is deeply ambivalent, he argues, suggesting as it does
both a display of conformism and self-regulation on the part of the colon-
ized as well as a sign of recalcitrance and potential subversion, because the
imitation is never perfect. From the point of view of the colonizer, there
always exists a more or less manifest gap between the original and the copy.
The native appears immune to total absorption and remains resolutely Other
while in the outward garb of the Self. In this sense mimicry can have a
strong parodic or ironic function, by presenting to the colonizer a distorted
self-image: ‘The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from
mimicry – a difference that is almost nothing but not quite – to menace – a
difference that is almost total but not quite.’13
Performative mimicry of the kind we find at the PCC in the Samoan and
Tongan presentations functions according to a different principle. Instead of
imitating the colonizer and developing forms of subversion by holding up
a distorted image of the European, the Samoans and Tongans appear to be
mimicking European projections of themselves. This kind of parodic irony
resembles the double-voiced trickster discourse that Henry Louis Gates finds
in Black oral and literary expression.14 This ironic use of parody depends on
the performers’ awareness of European and Euro-American projections and
is evident in various subtle and not so subtle allusions. For example, jokes
about the ripeness of the coconut – ‘it will turn brown when it is ripe, like
me, which tells me that some of you are not ripe’ – may well refer specifically
to the European discussion of skin-colour hierarchies and more generally to
what we have termed the theatricalization of Polynesian peoples.
A further variation of colonial mimicry is the coconut-tree climbing
demonstration during the Samoan performance. As we saw in Chapter 5,

such demonstrations were already included in the performance repertoire

of the Samoan troupes visiting Germany just after the turn of the century.
In the PCC performance a man swiftly shinnies up a tall tree; he pauses,
scratches his behind and then calls out: ‘a plane, a plane.’ The chief exhorts
him to jump to the next tree. Several South Seas topoi are being cited here.
The allusions to natives as simians are unmistakable – scratching, ‘jump

to the next tree’, and so on. The comparison of primitive peoples to apes,
particularly in the discourse of the social Darwinism of the late nineteenth
century, is refracted back in these comic moments (whereby performers and
spectators are presumably laughing at two different things). Also the refer-
ences to seeing a plane from the top of a tree provide an ironical spoof of the
familiar Hollywood scene whereby the approach of European ships is first
signalled by natives perched atop coconut trees. The ironical twist of course
is the reference to a plane, the main vehicle of tourist transportation, which
is easily identifiable without the vantage point of a coconut tree.
Although such moments may seem to sail dangerously close to self-
demeaning behaviour, they appear, on closer inspection, to provide
performers with the opportunity to subvert and resist the relentless tourist
gaze. The laughter they engender confirms their awareness of the discourses
Figure 22 Tourist drinking coconut milk while being filmed by Samoan chief at the
Polynesian Cultural Center, Hawai‘i
Source: Collection of the author.

they assume the tourists bring with them. The empowerment is achieved
through a situation of discrepant information distribution with the Samoan
performers knowing more than the spectators.
Audience participation provides the necessary means by which the tourist
gaze can be best exposed to other tourists. It also allows for a greater differen-
tiation among the spectators, particularly along national and or ethnic lines.

The Samoan performance requires, for example, that spectators sample fresh
coconut juice. While this is straightforward enough, in one performance I
recorded, the Samoan chief deftly switched roles by exchanging coconut
for camera. As an Asian tourist drank coconut juice, she was filmed by the
‘primitive’ (Figure 22). The camera, perhaps the most ubiquitous index of
the tourist gaze, was in this moment turned against its owner.
The Samoan show requires other forms of sporadic involvement – vocal-
izations, mimicking foreign words and a sing-along (‘Jingle Bells’ in accom-
paniment to a coconut husking demonstration). The choice of ‘Jingle Bells’
is an interesting as well as amusing one, the reason for which only becomes
clear when the Koreans are asked to sing in their own language. Not only
does the Samoan chief sing some Korean himself, as well as Spanish and
other languages, but the absurd-seeming combination of coconut husking
and a European Christmas song sung in Korean led by a Samoan thematicizes
tourism and global culture in a particularly obvious way.
In the Tongan drumming demonstration audience participation permeates
the whole performance in various ways. It ranges from conventional working
the audience routines – ‘when I come out, I want you to give me a round of
applause’ and practising clapping and rhythms – to the involvement of tour-
ists in the demonstration itself. In the Tongan performance the presentation
is structured around the willingness of tourists to dress up in grass skirts and
take part in the drumming demonstration. The choice of a black and a white
American and a Korean in the performances I recorded on two separate visits
was both visually striking and very funny: the tourists become the spectacle
they had paid to watch. Three tourists in the performances recorded for
this study – two Americans (white and African American) and a Korean –
were selected and clad in grass skirts. The costuming suggests another form
of mimicry in which the colonizer imitates the primitive. It is also a tried
and true convention of hotel entertainment, whose connotations most obvi-
ously include ‘going native’. The drumming begins with the Tongan making
wild grimaces and paralinguistic vocalizations in a self-conscious citation of
ferocity. At one point the Tongan drummer launches into a spate of Tongan
ending with ‘Shoobeedoo’ in a conflation of ‘savage babble’ and American
popular culture burble. The drumming routine itself forces the tourists into a
situation of physical and verbal mimicry, particularly the Korean tourist who
evidently knows little or no English and has to mimic the Tongan drummer.
In the exchange with the Korean the Tongan makes fun of him, establishing
complicity with European and Japanese spectators, yet the show ends in a

drumming climax with the Korean holding his own, thus re-establishing
a harmonious tone which is characteristic of the PCC as a whole, where
conflict and disharmony are not permitted.
These examples make very clear that the tourist gaze at the PCC is not
predicated on a cultural binary of Western versus Polynesian. In economic
and cultural terms, Asian tourists, mainly Japanese and Koreans, are espe-

cially important. The Japanese are the largest single tourist group visiting
Hawai‘i (quite apart from their economic involvement in the islands). It is
not by chance that in both performances recorded and analysed here, the
Korean tourists are the butt of most of the humour. I would argue that this
caters not just to the Western tourists in an orientalist mode but also to the
Japanese whose historical (colonial) relationship to Korea has not been fully
acknowledged.15
In stark contrast to the entertainment-oriented procedures of the Samoans
and Tongans with their sometimes quite complex combination of selective
(dis)information, satire and self-deprecation, the Hawaiian presentation is
low key and entirely didactic in intent. Traditional hula is demonstrated
within the village without a raised stage; the tourists are grouped around
in an informal way. The MC provides information on the use of the nose-
flute, an instrument that has fascinated since the earliest explorers. He also
explains that the dancers and musicians are students from the adjoining
Brigham Young University; they are in a sense demonstrators of culture. We
could argue that we are in the mode of Brechtian gestus rather than the
blurred fictionalizations and role-playing of the Samoans and Tongans.
The different styles of performance from one island group to the next
can be explained partly by differences within the PCC itself and partly
by disparate colonial experiences. The sober demonstrative mode of the
Hawaiians resembles closely the tone of the Maori presentation. Here audi-
ences gather in a Maori meeting-house where they are treated to a display
of Maori performance forms, such as haka, waiata, poi-dancing, familiar to
tourists and New Zealanders alike. While the tone is occasionally light-
hearted, it is not flippant or self-ironic. The contrast between the Samoans
and Tongans on the one hand, and the Hawaiians and Maori on the other
signals an important aspect of cultural differentiation within the mono-
lithic conceptualization of Polynesian culture. Both Maori and Hawaiians are
Fourth World cultures, that is, indigenous cultures submerged in a majority
colonizing culture.16 For both, folkloric demonstrations have had a function
historically different from those of the Samoans or Tongans. In both New
Zealand and Hawai‘i the preservation, and to some degree recreation, of
performance culture towards the end of the nineteenth century was crucial
for cultural survival in the face of heavy assimilative pressures. Both were
involved in the invention and redefinition of performance traditions, which
fulfilled the double function of presenting an image of cultural vitality to
the colonial gaze and finding new functions for performance within a new

cultural situation.17 The cultural forms are therefore carefully guarded and
treasured; presumably they are regarded as too fragile to be subjected to the
rumbustious processes of self-irony and play that the Tongans and Samoans
practice.
Framing authenticity

The different performance procedures examined so far lead into a number
of more general questions involving the relationship between authenticity
and performance in a tourist context. The tensions that have emerged are
closely related to an almost irreconcilable dichotomy between the treatment
of material and performance culture. This dichotomy manifests itself both in
ethnographic discourse and in the philosophy of the PCC, which is founded,
officially at least, on the ‘salvage paradigm’ of ethnography, with its, in James
Clifford’s phrase, ‘desire to rescue “authenticity” out of destructive historical
change’.18 In all of its official material the PCC declares its primary interest to
be the preservation of Polynesian culture. By its own admission the Center is
‘the world’s pre-eminent repository of living Polynesian cultures’, where the
suggestive incongruity between the terms ‘repository’ and ‘living’ appears
to go unnoticed. While the material culture of the seven Polynesian villages
recreated at the PCC appears to be vaguely pre-contact, as do many of the
performances presented, and ethnographic expertise is consulted to ensure
authenticity in both realms,19 the all-pervasive entertainment mode of the
Center acts as a continual counterbalance to the putative museum concept.
The tension implicit in the concept of a living museum can also be formu-
lated as an epistemological contest between the ‘archive and the repertoire’,
as performance theorist and Latin American scholar Diana Taylor has defined
it. According to Taylor’s reading, Western culture privileges the archive as
the repository of enduring materials such as texts, buildings and archae-
ological remains over the ephemerality of the repertoire which represents
embodied practices such as spoken language, dances, songs, rituals and the
like. With its etymological roots in the Greek term arkhe, a public building,
the archive presumes to sustain power and ‘exceed the live’.20 The PCC,
with its reconstructed villages and museum concept, is clearly conceived as
an archive in this sense. Yet its main forms of presentation, performances,
privilege the repertoire, which, as Taylor stresses, require presence and parti-
cipation so that in practice, the dominant experience of Polynesian culture
for the visitors is determined by contact with embodied rather than archival
practices. It could also be argued that the subversive performances of the
Samoan and Tongan villages are predicated on highlighting the impossib-
ility of a purely archival representation of Polynesian cultures. If we also
factor in the discourse of authenticity into the binary of archive and reper-
toire, then we find that it provides a further variation on the underlying
tension between the two means for conserving and transmitting knowledge.

The notion of authenticity implies a fixed point of reference for final veri-
fication, which, in the Western logocentric tradition at least, presupposes
archival knowledge. This contradistinction is ultimately irresolvable because
it stems from the aporia of the tourist gaze which, on the one hand, appears
to demand authenticity and, on the other, works to deauthenticate anything
which comes into its field of vision.

It is something of a truism in theoretical writing about tourism that the
tourist gaze tends especially to blur the epistemological boundaries between
fiction and authenticity. Various theoretical models have concerned them-
selves with elucidating the paradoxical nature of Dean MacCannell’s term
‘staged authenticity’. The tourist gaze, in its search for the unadulterated
as a counter-model to the alienation of modernity, seems to automatically
contaminate the object(s) of the gaze in the very moment of its usually
(mass) perception and reception. A recurrent topos in this theorization is that
the touristic sight/site is by definition self-referential. According to Jonathan
Culler the tourist gaze reads things as signs of themselves. This is due in
part to the ‘density of representations covering our world’.21 The question
of authenticity in this constant state of deferral has been linked historic-
ally to the predicament of modernity and the rise of large-scale tourism.
According to this thesis, varied in different nuances by MacCannell, Culler,
Urry, and Frow,22 the condition of alienation constitutive of modernity (the
mechanization of work, creation of large-scale urban societies and so on,
along with the universal commodification of labour and goods) has bred as
its antithesis the ‘invention of tradition’ and the increasing priority placed
on authenticity in objects, peoples and places apparently located outside the
realm of modernity.
The priority of authenticity at the PCC reveals an unstable set of criteria
and a quite evident inapplicability to performances. The authentification
process is most successful when applied to material culture. Tourists can
witness the making of tapa cloth, sample Hawaiian poi, or walk thorough the
different traditional houses. However, over the decade I have been visiting
the PCC, this aspect appears to be losing its appeal and prominence. Whereas
the brochure issued in 1991 outlined in considerable detail the various forms
of material culture demonstrated in the different villages, recent versions are
dominated entirely by the performances, ranging from Music of the Islands
to IMAX.23 This shift in focus appears to be counteracted by the cover photos
of the brochures themselves. The 1991 brochure, featuring a grimacing
Maori warrior on the cover, is couched in an unequivocally performative
mode, whereas the version from 1996 suggests a focus on material culture. A
recent version featuring a Tahitian dancer shifts back to performance culture
again.24
If the PCC has any way of guaranteeing performance authenticity, it
would be by the use of Polynesian students from Brigham Young University
(BYU). This is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the authenticity

discussion at the PCC. Whereas the main ‘actors’ of the cultural presenta-
tions are in the most cases actually from the islands being ‘explained’, the
back-up members are not necessarily so. The BYU caters not only to Poly-
nesian students but also to Americans and other Mormons, so it is quite
normal for tourists to be poled along the canal by a Korean or a Filipino
or a blond-haired young Mormon from Utah.25 The Marquesas village poses

a particular problem because of the lack of representation of indigenous
Marquesans at the Center and at BYU.26 In their absence, Tahitians or others
play Marquesans. It is also not unusual for there to be a considerable inter-
change between the villages as Andrew Ross notes:
[M]y impression was that the Polynesians who work there were comfort-
ably ambivalent about the overlap between (a) their given performing
identities as Tongans, Samoans, Hawaiians, etc.; (b) the faux identities
that they often take on as performers – Tongans playing the part of
Marquesans, because of the shortage of Marquesan students, Samoans
playing Hawaiians just for the hell of it, and Filipinos playing the role
of Polynesians in the night show, because sometimes any brown body
will do on stage (Maori, a little too haole in appearance and accent, are
something of a problem).27
This flexible and eclectic practice suggests that something close to a ‘generic’
Polynesian underlies the idea of authenticity at the PCC. While this may be
an inappropriate basis for establishing any kind of authenticity for objects,
it is evidently quite practicable for performance. This discrepancy between
the two modes of perception may be explained in terms of the semiotic
difference between the material and performative sign. The performative sign
is understood to embrace both clearly fictionalized forms of presentation
(such as ‘Ancient Legends of Polynesia’) as well as the cultural presentations
that are not clearly framed in a theatrical mode.28
Authenticity in performances for tourists results in especially contradictory
framing procedures because of the potential slippage between sign and
referent, a potential which is fully exploited by the Samoan and Tongan
performers as I have tried to demonstrate. Distinctions between staging and
authenticity, fiction and reality – at the heart of Western aesthetic theory and
theatrical performance – do not usually pose any phenomenological prob-
lems for the analyst, but tourist performances, as the examples examined
suggest, raise basic questions of epistemological framing by continually
disrupting the binary oppositions that habitually define performance.29
The shifting frames of authenticity in touristic performances can be illus-
trated by a further example from the Pacific. Although from Papua New
Guinea rather than from the PCC or another Polynesian site, this example
is especially illuminating because it allows us to extend the investigation of
obviously staged ‘hotel entertainment’ to those fictionalized real encoun-
ters that present themselves initially as spontaneous discoveries. Frederik

Errington and Deborah Gwertz, the two anthropologists present at an initi-

ation ritual among the Chambri people of Papua New Guinea to which
tourists – for a price – were privy, note that when the tourists were told
they could clap and take photographs because the ritual was over, they were
annoyed and consternated:

This assertion of collective male power had lasted about twenty minutes
when one of the hazers said in pidgin: ‘The law is finished now; we will
stand up and the tourists will take pictures.’ Then all four of the hazers
moved behind the initiates and stood in a row, facing the tourists, who
were then instructed: ‘Clap your hands. The rule of Kwolimopan [the
crocodile god] is over; it’s finished now; we have completed it. OK, you
can take pictures of us now. Clap your hands.’ The tour guide informed
the tourists in English that they should applaud and had been invited to
take pictures.
The tourists did applaud, and most took a picture or two – although
with some reluctance. They seemed annoyed and confused at this point.
The hazers had suddenly defined the performance as staged, at least in
part, for tourists rather than for the Chambri themselves and this called
into question its authenticity [my italics].30
Although the initiation ritual was ‘genuine’ in the sense that the Chambri
were doing it for themselves – the initiates went through an efficacious rite –
the presence of the tourists (and two anthropologists) meant that the ritual
attained a certain quality of self-reflexivity: this became quite clear when
onlookers were asked to become spectators by applauding. This not untypical
example from the field of tourist performance helps to refocus my earlier
posed central question about the putative opposition between ‘staging’ and
‘authenticity’. The force of Errington and Gwertz’s argument rests on the
idea that the two concepts are basically self-excluding. The tourists, at least,
appear to agree, but the actions of the Chambri and their attitude to their
own rituals suggests a less dichotomous way of thinking.
In the specific situation of performance, the discourse of authenticity
becomes most prone to deconstruction. As the account of the Chambri
ritual demonstrates, the performance was paradoxical because it confused
two frames. The request for applause drew attention to the position of the
tourists. Various observer positions would be possible here, depending on
the frame: among them are spectator, witness or bystander. In the theatre,
spectatorship is carefully framed by the generic expectations, but the tourists
at the Chambri ritual thought that they were witnesses rather than spec-
tators of the ritual and thus they assumed the fiction of non-presence. The
Chambri, on the other hand, did not allow this fiction. Instead, they broke
the illusion of the fourth wall by inviting the ‘non-present’ tourists to make
their presence felt in an explicitly theatrical way (i.e., in accordance with

the conventional role of the spectator in Western theatre). By thus drawing

attention to the position of the viewer, the Chambri destroyed or at least
seriously destabilized the authenticity of their own ritual for the Western
tourists.
∗ ∗ ∗

The example of the Chambri suggests that any discussion of theatricality and
authenticity in the context of tourist performance must address the spectator
position as much as the actual performance object itself. Highly complex
tourist performances such as those offered by the Polynesian Cultural Center
are complex precisely because they seek to cater to the expectation of
authenticity and to provide commercially successfully tourist entertainment.
Seen in this way, the authenticity ‘content’ of the performance witnessed
is a combination of the spectator position and the performance strategies
employed. The Chambri ritual and the Samoan ‘cultural presentation’ are
comparable to the extent that they construct a tourist gaze just as much as
the tourist gaze constructs them. Both performances assume a knowledge of
the Western (or Asian) other and modify their codes to meet the perceived
patterns of expectation. By so doing, the performances reveal the deeply
entrenched ‘framedness’ of authenticity within the tourist gaze.
The search for and expectation of authenticity at the PCC or in any other
form of tourist performance generates a discourse on the notion itself. As I
have shown, the position of the theatrical spectator is just one of a number of
positions that the viewer might occupy. The shifts between such positions –
from witnesses of a ritual to spectators at a performance or observers of an
ethnographical demonstration – invite constant redefinitions of fiction and
authenticity or of fictionalization and authentication. Because it ironically
quotes discourses on Polynesia in general and Samoans in particular, the
‘staged exprimitivism’ of the Samoan show deconstructs the very notion
of cultural authenticity it purports to be presenting.31 In the same way
‘authentic’ Tongan drumming is refracted back to the tourists via other tour-
ists of varied ethnic composition in Polynesian fancy-dress. Despite strict
management control and a market-driven desire to satisfy the tourist market,
performances involving the self-representation of the ethnic ‘other’ can and
do employ various subtle forms of semiotic deconstruction whereby the
spectatorial patterns of expectation are parodied and ironized. In these cases
‘tourist’ performance can provide the tourist gaze with the deconstruction
it deserves. Tourist performances can therefore provide potential for agency
and self-representation, although many spectators may be quite oblivious to
the dynamics at work. As we shall see in the next and final chapter, a number
of the strategies employed at the PCC have been adapted in the contem-
porary Pacific theatre and performance movement, which is redefining the
notion of Pacific performance.

8
Translocations and Transgressions:
The Postcolonial Pacific

As we saw in the last chapter, the Polynesian Cultural Center is predicated
on a number of practices that are characteristic of cross-cultural theatric-
ality. As constructed in the Center, Pacific cultures are presented primarily
by performative metonymy. A number of putative traditional performances
provide a citable set of recognizable and appealing signs of cultural authen-
ticity. Since the villages stage a prelapsarian Polynesia pre-dating Western
contact the representational function of these metonymies is in actual
fact ahistorical and has little or no connection with contemporary Pacific
cultures. It is only in the subversive performances of the Samoan and Tongan
villages that this discrepancy is made manifest when the touristic expecta-
tions of a mythologized Pacific are refracted back to the spectators. In this
fictional theatre of an authentic Polynesian past the actualities of contem-
porary Pacific cultures are intentionally obscured.
Yet in one respect the PCC is characteristic of contemporary Pacific culture
and its new performance practices. At its Hawai‘i location it displays different
Polynesian cultures outside their islands of origin. This state of transloca-
tion is characteristic of both performance and wider cultural experience
as island cultures relocate into diasporas around the Pacific rim of which
Hawai‘i is one of the main centres. While Hawai‘i remains the undisputed
touristic centre of the Pacific, the theatrical centre from the point of view
of the growing theatre and performing arts movement is New Zealand.
The new Pacific theatre and performance forms emerging in contemporary
New Zealand constitute perhaps the most recent significant development in
New Zealand theatre at the turn of the century. It is a theatre of remem-
bering focused on rediscovering cultural roots in order to fashion new and
sometimes multiple identities. Although connected with the modern world
of interculturalism and globalized patterns of movement and exchange, the
old routes and roots remain present.
While the centre of the movement and the most continuous body of
work appear at the moment to be New Zealand-based, significant produc-
tions and events also take place in Honolulu, Sydney and Pago Pago. This
191

‘lack’ of centre is of course constitutive of diasporic experience and cultural

production. As a movement, Pacific theatre seems to evince all the hallmarks
of postcolonial theatre as it has been defined in recent years.1 In respect
to its formal construction, it is heavily syncretic, combining indigenous
Pacific performance forms and rituals within the framework of European
dramaturgical conventions.2 In his now ‘classic’ work Think of a Garden,

the Samoan-American playwright and television scriptwriter John Kneubuhl
explores memory as the sinew of diasporic identity. The performance Tatau –
Rites of Passage, created by the Christchurch-based group Pacific Under-
ground and the Australian community theatre group Zeal Theatre, explores
the notion of ritual reincorporation – involving actual tattooing on stage –
as a means of transcending dislocation and repairing the ruptures caused
by it. The execution of a tattoo on stage pushes a play like Tatau over
the accepted boundaries of theatre and into the realm of performance art.3
The transgressive nature of such performance is, however, by no means
restricted to a singular work, but can be regarded as a characteristic feature
of contemporary Pacific performance. Two other genres will be addressed
in this chapter. Throughout the Pacific Rim, Polynesian transvestites, best
known by their Samoan name fa’afafine, have become an accepted part of
nightclub entertainment. They first established themselves in centres such
as Auckland or Sydney but are now an important feature of local perform-
ance culture between fashion shows and cabaret, and have even featured
in the international theatre festivals. Cabaret and stand-up comedy are the
genres that frame the now internationally established act Naked Samoans,
formed by Pacific Underground, the same group that created Tatau. In
their cabaret-style they address the immigrant experience directly, while
making use of the traditional Samoan comic tradition fale aitu. The final
example is the New Zealand-based performance group Mau, directed by
Samoan-born dancer and director Lemi Ponifasio. Their success at inter-
national theatre and art festivals (they have featured at both the Venice
Biennale and the Theater der Welt festival in Germany) suggests that because
of the diasporic condition Pacific performance echoes both locally and
globally.
Pacific diasporas
The diasporic experience is of course by no means particular to Pacific

Island migrants. In fact, it has as a term only very recently been applied
to them. Originally coined in the late nineteenth century with reference
to the scattered Jewish populations around the world, the notion has
gradually been extended to other migrant populations that have reconsti-
tuted themselves in metropolitan centres. James Clifford terms the mental
and emotional links between people from the same cultural background,
but living in different parts of the world as ‘transnational networks’.

Translocations and Transgressions: The Postcolonial Pacific 193
He goes on: ‘diasporist discourses reflect the sense of being part of an

ongoing transnational network that includes the homeland, not as some-
thing simply left behind, but as a place of attachment in a contrapuntal
modernity.’4 Clifford’s explanation can be aligned to definitions often
applied to postcolonial Indian authors who live and work in Western
centres far from their country of origin.5 For Pacific Islanders, geograph-

ical distance is and has been a condition determined by the islands
themselves, scattered as they are across thousands of miles. The large-
scale movements of emigrants to metropolitan centres such as Auckland,
Sydney, Honolulu or Los Angeles since the 1960s has led not surprisingly
to the establishment of just such transnational networks. The plays and
productions of Pacific authors and theatre artists in the 1990s are situ-
ated on these networks and respond accordingly by attempting to create
new mental spaces at the interstices of traditional and postmodern ways
of life.
A number of factors suggest that the term ‘Pacific diaspora’ is an apt one
from both a historical and contemporary perspective. The experience of
cultural repression during the period of colonial rule was certainly a common
one, and led in most cases to so-called ‘split’ identities in which European
culture was superimposed on the traditional one. The degree of cultural
and linguistic colonization, however, varied greatly between islands, ranging
from almost total destruction in the case of some Hawaiian islands to the
complete retention of language and most cultural forms in Western Samoa
and Tonga. In this sense Pacific histories run parallel to the wider trajectories
of postcolonial histories and should certainly be considered part of these.
Following the granting of independence to many islands in the 1960s,
the debates on cultural identity characteristic of most postcolonial societies
also emerged in the Pacific. These were initiated by academics, intellectuals
and writers such as the Samoan poet and novelist Albert Wendt and the
Tongan scholar and writer Epeli Hau’ofa. The notion of cultural identity is
of course a notorious one, affected as it is by colonial constructions, repres-
sion, remembrance and forgetting, and by a ‘bad press’ in the context of
poststructuralist debates. Yet, it has emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a new
force against the background of migration and the experience of displacement.
Beyond specific historical and geographical criteria, diasporic identity emerges
as predominantly a mental space shared by like-minded individuals. Pacific
Islanders perceive parallels between the different cultures, despite historical
and geographical distances. For this reason many of the plays produced by
Pacific Island writers and directors return to the same themes.6
The diasporic centres are at present New Zealand and Hawai‘i, at least for
the anglophone Pacific. This dominant position is linked to the large Pacific
Island populations in these centres plus the possibility, in New Zealand
theatre, of modest subsidy for productions. It is well known, in the Pacific
at least, that Auckland is the largest Polynesian city in the world, and

that Honolulu offers a creative mix, not just of Polynesian cultures but of
other ethnic groups as well. As most islands have very fragile economies,
the pressure to travel and work in these centres is very great indeed. In the
case of New Zealand, the major immigrant groups stem from Samoa, Tonga,
the Cook-Islands and Nieue.7 Whereas the Maori in New Zealand began to
articulate themselves through the medium of theatre in the 1970s,8 Pacific

Islanders have only recently begun to write and produce plays. It is most
often the case that those involved are second generation, having being born
and raised in New Zealand.
The play of memory
The spiritual father of Pacific Island theatre is John Kneubuhl, a dram-

atist and scriptwriter of mixed American, Samoan and German descent.
Raised in American Samoa, educated in Hawai‘i and at Yale University where
he studied playwriting under Thornton Wilder, Kneubuhl embarked on a
successful career as a television scriptwriter in the 1950s and 1960s, until
he made a conscious decision in 1968 to return to the Pacific. From then
until his death in 1991, he divided his time between American Samoa and
Hawai‘i.
His last play Think of a Garden (1990) is an extremely complex play both
in formal and thematic terms, intertwining as it does autobiography, polit-
ical history, Samoan mythology and family conflicts. In formal terms, it
bears the imprint of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, as the action
is framed by a narrator and negotiates continual interchanges between the
past and present. The action is set in American Samoa in the late 1920s and
revolves around the experiences of a young boy, David, a child of mixed
American and Samoan descent, on the psychological level and the Mau
rebellion in Western Samoa on the political level. The action is framed by
the commentary of a narrative voice representing both David as an adult
and Kneubuhl himself.
In keeping with his bi-cultural background, David leads as it were a double
life. At home English is spoken, except with the servants. At the same time
he identifies deeply with the indigenous culture of his mother, especially
with the spirit of the ancestors. Despite Christianity, the world of spirits and
the dead, the aitu, play a central role in Samoan life, as Kneubuhl’s narrator
in Think of a Garden points out:
Writer: In the huts, those villagers who owned mirrors covered them with
cloth – especially if there was a moon – for the glitter of glass, especially
moon-struck glass, brought the dead out of their graves, searching for
their human images – us – their children – their grandchildren’s chil-
dren – their otherness which is themselves. In the old days, this
was a time for prayer, appeasing them. In my boyhood, we gathered

in our thatch-roofed Samoan hut across the road, by the seashore, for
vespers.9
Neither his American father nor his well-educated Samoan mother have any
part in these or the official vespers, preferring to remain home and read.
David receives religious instruction from a young Catholic priest, Brother

Patrick, who observes that his charge has begun speaking to the dead,
whereupon he warns the parents:
Patrick: No gravestone – but a little boy’s grave. Davey spoke to it. I was
too far away to hear. Then he would listen, sort of. And, of a sudden, he
would laugh. Then listen. And speak. And listen. And laugh. And so it
went, for almost an hour Then he came home. (a longish pause)
I’m that worried about him. (15)
David’s best friend turns out to be the spirit of a dead boy called Veni. At
the end of the second scene Kneubuhl gives the boy Veni a voice, which
turns out to be that of David’s alter ego, the narrator-writer. By conflating the
spirit of the dead boy with the narrator-writer, Kneubuhl creates a complex
representational form. It is neither a ‘mask’, the usual sign and convention
for spirits (although one without any grounding in Samoan performance
traditions) nor a disembodied voice. It is rather David’s alter ego manifested
as an acoustic figuration who speaks only Samoan in his direct interaction
with the boy:
Writer: He sat on the ground instead of the bench. I sat beside him
David: Veni
Writer: (Always softly) ‘Oa’u. [It is me]
David: ‘E mafai ‘ona tāō? [Can we go?]
Writer: ‘I fea? [Where?]
David: ‘I le mea na ‘ē sau ai. [From where you came.] (50)
Thus Kneubuhl opens a space for different interpretations, which oscillate

between Samoan cultural tradition and a psychologically motivated projec-
tion or dream figure. Another absent figure provides the link between the
private concerns of the characters and their involvement in political events,
the other thread of the play. The political background of Think of a Garden
charts the failure of the Mau movement, a political opposition to the New
Zealand colonial government in Western Samoa that emerged in the 1920s.
The climax of the play is the murder of the Mau leader Tamasese, a cousin of
David’s mother, who is shot down by the New Zealand police on Christmas
Eve 1929. Thus the birthday of Christianity marks the death knell of the
Samoan freedom movement.
The catastrophic events of Christmas Eve produce a turning point not only
on a political but also on a private level, in that they accentuate the differing

identity conflicts. These, however, run across rather than along ethnic lines.
Irreconcilable differences between the parents, submerged until this point,
surface and lead to their separation. The American father devotes himself to
fighting for Samoan rights before the League of Nations, whereas his Samoan
wife wants no involvement with the issue whatsoever. She refuses to channel
her deep personal loss into any kind of political commitment. The identity

conflict of the boy David climaxes in his rejection by the local Samoans,
who pelt him with stones. He reacts to this traumatic experience by painting
himself brown so as to reduce the difference in his visual appearance from
the other Samoan boys. Thereupon, his parents resolve to send him to a
boarding-school in New Zealand. As he leaves, his classmates sing a song that
their parents sing at the graveside, as the narrator relates: ‘For, as the Brothers
had said, my going was a dying away from them and the village’ (95–6).
The divided parental house, a divided childhood and finally a divided
cultural identity are for many Pacific authors a common experience. For
the authorial self, Think of a Garden is a play of and about memory and a
struggle against forgetting. These sentiments are expressed in emotionally
loaded terms by the Samoan house-keeper Pito who bids farewell to the boy
and whose words echo in the memory of the adult. Her words are spoken
in Samoan and retranslated by the author through the filter of his memory.
The play ends with different images of exile and diasporic existence. The
boy David is in exile at his New Zealand boarding-school, while his father
leaves for Europe to fight for the Samoan cause there. Although his mother
remains in her native Samoa, her alienation from her indigenous culture and
identification with the colonial one ultimately create a state of internal exile.
Think of a Garden is emblematic of the diasporic condition of Pacific
theatre, and not just on account of its preoccupation with displacement
and memory. Its conditions of production are equally symptomatic of the
postcolonial Pacific. It was first workshopped in New Zealand in 1991. The
official premiere took place in Pago Pago, American Samoa in 1992, and was
followed by two major productions in New Zealand (1993 in Auckland and
1995 in Wellington10 ). It has since been produced in Honolulu (1995). The
places of production – New Zealand, Samoa and Hawai‘i – retrace the key
coordinates of the Polynesian triangle and represent the main routes and
passages of the Pacific diaspora.
Ritual reincorporation
A different form of cultural recollection was developed in the performance

of Tatau – Rites of Passage. It was created as a co-production between the
New Zealand-based group Pacific Underground and the Australian theatre
company Zeal Theatre in 1996 with highly acclaimed performances in both
countries. Pacific Underground terms itself a ‘Polynesian theatre and music
company’ and was formed in 1992 specializing in ‘telling the stories of

Pacific Islanders who live in Aotearoa’.11 The action is framed by a tattooing

ceremony with which the performance commences and which is carried
out throughout the performance backstage. Tattooing as a rite of passage
is an important aspect of Samoan tradition by which young men are initi-
ated into the village community. The custom of tattooing in Samoa has had
a chequered history, as it has had throughout Polynesia. It was intensely

opposed by the missionaries, who rightly saw in it an integral part of
traditional Polynesian religious culture. Although they never succeeded in
banning it entirely, it was forced to go underground to some extent, moving
from a celebrated public to a more secluded private ritual. The recent revival
of interest in tattooing and its increasing widespread practice is partially a
result of the rediscovery of the tradition among diaspora Samoans in New
Zealand, where tattooing became increasingly important from the 1970s
onwards as a means of cultural reassertion. From the renaissance of the prac-
tice in New Zealand there has been a follow-on effect on mainland Samoa.
The integration of a tattooing ceremony into a theatrical performance
posed a number of crucial and controversial questions. It involved a redefin-
ition of frames in Goffman’s sense of the term. The ritual ceremony, which
is normally performed in a private space, is transported into the public arena
of the theatre, and the theatrical frame, which is determined by its capa-
city to fictionalize all elements within clearly defined spatial parameters, is
destabilized by the presence of a real ceremony. The scenes at the beginning
and the end of the evening are marked by actual events: real pain and non-
actors. Those involved in the ceremony – the tattoo artist and his ‘human
canvas’ – are not actors, although certainly performers in a broader sense.
Whereas Goffman assumes that switching or confusing frames results in a
negative experience for the participants, the performance Tatau produced
precisely the opposite result.12 The tension produced by the authentic cere-
mony has an undeniable effect on the ‘subjunctive’ frame of the theatrical
performance (Figure 23). The wooden tapping of the tattooing instruments
provides an audible ‘drum beat’ throughout the evening so that its rhythm
becomes an important structuring element of the play, even though it has
no direct bearing on the narrative level. In a certain sense, the tattooing
ceremony can be said to ‘authenticate’ the fictional story presented on stage
as it provides a frame of a different kind for the events depicted. In the
original Auckland production, further authenticity was added by the fact
that the ‘body canvas’, Vic Tamati, had provided much of the material for
the fictional story being enacted. He in effect listened to his own story each
night while being tattooed.
The play Tatau tells the story of a family of Samoan immigrants to New
Zealand in a succession of short scenes. It relates closely the actual historical
situation between the 1940s and 1990s: the parents meeting to the rhythms
of swing music of the 1940s, the son Floyd’s discrimination at school (‘Bring
your people up to British standards!’ is the schoolteacher’s slogan), the


Figure 23 Tatau – Rites of Passage, 1996. Tattooing ceremony at the beginning of the
play
Source: Photo: Rob Dilley. By permission of the Zeal Theatre and Pacific Underground, unpublished
Artistic Report, 1996.
mother’s incomprehension when he is expelled from school; his spell in

Borstal. After his release and return home, he is beaten by other family
members who cannot comprehend his failed integration. The family disin-
tegrates: the daughter becomes pregnant and Floyd joins a youth gang who
tattoo themselves as a sign of their group identity and even rob their own
families. Only at this point does the family as a whole realize its disastrous
state of loneliness and alienation so that the process of reintegration can
begin. The play ends as Floyd prepares himself for the pe’a, the tattooing
ritual for Samoan men, the prerequisite for full integration into Samoan
society. The boy’s mother explains to her son the significance of the ritual:
There is a pe and he’s flying around and around and under the wing of
the pe, he’s carrying his children. And when he’s flying in the trees or
crawling on the ground, the children is under the wing so it can protect
the children, because that is what he is doing all the time. He is always
looking after the young one. That is what Daddy is always trying to do to
you, he is always trying to protect you.13
In his study of Polynesian tattooing, the English anthropologist Alfred Gell

provides two explanations for the term pe’a. The first refers to the flying fox

(pe), the second to the expression ‘la ta sau pe’a’, ‘You must get yourself a
tattoo’. The flying fox is the fruit bat found throughout the Pacific. It has
a special place in Samoan mythology as it symbolizes protection – females
envelop their young with their wings – as well as strength. The wings of the
flying fox are therefore incorporated into the upper half of the tattoo, where
they have the same symbolical significance:

The resting flying fox is archetypally a ‘two-skinned’ animal, protecting
itself with a natural cloak from which only its head is seen to emerge.
It seems entirely appropriate, therefore that the flying fox, wrapped in
its wings, should be metaphorically associated with the wrapping of the
body with a tattoo.14
According to Gell, the pe’a is perceived as a process of social completion. The

male is ‘sealed’ as it were and becomes a fully closed entity. Only once a man
has been completed in this way can he take his place in Samoan society.15
Older Samoans in New Zealand criticized the public exhibition of the
tattooing ceremony in the frame of a play. Ony when the production team
secured the participation of the respected tattoo artist Tafuga, Su’a Paolo
Suluape II, could the New Zealand Samoan community accept the public
performance of the ritual. He was a member of an acknowledged tattooing
family in Samoa going back four generations, which has done much to
preserve the tradition. At the end of the evening, the ‘human canvas’, the
tattooed person, addressed the audience:
This pe’a, it grows on me and will be completed tonight. It’s had a

profound effect and I have gone through all sorts of emotions and I
am finding myself again, that’s it. I didn’t know what a Samoan should
be. It has been a real life experience for me. I am not an actor I am
just the canvas. I wanted some changes in my own personal life. More
than that. You’ve not only got to talk the talk, but walk the walk as well.
And it’s a heavy decision for me. But I have walked the other way and
it is time to walk the other way. This pe’a is the other way. Thank you
for coming tonight. (He hobbles off the stage assisted by the tattooer and his
assistants.)
In this speech, the ‘human canvas’ establishes an analogy between himself

and the character of the son in the play, who at the end is ready for initiation
by tattooing. The tattooing on stage occupies only a fraction of the time the
whole process requires. During the two-week performance season the body
is decorated throughout the day, so that by the end of the run the ritual
can be completed. In this way the spectator is witness to a genuine ‘work in
progress’. Although the son is already marked by other tattoos – a result of
his involvement with street gangs and imprisonment – these signs mark him

as a social outsider. The Samoan initiation ritual, on the other hand, has
precisely the opposite function. It enables an individual to be fully socially
integrated. Applied to the situation of Samoan diaspora in New Zealand,
it means that the son is prepared to assume responsibility for himself and
Samoans in New Zealand. It symbolizes the assumption of responsibility for
the comunitas in the diaspora.

The Pacific is burning
Every Friday or Saturday night somewhere in the Pacific Rim cities of Auck-
land, Sydney, Honolulu, but also in the local centres such as Apia in Western
Samoa, Pago Pago in American Samoa, in Nuku‘alofa, capital of the Kingdom
of Tonga, one can encounter a performance of a special kind. Young Poly-
nesian men dressed as glamorous women will swish along the catwalk to
catcalls and cheers of encouragement in what can be regarded as a particu-
larly Polynesian performance form. These ‘beauty pageants’ or in some cases
fashion shows go under names such as Miss Galaxy, Rosa Pasifika, or Style
Pasifika. Alternatively, similar performances can be found in nightclub and
cabaret acts such as Cindy of Samoa or Diva Siva. Wherever they take place,
these performances are transgressive and ironical, as they play outrageously
with popular clichés regarding the Pacific and especially Polynesian women.
Many Polynesian societies support a category of male persons who not
only comport themselves, and frequently dress, like women but identify with
the female sex to the extent that they seek relationships with ‘normal’ men.
This identification with the opposite sex frequently begins before puberty
and such individuals are often labelled as such by their extended family or
village. Local terms include māhū in Tahiti and Hawai‘i, fakaleiti in Tonga
or fa’afafine in Samoa. The latter translate literally as ‘in the fashion of a
woman’.16 Both emic and etic commentators are in agreement that Western
labels such as homosexuality or transvestism cannot encompass the Poly-
nesian categories, although overlap certainly exists. Fa’afafine may indeed
cross-dress but many do not. They have little or no interest in sexual contacts
with other fa’afafine. Sex changes are rare, but this may be due to economics
and opportunity rather than a fundamental opposition to such a permanent
alteration. Some fa’afafine actually relinquish the identity later in life when
they assume important social roles.17 From the earliest contacts Europeans
were fascinated and repulsed by an overt behaviour that seemed to openly
condone ‘sodomy’. As Polynesia was Christianized the behaviour seemed to
disappear from Western discourse (but presumably not from the societies
themselves) only to reappear in the late twentieth century.
The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth in popular
media attention paid to transgendered people in Polynesian societies. From
New Zealand to Germany, France to Australia, documentaries, short stories,

novels, newspaper and magazine articles have emerged, aiming to ‘docu-

ment’ the lives of individuals, or to represent ‘the category’ of Polynesian
transgenderism. The phenomenon is the most recent addition to the history
of Western preoccupations with the Pacific and more specifically Polynesia.
Over the past ten years terms such as fa’afafine and māhū, hitherto known
only to local people and a small number of anthropologists, have begun to

enter popular parlance in Pacific Rim countries and cities with Polynesian
migrant populations. One of the main reasons behind this sudden surge in
‘popularity’ is a steady and growing media presence, particularly of fa’afafine,
the Samoan term. The term ‘media presence’ is understood here in its widest
sense to include newspaper and magazine articles, television documentaries,
theatre and other forms of live performances, as well as an Internet presence.
It is necessary to interrogate this ‘global’ interest in what was until recently
a very local phenomenon. It is necessary to investigate the tension between
structures of representation and ‘locations of agency’ on the part of the
represented ‘objects’. How do transgendered persons use such performances
for their own purposes? How do transgendered persons represent themselves
by performative means in new polysemic contexts which cannot be grasped
just by elucidation of cultural semantics along the axes of ‘traditional’ versus
‘modern’. Indeed, the notion of ‘tradition’, as will be demonstrated, is itself
a highly contested one in the contexts to be discussed here, with trans-
gendered persons and their performative practices occupying a crucial nexus
in current debates. As we shall see, the overt theatricality that these perform-
ances employ follows a clear strategy of performative citationality – to borrow
Judith Butler’s term – whereby the subject of performance is a complex
of clichés and perceived projections that are refracted back in the form of
parodic comic distortion.
The very first contacts between Europeans and Pacific peoples seemed to
have involved moments of gender trouble. Although of doubtful veracity,
Diderot relates in his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville the story of an
officer’s cabin boy who is discovered by the Tahitians to be a young woman:
‘Undiscovered by any of the crew, during the whole long voyage, the Tahi-
tians had divined her sex at the first glance.’18 Diderot’s anecdote is designed
to illustrate the unmediated insight of the Tahitian philosophes nus and to
provide a typical example of rococo titillation in the tradition of his own
erotic novel, Les Bijoux indiscrets. More directly ethnographic and theatrical
is an anecdote related by George Mortimer, an officer of the marines on the
ship Mercury during a stay at Tahiti in 1789:
I cannot help relating a very droll occurrence that happened in

consequence of one of their nocturnal Heivas [i.e., dance performances].
Attracted by the sound of drums, and a great quantity of lights, I went
on shore one night with two of our mates to one of these exhibitions.
We seated ourselves among some of our friends, whom we found there;

when one of the gentlemen who accompanied me on shore took it into

his head to be very much smitten with a dancing girl, as he thought
her; went up to her, made her a present of some beads and other trifles,
and rather interrupted the performance by his attentions; but what was
his surprise when the performance was ended, and after he had been
endeavouring to persuade her to go with him on board our ship which

she assented to, to find this supposed damsel, when stripped of other
theatrical paraphernalia, a smart dapper lad. The Otaheiteans on their
part enjoyed this mistake so much, that they followed us to the beach
with shouts and repeated peals of laughter; and I dare say this event has
served as a fine subject for one of their comedies.19
This is the earliest reference to the special connex between māhū (the Tahi-
tian equivalent of fa’afafine) and performance. From the earliest contacts,
we also find, however, a construction of the Polynesian body in feminine or
androgynous terms on the part of Western travellers. Even Johann Forster,
the German naturalist on Cook’s second voyage whose prose is tersely
scientific, described Tahitian men as ‘beautifully feminine’.20 Recently,
scholars have begun to reread the classic texts of South Seas cultural
encounters such as Melville and Gauguin to rediscover previously overlooked
homoerotic structures of desire.21 Most other references in the early contact
literature are to the sexual implications of the category, to what early visitors
and particularly missionaries saw as overt sodomy.22 It is no doubt due to
the influence of the latter that there are, as Niko Besnier has noted, very
few records of fa’afafine in the post-missionary years. The category does not
really resurface until the post-war period.
In the late 1970s, Polynesian transgenderism began to slowly emerge as a
performative phenomenon. Locally, fa’afafine, it seems, had always been part
of family structures, but their sexual proclivities of course had not endeared
them to the missionaries and then later to local churches. Anthropologists
had been aware of the category but not accorded it much attention. The
first detailed discussion was provided in the early 1950s by Bengt and Marie
Daniellson in their now classic perpetuation of the South Seas myth, Love
in the South Seas.23 In 1978 they co-authored an article in the Pacific Islands
Monthly that explicitly documented the transition from a covert domestic
category to an extroverted performance phenomenon.24 In Tahiti, Tonga
and Samoa the authors observed fa’afafine increasing their public visibility
through beauty pageants but also nightclubs. Until the mid-1990s fa’afafine
were a local phenomenon or present on the fringes of Pacific island diasporas
in larger cities such as Auckland, Sydney or Los Angeles. This situation
changed within a few years as fa’afafine literally gained centre stage in a
number of high profile stage and media productions.25
In 1995 the International New Zealand Arts Festival commissioned Pacific
Underground writers and performers Oscar Kightley and David Fane to write

a play about fa’afafine in collaboration with the Samoan actor and director
Nat Lees, who had attained prominence with his much-lauded production of
John Kneubuhl’s Think of a Garden. The result, A Frigate Bird Sings, premiered
in March 1996 in Wellington during the festival. In 16 scenes, A Frigate Bird
Sings develops the story of Vili ‘Atafa, a Samoan fa’afafine in his mid-thirties
and eldest son of a Samoan family living in Auckland. The play revolves

around familial conflicts with Vili’s younger brother Sione and alcoholic
father Tapili. After the death of their mother, Vili has assumed the role of
family caregiver, and increasingly nurse, for their father who is devastated by
the death of his wife. As his domestic duties increase, Vili becomes increas-
ingly drawn to the bohemian lifestyle of two older fa’afafine, Dejavu and
Shaninqua, who provide orientation in the world of transgendered exist-
ence between sexes and cultures. Vili’s affair with a young straight palagi
(European), Hugh, a rugby friend of his brother Sione, ultimately fails as
Hugh realizes the impossibility of such a liaison.
The play, and more so its acclaimed production by director Nat Lees,
eschews a straight naturalistic ‘analysis’ of a social ‘problem’. Rather it
interweaves wider questions of diasporic existence – the loss of home
and partial integration in the host country – with the specific problems
related to fa’afafine, who are, as it were, subjected to double discrimination.
Samoan tradition, as represented by the father, prevents them from actively
presenting their female orientation to the outside world, while the host
society discriminates against them as Samoans and at best tolerates their
transvestite persona.
The questions of sexuality posed by fa’afafine, however, play only a minor
role compared to the complexities of cultural adjustment and integration
faced by the immigrant family. In this respect, the father is a failure: he is
unable to adjust after the death of his wife, and is obsessed with a growing
nostalgia for the idealized Samoa of his childhood. The ‘straight’ son Sione
works towards integration via rugby. In this oppositional structure, Vili,
the fa’afafine, takes on a number of liminal positions. As eldest son and
ersatz ‘mother’, he is forced into feminine and masculine roles. He must
also negotiate his fa’afafine identity in the context of a society that does not
recognize the category.
The play opens with a somewhat surreal overture in which Vili hallu-
cinates disconnected phrases that will feature prominently throughout the
play. It culminates in a mock version of Samoan genealogical oratory: ‘I am
Vili ‘Atafa, son of Tapili and Siana Atafa, brother of Sione. I am the provider
and the oppressed. I am the caretaker and the teacher. I am the role model
and embarrassment. I am fa’afafine.’26 The paradoxes in the speech – ‘the
provider and the oppressed the role model and embarrassment’ – are
central to the play’s approach, which locates the central character in the very
sexual and cultural ‘inconsistencies’ that contribute to the appeal fa’afafine
continue to exert on Western audiences. In this reading, the fa’afafine seem

to be perfectly postmodern – transient, and impervious to integration into

fixed models of identity. The play’s narrative follows Vili’s journey of cultural
and gender self-fashioning, as s/he comes to terms with the task of being a
fa’afafine in a Western society. This journey to self-consciousness is encap-
sulated in the final scene, when Vili importunes his father again to tell him
and his brother the story of the frigate bird. The father reluctantly accedes:

Dad: The bird is seen as a messenger from the gods. Whenever you saw
the bird, it was like a sign that the cyclones were coming. Everyone
would work to prepare for it. Sure enough the winds would come and
smash the trees down, the rains make a flood and everyone would go
hide, even the frigate bird would hide high up on the cliff. And when
the cyclone go, so did the bird. Some see it as a blessing, some see it as a
curse. Kill it and he’ll never tell anything else ever again. When the
frigate bird sings, the only song you hear is the pain of its loneliness.27
It is clear that the ambivalent mythological figure of the frigate bird functions
as a metaphor for the fa’afafine in the diaspora. The double figure of a
‘blessing and a curse’ is mirrored in Vili’s final acceptance of his own role, not
in unitary terms but in the realization that he lives in a state of doubleness.
The final words of the play are a reprise of his opening speech but with the
addition of female roles: ‘I am Vili ‘Atafa, son and daughter of Tapili and
Siana Atafa, brother and sister of Sione. I am fa’afafine.’28
It is to the play’s credit that it eschews an exclusionary focus on the histri-
onic dimension of the fa’afafine, although this is also present in the figures
of Dejavu and Shaninqua, who represent the extroverted theatricality of the
drag queen. Vili, on the contrary, is primarily a character in a conventional
diasporic drama that characterizes much of the work of Pacific Underground.
Yet this ‘kitchen-sink’ drama is only one layer of what in production became
literally multi-layered in visual terms. Director Nat Lees set out to create
programmatically a ‘Pacific Island’ theatre. This pan-Polynesian concept was
reflected in the set, lighting and costume design. In place of the usual clutter
and appurtenances of box-set domestic drama, the story was enacted in the
round on a circle of sand, which also acted as textured screen for lighting
projections. Apart from a few rocks the actors performed in a totally ‘empty
space’. This spatial concept, however, had only accidental parallels with the
playing areas of Peter Brook’s Paris productions. As Lees explained in an inter-
view, the set (designed by Michael Tuffery) was conceived as a counter-model
to palagi theatre. Its central principle was influenced by Pacific Island cultural
practices, mainly the village meetings and kava ceremonies: ‘here everyone
has input, even those watching; their energy is part of the performance.’29
The translation of Pacific Island cultural practices into theatrical signs was
echoed in the costuming as well. With the exception of the extroverted drag
queen fa’afafine, the all-male cast all wore lava lavas, the skirt-like cloth worn

by both sexes in the islands. This costume transcended straight naturalism,

however, and was not intended as a token of cultural affinities. Semiotically,
the costume created structures of opposition and analogy between sets of
characters. The straight male characters wore just the lava lava and were
otherwise bare-chested, whereas the fa’afafine Vili wore a shirt or blouse as
an index of her female orientation. Particularly interesting in this context

was the palagi character, Hugh, Sione’s rugby friend. He too wore the lava
lava so there was no attempt made to distinguish him visually from the
Samoan characters except for his natural skin colour. As his relationship
with Vili deepened, he assumed the shirt and blouse as well to indicate
a sexual, but not necessarily cultural reorientation. The mise en scène thus
visually absorbed the one European character into the cultural world of the
Samoan family because, as Lees stressed, the production was designed for a
Pacific Island audience. This statement is of course somewhat disingenuous
in the light of the commission for an international arts festival, but the
programmatic position was nevertheless realised aesthetically with consid-
erable consistency.
The flamboyant drag queens Dejavu and Shaninqua reflect popular
conceptions in the Pacific of fa’afafine and their cognates on other islands.
In their hyberbolic campness they represent a category of theatricality that
‘performs’ both on and off the stage. The origin of these performance
activities lies probably in the organization of beauty contests. Fa’afafine were
before that involved in tourist performances, but not as a discrete category.
As already noted, in the mid-1970s Miss Tane contests were organized in
Papeete, Tahiti’s capital and the practice spread to Samoa and Tonga. These
shows and established nightclub acts make explicit use of parody and irony,
a performative device that lies at the heart of fa’afafine theatricality.
The annual Miss Galaxy pageant in Tonga, organized in the country’s
capital Nuku’alofa, provides a platform for local fakaleiti, the Tongan equi-
valent of the Samoan fa’afafine, to present themselves publicly in an expli-
citly theatrical context. This long-running performance event has been
analysed in detail by the anthropologist, Niko Besnier. He argues that the
contest reveals the complex cultural dynamics that merge apparently ‘global
signs’ of popular culture with highly localized references:
Every year, at the conclusion of month-long Heilala Festival in Nuku’alofa,

the capital of Tonga (Western Polynesia), ‘men who act like women’
organize the Miss Galaxy beauty pageant, an extravagant and glam-
orous show of fashions, bodies, inventiveness, fantasy, and humor. One
of several comparable events staged across urban centers of the island
nations of the Western Pacific, Miss Galaxy has gradually become, since
its inception in the early 1990s, increasingly spectacular, assertive, and
innovative. Held in one of the most prominent public venues in the
country, the pageant is the subject of a considerable organizational mobil-
ization: organizers and sponsors sell tickets in advance, a designated

hospitality business sets up a bar and brings in waiters and waitresses are
hired, discjockeys secure and test sound systems, organizers decorate the
hall, and workers set up seating for several thousand people. For several
weeks before the two-day show, families and friends assemble and fit the
contestants’ often elaborate outfits while contestants rehearse individual
performances, group songs, and dance steps.30

Particularly noteworthy in this description is the cultural importance Besnier
attributes to the event. Miss Galaxy, as the name suggests, is not confined
to a backstreet upstairs club, but is part of the nation’s major performance
festival; it takes place in a classy hotel and is attended by members of the
royal family. Contestants parade in various costumes, ranging from familiar
South Pacific clothing such as pule taha (ankle-length skirts and matching
short-sleeved top) as a form of evening dress to highly individual and imagin-
ative creations. As Besnier notes, each costume is ostensibly designed ‘to
allow contestants to present themselves as attractive and feminine persons’,
following the model of beauty pageants around the world. Indeed, the beauty
pageant follows very closely the international model. There are several
judged events, including an individual talent display, a brief interview and
catwalk parades. More particular to transgendered beauty pageants are the
interspersed entertainment routines, ‘which may include a hula perform-
ance by the emcee, a rock-and-roll standard sung by a local talent, a dance
routine performed by all contestants to a popular Tahitian or disco tune, and
a short classical and torch-song concert by non-transgendered performers.’31
The performances themselves, the presentation of the contestants, the
inevitable interviews, the dance and song routines, however, are anything
but culturally affirmative, at least in terms of the official line concerning
cultural self-representation in performance. Neither are they simply imitative
of perceived ‘international’ practices, but rather poised between the local
and the global. To understand the cultural dynamics of such performances,
it is first of all necessary to stress that Miss Galaxy is a kind of carnivalesque
counterpart of the real Miss Tonga beauty contest which takes place during
the same festival. The winner of this contest feeds into the Miss Universe
beauty competitions and is thus part of a global network of media presence.
It would, however, be reductive to see Miss Galaxy merely as a parody of
its straight counterpart. Although it is highly reflexive, the pageant and the
mini-performances it occasions define frames of reference beyond its sister
pageant.
Already the choice of costumes signals a move towards staging what
Besnier has termed ‘translocality’, meaning dislocation from Tongan society
‘while at the same time remaining in place. This imagined mobility forms
a useful fantasy space in both symbolic and sometimes material terms’
[emphasis added]. We see exotic costumes that have global resonances, such
as a veiled damsel from an oriental harem, a flamenco number and others

besides. But we also see a folkloristic Maori costume – this being a kind of
inner Polynesian or pan-Pacific reference not immediately recognizable to
the non-Pacific outsider. More subtle are the variations on Tongan tradi-
tional costume which are only decodable for the local audience.
Even more striking and potentially subversive are the various performance
routines. An example is of a Tongan war-dance accompanied by the

prerequisite drumming, but performed and costumed in an entirely
inappropriate manner. Performed in its proper context, such a dance is
a typical metonym of traditionalist culture. It is usually danced by men
in pre-contact attire consisting of grass skirts and headpiece plus fighting
stick or burning torches. The fakaleiti version includes a spectacular leap
finishing on the stage floor in very occidental splits and is clearly designed
as a spoof of the traditionalist original. Less local than pan-Pacific is the
Tahitian-style dance that has come to be almost metonymic of Pacific dance
in general, at least as far as tourist performances are concerned. In normal
contexts, the former is an exclusively male dance, the latter exclusively
female. The gender-bending inherent in all cross-dressing performances of
whatever provenience is extended in the Miss Galaxy context to include
play with culturally specific gender conventions. In the Tongan case, these
references that are communicated primarily by movement or costume also
include a range of politically loaded discourses about local culture. The trans-
gressive nature of the fakaleiti version of a Tongan war-dance can only be
understood if one factors in the current discussion over traditionalism in the
Pacific Island context.
Generally speaking, we can say that the affirmation of traditional values
on the part of island peoples has been crucial to their political survival. Tradi-
tionalist discourse has also contributed to the entrenchment of local political
elites who often derive their power more from hereditary claims than demo-
cratic legitimation. Phrases such as fa’a Samoa or faka Tonga (Samoan or
Tongan way) have become more than slogans and are today political and
cultural credos of considerable power and influence, ranging from material
questions of land title to niceties of performance practices. The ruling elites
set the tone. It is therefore not surprising that occidental critical discourses
which question terms such as identity or discuss questions concerning the
‘invention of tradition’, well founded as they may be, have been vigorously
opposed by local intellectuals and politicians.32
The crucial question in our context pertains to the position transgendered
persons occupy in these traditionalist discourses. In both the anthropolo-
gical literature and the increasing number of media representations, the
‘traditional’ place of transgendered persons is a paradoxical one. On the one
hand, they are apportioned a place in fa’a Samoa, for example. Here their
place is in the extended family, cooking, cleaning, providing care for chil-
dren or elderly parents, and also carrying out a variety of male chores as
well. This ‘culture of acceptance’ is promulgated by most local voices.33 On

the other hand, the Christian discourses have extreme difficulty in accom-
modating the sexual activity that fa’afafine also imply. It is now safe to say
that Christianity in the Pacific, or at least in the Polynesian, context is also a
traditionalist discourse, representing ‘society’ as do the ruling and economic
elites. It stands usually for strong family and tribal cohesion. Within this set
of values, the fa’afafine are both in and out. Their liminal position is thus

both gendered and cultural and this liminality – so I would argue – enables
us to scrutinize traditionalist discourses. In fact, performances such as those
executed at Miss Galaxy, but also many similar ones in the Pacific diasporas
in Auckland or Sydney, are framed in reflexive modes in which these very
discourses are cited.
In her analysis of the documentary film Paris is Burning, about black and
Hispanic gay fashion balls, Judith Butler argues that the theatricality of
queerness often involves the exaggerated miming of homophobic citations
as a means of contesting and opposing the dominant discourse: ‘This kind
of citation will emerge as theatrical to the extent that it mimes and renders
hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses.’34 This strategy can
easily be applied to wider cultural as well as just gender contexts. With
regard to performance and representation of fa’afafine, we must ask what
is being cited and for what purpose? Rather than trying to account for
the specific ‘identity’ of fa’afafine within the context of queer discourse,
the beauty pageants and nightclub shows render hyperbolic cultural and
political discourses as much as purely gender-related ones. The citationality
that Judith Butler regards as characteristic of queer theatricality attains in
the Pacific context an added cultural and political dimension specific to
local contexts. The extrovert theatricality of the beauty pageants, shows and
other performance forms welds together the ‘citationality’ of drag with the
discourse of cultural identity.
Currently, fa’afafine performances show all the signs of ‘going global’ in
the two realms with the largest appetite for culturally rooted performance
forms: tourism and the international theatre festival market. On 3 February
2002, a long article appeared in New Zealand’s major Sunday paper, the
Sunday Star. Entitled ‘Having a fa’afafine time in Samoa’, the article reit-
erated the major points we have encountered. The article documents of
course the sustained interest in the phenomenon, even in New Zealand,
where some might say one has heard too much about them. The intriguing
but logical thing about this article is that it appeared under the travel
section and in fact was the major article in that issue. The article ends
with the following information: ‘Mary Ann Percy flew to Samoa courtesy of
Polynesian Airlines which flies to Samoa four times a week. She stayed at
Aggie Grey’s Hotel in Apia.’35 The sustained media attention has ultimately
made the fa’afafine – along with siva dancing, Aggie Grey’s Hotel and the
Papasea waterfalls – into a further tourist attraction. Fa’afafine participation
in the tourist industry as travel guides, hotel staff and in the entertain-
ment business has resulted in the productive paradox where fa’afafine are

suspended between tradition and transgression. Tourism in Polynesia still

feeds off discourses of tradition and its sibling, authenticity. Fa’afafine, it
would seem, have come to be another unique selling point, where they
can represent something ‘traditional’ through transgressive performances
that ultimately lose their transgressive potential through incorporation into
touristic commodification.

The fa’afafine have also entered the field of aesthetic performance. In 2003
the House of World Cultures in Berlin (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) featured
in its very diverse programme a show called Diva Siva – Fa’afafine Cabaret as
part of its annual performance and art festival In Transit. The festival publi-
city material promoted the group calling itself Island Divas as a collective of
performance-artists, dancers, musicians and DJs. The ensemble fused tradi-
tional island culture with contemporary fashion, sounds and visuals. By
their own account ‘feeling more at home in a nightclub than a gallery’, they
presented the manifold talents of fa’afafine from Auckland and Samoa. The
show was curated by Lisa Taouma, an art historian and multimedia artist
of Samoan origin based in Auckland, who currently works as a director for
the Pacific Islands television programme Tagata Pasifika. The performers’
biographies indicate the remarkable diversity of interests and performance
styles that the show integrated. They include Shigeyuki Kihara of mixed
Japanese and Samoan descent who goes by the pseudonym of ‘dusky-geisha’.
She presented a piece of ‘live ethnography’, looking at the different ethnic
notions of royalty and the Western idea of royalty that was brought to the
islands in the Victorian era. ‘Buckwheat’, a two-metre tall, larger than life
Polynesian ‘mama’, represented the urban Pacific drag queen. Siaosi Muli-
pola is a contemporary dancer who is also a member of the theatre group
Pacific Underground. Like ‘Buckwheat’, his alter ego is ‘Shanene’ a Polynesian
doyenne of drag. Siaosi’s many credits include the travelling stage produc-
tion ‘Popo the Fairy Queen’ and the contemporary dance troupe Black Grace.
Most of the singing was provided by the transgendered fa’afafine Lindah E,
a Samoan soul and R & B singer who is also a renowned fashion designer in
Auckland.
In many ways, the performance consisted of a more formalized and
aesthetically structured version of the popular beauty pageants and nightclub
shows. The combination of fashion parades, traditional and modern dance,
political cabaret and multimedia reflect current performance practices.
Images of Christianity, colonialism and the Western iconographical tradi-
tion à la Gauguin were translated into the irreverent Samoan clowning genre
of fale aitu. The main theme of the performance was the exotic Pacific of
the Western imagination and its attendant erotic fantasies. The individual
performers employed different genres, but the acts had in common a rein-
vention of clichés of the Pacific. They engaged in a ‘politics of parody to
usurp that most popular icon of “paradise” – the dusky maiden, the South
Seas siren, the hula girl, the velvet vixen’.36 Like the beauty pageants, the

imagery and performances provided a mixture of global and local references.

The most important message of the performance, however, was the forum
itself. InTransit, a high-profile international performance festival in Berlin,
documented the artistic coming out of the fa’afafine.
Clichés of the Pacific also provide a red thread in the irreverent humour
of the successful comedy group The Naked Samoans. Constituted in 1998 by

Oscar Kightley and Dave Fane of Pacific Underground together with Shimpal
Lelisi and Mario Gaoa, the comedy act has gone on to attain much popularity
in New Zealand but also abroad where at the Edinburgh fringe festival in
2002, the show Naked Samoans The Trilogy won critical accolades. Although
the group is not entirely Samoan (members also hail from Niue and Rotuma),
their brand of humour has been linked to the Samoan tradition of fale aitu,
lampooning sketches that have survived colonization and continue to be
practiced.37
The defining aspect of the fale aitu is its practice of imitating and
burlesquing people in positions of power. In pre-contact times these would
have been the matai (chiefs). With the onset of colonialism, the Europeans
also became a favourite subject of ridicule. Vilsoni Hereniko has docu-
mented a number of examples since the late nineteenth century of this shift
in focus. A performance recorded in 1893 describes two or three clowns
performing exaggerated gestures, movements and facial expressions repres-
enting Germans, the dominant settler group at the time.38 He also cites
Donald Sloan, a traveller in the 1940s, who observed a comic performance
of himself by a large Samoan clown ‘wearing my best white suit, my sun
helmet and a pair of tennis shoes – on the wrong feet’. The wrong-footed
‘tourist’ then produced an imitation camera from a large basket held by a
small boy:
With great ado he pushed and twisted at imaginary knobs and gadgets
on it to satisfy himself that it was ready for the first shot. He then tripped
daintily to where I sat and contorted himself into every position imagin-
able, getting from the crowd a twitter of ill-concealed giggles, before he
pressed the trigger of a big bamboo clapper, flattened on one side that was
supposed to be the shutter release. It went off with a bang like a firework,
and the clown fell down backwards as if he had been bowled over by the
kick of a double-barreled shotgun. The crowd roared with laughter, and I
joined in too, laughing till my sides ached.39
The symbol of touristic intrusion, the camera, is restaged as a mock ‘weapon’

which is turned against the visiting European.
Although they draw on this type of lampooning comedy, The Naked
Samoan shows transcend the sketch form and construct linear stories with
interconnected characters. The first three productions followed the fortunes
of the same family; the fourth show, Naked Samoans: The Trilogy, featured

highlights from the previous three. The fifth addition, Naked Samoans Go
Home (2003), creates a new set of characters while exploring the same them-
atic concerns. The latter focuses on the Pacific Island experience in the
diaspora garnished with an irreverent attitude to inter-racial conflicts. Racist
Indian shopkeepers, sacred Maori ceremonial protocol as well as the usual
European prejudices against ‘dark’ people receive equally satirical treatment.

The title of the most recent show, Naked Samoans Go Home, is a double
entendre, referring both to the frequently heard exhortation to immigrant
people and to the fact that the story begins in Samoa. The Samoan setting
provides a frame for various references to the genealogy of Pacific represent-
ations that has been the subject of this book. The loosely structured story
revolves around a group of six brothers who have formed a hapless guitar
band (they use their guitars mainly as percussion instruments). Their main
focus is on New Zealand, where ‘the streets are paved with gold’ and ‘every
week they pay you for not working’.40 One brother, Sione, a better rugby
player than musician, is offered the chance to go to New Zealand to try out
for a professional rugby team in Ponsonby, Auckland. The second half of
the show follows his ultimately tragic experiences there, as he is dismissed
from the team and finally loses his job on a building site. Having pledged
to be a success in New Zealand and unable to face the shame of failure, he
takes his own life. The final scene is set once again in Samoa, as the other
brothers gather around Sione’s body to perform the customary eulogies.
The road to this lamentable end is paved, however, not only with gold
and disappointment but also with many jokes, both verbal and physical. The
first half of the show, set in Samoa, focuses on clichéd touristic responses to
Samoa and the Pacific Islands in general. Enervation is the dominant topic
of conversation. The first entrance of each character is introduced by the
running gag, ‘It’s so hot here in Samoa’. The eldest of the Tapa’a brothers
is a bossy ‘lesbian’ fa’afafine played by Dave Fane, who remarks impatiently
while waiting for others to arrive: ‘It’s lucky we have such a hazy concept
of time here in the islands.’ They reiterate the importance of their family
ties – ‘All we have is family’ – while mercilessly exploiting their youngest
brother who has a stammer. The latter complains that he has to do the
cooking, cleaning, massage people’s feet and ‘people in Samoa have feet like
dinosaurs’. The installation of a traffic light in Apia is regarded as a major
sensation. The highlight of the first half is an intermezzo by the guitar band
as they perform a medley of ‘original songs’ comprising tunes such as ‘She’s
a maniac’ and ‘Macho Man’. This is followed by a spoof of Pacific Island
tourist shows, as the brother called Boogie Wonderland demonstrates dances
from the Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga and ‘Las Vegas’ in quick succession,
employing slight variations in hand and leg movements. Nevertheless, to a
diaspora audience (such as the one present during the taped performance
analysed here), each change is greeted with hoots of laughter based on
recognition. Dave Fane as the ‘lesbian’ fa’afafine performs a delicate poi dance


Figure 24 The ‘lesbian’ fa’afafine brother performs a Maori poi dance
Source: Video print from The Naked Samoans Go Home. Courtesy of Armstrong Creative, Wellington.
from ‘the beautiful islands of New Zealand’, but ends with the characteristic
Maori grimace of poked tongue ferocity. The ‘climatic climax’ is a botched
rendition of the famous Samoan fire-dance (‘please do not try this at home;
try it at someone else’s home’). In place of the dangerous burning sticks,
the brothers can only manage a pole with red cellophane, which finally
falls off.
The second half of the show takes place in Auckland, New Zealand, mainly
at a downtown Auckland building site. Sione has failed to make the rugby
team, has lied to his brothers that he is studying medicine, whereas in fact he
is now a labourer. The other workers are Pacific Islanders who are bullied by
a cricket-bat wielding Maori foreman played by Oscar Kightley. The humour
changes focus to highlight inter-racial prejudice. It alternates between the
eschatological (Sione’s dialogue with his deceased parents) and the scato-
logical as one character is forced to wear brown, soiled underpants over
his shorts. Mainly, however, the comic attacks revolve around redefining
older clichés in new configurations of power. Familiar European prejudices
regarding the ‘lazy Maori’ are refocused as the Maori foreman excoriates
the lazy ‘coconuts’ for their idleness and lack of education. In these scenes
the Naked Samoans live up to their reputation of performing transgressive
humour that is ‘fearless in the face of race, sex, political correctness and
good taste’.41

Dystopic paradise
Equally fearless, but more in terms of radical artistic vision, is the New
Zealand-based Mau ensemble, founded in 1995 by Lemi Ponifasio. Mau (the
name derives from the Western Samoan independence movement Mau,
which in Samoan means ‘vision’ or ‘belief’) was set up with the intention

of creating a company of artists from various regions of the Pacific area to
present stories, myths and legends of that geographical area. The director,
Ponifasio, was born in Samoa and moved to New Zealand at age 15 to
continue his schooling. There followed a long apprenticeship in dance and
theatre in Japan, Europe and the Pacific. A formative influence was his
training in Butoh, the Japanese experimental dance form that emerged in
the late 1950s, which manifests itself both in terms of physical style as well
as radical artistic ethos. Mau’s work is based on a spirit of collaboration
with Pacific artists and performers of diverse backgrounds and performance
traditions.42
The first of these collaborations, Lo’omatua (The Old Woman), was created
in Apia in 1995 with local people. In 1999, Mau developed Rise with a
Maori kapa haka group, and in 2000 Ponifasio collaborated with the Maori
composer Hirini Melbourne to create a series of performances under the title
of Bone Flute. It was presented at the eighth Festival of Pacific Arts, New
Caledonia, in 2000, and after touring New Zealand, Bone Flute presented its
final version, Bone Flute ivi ivi at the Adelaide Festival in 2002. In the same
year, Ponifasio curated the first exhibition of Pacific theatre and scenography
at the Prague Quadriennale. Boneflute ivi ivi was based around what Poni-
fasio regards as Pacific concepts with spiritual resonance. At its centre is the
notion of va or space but in Samoan, or perhaps Ponifasio’s cosmology, it
is extended to include antithetical notions such as animate and inanimate,
natural and supernatural which should be seen as imbricated in one another.
The production also made use of the metaphorical resonances of Polynesian
architectural nomenclature. Most Polynesian languages correlate sections of
a building to parts of the body: the ridge beam of a house is the ‘spine’ and
the supporting rafters are the ‘ribs’. It also made use of the marae, the public
place of encounter in front of the meeting-house. The production attempted
to explore variations on the notion of Pulotu, the place of the dead, a parallel
world of the aitu, the spirits, both benevolent and maleficent, who coexist
with the living.43
Mau’s most recent and internationally acclaimed production Paradise
(which premiered in Auckland in June, 2003) continues some of the themes
and spatial ideas of Boneflute. It is divided into three parts, which reflect the
architecture of Polynesian ceremonial encounter. The place of performance
(which was adapted for various festival appearances in Venice, Stuttgart and
Amsterdam as well as New Zealand) is divided into a marae-like structure. The
audience is welcomed into an informal space In the setting at the Holland

festival in Amsterdam the audience sat on benches or on the floor and a bar
had been set up behind. The performance began with a Maori powhiri, the
ritual of welcome consisting of chants, dances, oratory and rubbing noses.
The audience were figured as manuhiri or guests who are required to undergo
a ritual of tapu removal before entering the space of the hosts (tangata
whenua). In the performance I saw, the vice-chancellor of Amsterdam Univer-

sity and his wife, assuming the role of the manuhiri, were confronted with
an intimidating challenge (wero) performed by a spear-wielding warrior. The
oratory of welcome was conducted in the Kanak language of New Caledonia.
Figure 25 Dancer from Paradise by Mau ensemble, directed by Lemi Ponifasio

Source: Publicity photo courtesy of Holland Festival.
On the completion of the ceremony the audience moved through a curtain

into a conventional performance space where the second part, Inside the
Va, took place. It began with a single figure in lava lava and white shirt
seated on the stage. He was joined by another who proceeded to shave
his head. High up on the left-hand side of the stage a human torso, seem-
ingly suspended in mid-air, became visible. It was dimly lit so as to high-
light the sculptural contours of the back. It was a form suspended not
only in space but also between the animate and inanimate, human and
non-human. The ensuing performance was structured around a narrative
beginning with images from Polynesian creation myths, and culminating
in colonial encounter and beyond. Almost total darkness represented the
beginning of the world when in Polynesian cosmology there was eternal

night caused by the seamless embrace of Rangi the sky god and Papa the
earth goddess. Their son Tane forced them apart and caused light to stream
into the world. Into this world emerge semi-human shapes represented
by near-naked dancers trailing between their legs an umbilical cord-like
appendage (Figure 25) The umbilical cord evokes associations of the whenua,
the afterbirth that in Polynesian cultures is always buried near the child’s

home immediately after birth in order to cement metonymically the tie
between an individual and the land. The audience often has to strain to
discern the shapes in the darkness. The lighting, by Helen Todd, gives them
a strange monochromatic appearance, drained, as it were, of colour. The
effect is sculptural, part abstraction, part Butoh and part Polynesian icon-
ography. Composer Marc Chesterman a provides a suggestive soundtrack
with an unmistakable ‘Pacific’ sound, transcending folklorism and evoking
instead oceanic rhythms of wave beats and wind murmers. In one remarkable
sequence, three dancers squat on aquarium-like structures that create a
mirror effect evoking associations with the crouching figures of Polynesian
wood carving. The arrival of the Europeans – the pig men as they are known
in Kanak languages – sees a change in visual effect. The iconography becomes
more blatant and less crepuscular with projections of nuclear explosions
reminding us of the Pacific’s role as a nuclear testing ground. The title Para-
dise now alludes to the term’s dystopic history as a place of Euro-American
phantasms, both scientific and artistic. In another Butoh-inspired sequence,
an emaciated spirit-like female figure moves across the stage with excruci-
ating slowness to disappear into a cavern as though the aitu were abandoning
the changed world. The cultural impact of colonialism is represented by the
sequence ‘Falesa’ (church). Performers line up on the front of the stage in
starched white shirts and lava lavas, thoroughly Christianized and ‘praying
to the white Gods’. The amplitude of white is a sight familiar on any Sunday
in Western Samoa as the whole island seems to make its way to church.
In the closing sequence of Part 2, ‘mirroring the Sky’, a kava bowl – the
quintessential image of Polynesian ceremony – is highlighted by a spotlight
centre stage. A performer scoops up the liquid in a coconut shell and moves
out into the audience where he drinks it, suggesting that a reconciliation of
sorts is taking place. The stage performance closes with a remarkable image
as a performer crawls vertically up a wall evoking the ubiquitous gecko and,
like his reptilian counterpart, suddenly disappears in a flash.
The final part of the performance Poroporoaki (translated in the programme
as ‘Space in Repose’) returns the audience to the benches and bar. Food
and drink are provided in the Polynesian manner to farewell the guests.
Performers join the spectators; speeches are made, and incantations sung to
complete the communal ritual.
The work of Lemi Ponifasio and Mau provides a fitting completion to
this book, as a performance such as Paradise draws together many of the
strands and concerns this study has dealt with. It stages – quite literally –
cross-cultural encounter by adapting Polynesian ceremonial protocol to

provide a frame in which spectators encounter the embedded performance.

While the framing performance is mainly Maori in origin, the aesthetics
of the embedded performance eschew clear cultural reference. On a formal
level, there is little to suggest a ‘Pacific’ style. Yet thematically, the whole
piece, as the title suggests, is an exploration of Pacific history from mythic
origin to postcolonial present, evoked through aural and visual images of

remarkable suggestiveness. The ceremonial encounters enacted here echo
those that Captain Cook and the first explorers experienced 200 years ago.
The ensemble’s success on the international festival circuit suggests that,
above and beyond the usual demand for novelty that the festival economy
demands, Ponifasio has found a balance between cultural specificity, with its
attendant danger of repetitiveness, and artistic freedom to utilize whatever
expressive forms he desires.
∗ ∗ ∗
The plays and productions discussed here represent only a small cross-section
of contemporary Pacific performance. They are nevertheless representative
of significant trends in what we have termed here ‘diasporic theatre’ and
demonstrate that a Pacific consciousness is being explored through the
medium of performance in its widest sense. On a formal level, Pacific theatre
follows the general trend towards syncretism in postcolonial theatre. It incor-
porates traditional indigenous cultural texts into the framework of European
theatre to achieve a bi- or multicultural communication situation. On a
thematic level it focuses on the characteristic diasporic concerns of memory,
cultural loss and disorientation, and at the same time outlines strategies of
redress and reincorporation. Although the diasporic nature of Pacific theatre
will remain, it is clearly reformulating what has traditionally been seen as a
situation of lack and loss into a new cultural space with considerable creative
and recuperative potential. Located within global transmission processes,
Pacific performances are re-entering the international circulation of cultural
signs and texts.
In terms of the overall argument of this book, contemporary perform-
ances, especially those practised by the fa’afafine and comedy acts such as
the Naked Samoans, but also the more avant-garde groups such as Mau,
provide continuity with what I have defined as cross-cultural theatricality.
They understand that cross-cultural experiences, especially those defined
within the power structures of colonialism and its neo-colonial extensions,
are encapsulated as much by performance practices as by written texts.
While all the groups mine the mimetic capital that has accrued since the
first contacts between Europeans and Pacific Islanders, their performances
do not just cite the European histories of representation. They demonstrate
that the cultural equation has become more complex. Imitation and citation
are fundamental to these processes but they are now being deployed within

changing power structures. A Samoan-New Zealand comedian performing

a burlesque version of Maori dances indicates that cross-cultural theatric-
ality has transcended clear binary structures of colonizer and colonized. It
can be adapted to any situation of perceived inequality. On the other side
of the equation, a performance such as Paradise is framed almost entirely
by Maori protocol which is approached with utmost respect. Performative

theatricality will remain, it seems, a potent means to continually question
and renegotiate the lines of encounter between cultures.

Notes
Introduction

1. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, A Voyage Round the world Performed by Order of
his most Christian Majesty in the Years 1766, 1777, 1768, and 1769, trans John
Reinhold Forster (London: Nourse & Davies, 1772), 214.
2. Ibid.
3. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circumatlantic Performance (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996), esp. introduction, 25–31.
4. Ibid., 25.
5. The epistemological and ideological complexities surrounding the historical
anthropology of reconstructing the ‘native’ point of view were demonstrated in
the famous Obeyesekere-Sahlins debate revolving around the question of Captain
Cook’s divinity in the eyes of the Hawaiians; see Chapter 1, note 24. For a discus-
sion of the broader historiographical implications of integrating the indigenous
point of view, see the editor’s introduction to Robert Borofsky (ed.), Remembrance
of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i
Press, 2000). A recent exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum provides
a sustained attempt to show both perspectives of cross-cultural encounters; see
Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer (eds), Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe,
1500–1800 (London: V&A Publications, 2004), esp. chs 15, 25 and 26.
6. See Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘Theatricality: A Key Concept in Theatre and Cultural
Studies’, Theatre Research International, 20:2 (1995), 85–9.
7. Introduction to Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait (eds), Theatricality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3.
8. Ibid., 4.
9. Foreword to Josette Féral (ed.), Substance, 31: 2/3 (2002), special number on theat-
ricality, 3.
10. Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: Univer-
sity of Toronto Press, 2002), 23.
11. For a more comprehensive survey, see the introduction to: Davis and Postlewait,
Theatricality, 2003.
12. Fischer-Lichte, ‘Theatricality: A Key Concept’.
13. Tracy Davis dates the coinage of the noun ‘theatricality’ to the year 1837, when
Thomas Carlyle used the term to denote insincerity or inauthenticity; see Davis
and Postlewait, Theatricality, 130.
14. Elizabeth Burns, Theatricality (London: Longman, 1972), 13.
15. See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1981).
16. For a discussion of the rise of theatricality and eighteenth-century culture see
John O’Brien in his introduction to a special issue on theatre and theatricality
of the journal The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 43:3 (Fall 2002),
esp. 191–4. See also my article, ‘Metaphors of Spectacle: Theatricality, Perception
and Performative Encounters in the Pacific’, in Erika Fischer-Lichte et al. (eds),
Wahrnehmung und Medialität (Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 2001), 215–31.
17. Jonathan Culler, ‘The Semiotics of Tourism’, The American Journal of Semiotics,
1:1/2 (1981), 137.
218

Notes 219
18. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures,
trans Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1987); Niklas Luhmann,
The Reality of the Mass Media, trans Kathleen Cross (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000).
19. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991), 91.
20. Ibid., 6.

21. Ibid.
22. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Rout-
ledge, 2001), 13.
23. Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 1992), 189–90.
24. Ibid., 191.
25. Denis Diderot, ‘Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage or Dialogue between A. and
B.’, Diderot Interpreter of Nature: Selected Writings, trans Jean Stewart and Jonathan
Kemp (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1937; rep. 1979).
26. David Lodge, Paradise News (London: Penguin, 1991), 163.
27. This point was made at the time by no other than Herman Melville, who, in
a lecture entitled ‘The South Seas’ (1858) argued that ‘South Seas’ and ‘Pacific
Ocean’ were ‘equivalent terms’ but with quite different associations. The former,
he suggests, connotes ‘a name with many pleasant and venerable books of
voyages, full of well-remembered engravings’. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose
Pieces, 1839–1860 (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1987),
410. Rod Edmond argues that by the mid-nineteenth century the term ‘South
Seas’ had become outmoded because of shifts in geographical perceptions and
trade practices; see his Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook
to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16.
28. Paul Sharrad, ‘Imagining the Pacific’, Meanjin, 49:4 (Summer 1990), 597–606.
29. Ibid., 597.
30. Ibid., 601.
31. The Tongan writer Epeli Hau’ofa suggests replacing the old triad of Polynesia,
Melanesia and Micronesia by the more precise geographical and less racially
loaded terms, ‘East Oceania’, ‘West Oceania’ and ‘North Oceania’ respectively;
‘Epilogue: Pasts to Remember’, in Robert Borofsky (ed.), Remembrance of Pacific
Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000),
471.
32. Bill Pearson, Rifled Sanctuaries: Some Views of the Pacific Islands in Western Literature
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1984).
33. Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South
Seas (Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1995); Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the
Pacific. Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press 1998); Edmond, Representing the South Pacific.
34. C. Geertz, ‘History and Anthropology’, New Literary History, 21:2 (1990), 324.
35. Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early
History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1981); Islands of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), and How
‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1995).
36. Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992).
37. G. Dening, Performances (Chicago University Press, 1996), 105.

220 Notes
38. Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991), and Between Worlds: Early Exchanges
between Maori and Europeans, 1773–1815 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,
1997).
39. See N. Thomas, In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1997), and Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).

40. N. Thomas, Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
41. Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations made during a Voyage round the World, ed.
Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest and Michael Dettelbach (Honolulu: University
of Hawai‘i Press, 1996); George Forster, A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas
Thomas and Oliver Berghof, 2 vols (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000).
42. See, in particular, N. Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James
Cook (New York. Walker, 2003); and Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog:
Captain Cook in the South Seas (London: Allen Lane, 2003).
Chapter 1 Pacific overtures: trumpets, beaches and

women
1. Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World from Renaissance to
Romanticism (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993), 2.
2. See, for example, Gerhard Neumann, ‘Erkennungs-Szene: Wahrnehmung
zwischen den Geschlechtern im literarischen Text’, in Kati Röttger and Heike
Paul (eds,) Differenzen in der Geschlechterdifferenz/ Differences within Gender Studies
(Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999), 202–221.
3. Andrew Sharp, The Voyages of Abel Janszoon Tasman (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1968), 121.
4. Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991), 22.
5. Ibid., 73.
6. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), 90–1. Greenblatt also notes that Vasco da Gama employed
similar devices a few years later when trying to communicate with the natives of
South Africa, p. 180, n.10.
7. Sharp, Voyages of Tasman, 44–5.
8. Ibid., 45.
9. Sharp glosses this term from a Malay word Orangkaja, ‘meaning an East Indies
chief’. Evidently it was used by the Dutch as a generic term for natives, comparable
to the ‘Indians’ used in the first accounts of Cook, Banks and others before local
terms were developed; ibid., 44, note 1.
10. Ibid., 44.
11. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in
the Pacific (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 108–9.
12. For more on Omai, see Chapter 2.
13. William Anderson, ‘Journal’, in J. C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain
James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery: The Voyage of the Endeavour, 1768–1771
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1955), iii. 838.
14. J. C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook: The Voyage of the
Resolution and Adventure, 1772–1755 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1961), 208.

Notes 221
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 190 and 207.
17. George Forster, A Voyage round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), i. 375.
18. James Cook and James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean; Undertaken by
Command Performed under the Direction of Captains Cook, Clerke, (London:
T. Cadell, 1784), iii. 174.

19. Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 179.
20. Ibid.
21. James Cook, A Voyage Towards the South Pole, and Round the World , 3rd edn
(London: T. Cadell, 1779).
22. Ibid., i. 192–3.
23. Ibid., ii. 47–8.
24. The question of whether Cook was actually perceived as a divine being was the
subject of one of the famous intellectual debates between the Sri Lankan-born
anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere and the American anthropologist Marshall
Sahlins. Obeyesekere took issue with Sahlin’s claim that Cook had been deified
by the Hawaiians as the god Lono. See Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of
Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992), and Sahlins’s reply: How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook for
Example (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995). The dispute has engendered
its own metacommentary, see, for example, Rod Edmond, Representing the Pacific,
esp. ch. 2; and Greg Dening, Performances (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1996), 76.
25. Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 1992), 73.
26. George Forster, A Voyage round the World, i. 427–28; cited in Smith, Imagining the
Pacific, 72.
27. Smith, Imagining the Pacific, 73.
28. In a recent study, Lee Wallace has taken issue with the resolutely heterosexual
perspective that South Seas’ encounter narratives and their commentators have
assumed. See her Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2003), in which she argues the anxieties
induced by these encounters were directed more at the native and European male
than at the female body. I will return to this provocative argument in the final
chapter.
29. Louis–Antoine de Bougainville, A Voyage Round the World Performed by Order of
his most Christian Majesty in the Years 1766, 1767, 1768 and 1769, translated by
John Reinhold Forster (London: Nourse & Davies, 1772), 218–19.
30. Charles–Félix–Pierre Fesche, ‘Journal’, in Etienne Taillemite (ed.), Bougainville et
ses compagnons autour du monde 1766–1769: Journaux de navigation, 2 vols (Paris:
Imprimerie Nationale, 1977), ii. 80; my translation, C.B.
31. Apart from the failure of the Europeans to overcome the strictures of civiliz-
ation, Fesche is also, and perhaps most concerned that the French failed as
Frenchmen to live up to their popular reputation as gallant and passionate
lovers.
32. George Robertson, The Discovery of Tahiti: A Journal of the Second Voyage of the
H.M.S ‘Dolphin’ round the World, 1766–1768, ed. Hugh Carrington (London:
Hakluyt Society, 1948), 148.
33. Ibid., 154.

222 Notes
34. Robertson, Discovery, 166. Bougainville records some months later almost exactly
the same scene in almost the same turn of phrase: Bougainville, Voyage Round the
World, 217–18.
35. Ibid.
36. Robertson, Discovery, 180.
37. Bougainville, A Voyage Round the world, 219.
38. Ibid., 227–8.

39. Philibert Commerson, ‘Notes de Commerson’, in Taillemite, Bougainville et ses
compagnons, ii. 496–7; my translation, C.B.
40. Fesche, ‘Journal’, 81–2.
41. Ibid., 82.
42. Ibid.
43. See Sahlins’s essay ‘Supplement to the Voyage of Cook, or: le calcul sauvage’, in
Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
44. The reference here is to Marcel Mauss’s famous study, Essai sur le don (1925)
and its subsequent development by Claude Lévi–Strauss. Both Mauss and Lévi–
Strauss cite extensively ethnographic literature documenting women as objects
of ‘archaic’ gift economies which have been cited in turn by feminist scholars
as proof of underlying gender inequalities. The locus classicus of this critique is
Gayle Rubin’s article, ‘The Traffic of Women: Notes on the Political Economy
of Sex’, in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210.
45. Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas
(London: Allen Lane, 2003), 382.
46. Sahlins, Islands of History, xii.
47. Ibid., 19.
48. This ‘mixed economy’ must be compared to the exchange of nails, toys, trinkets
and iron tools for foodstuffs (in the main pigs, fowls and fruit), which went on
almost every day during the sojourns of the various ships that called. While this
was certainly an economy of material goods from the European perspective, the
Polynesians doubtlessly integrated it into a political economy of status.
49. J. C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks (Sydney: Angus &
Robertson, 1962), i. 277.
50. J. C. Beaglehole, The Journals of Captain James Cook, i. 93–4. A great deal of
commentary has accrued around this scene. Beaglehole agrees with Cook that it
was probably some kind of ceremony. However, he also quotes a critical contem-
porary William Wales, who, on the basis of an eyewitness from the Endeavour,
blames ‘that old demirep’ Purea for contriving the whole thing, which was not
even consummated as the couple in question were too terrified. He also reports
that ‘Purea’ suffered severe reprobation from ‘most of the natives’ for her actions.
William Wales, Remarks on Mr. Forster’s Account of Captain Cook’s last Voyage round
the World (London 1778), n.52; cited in Beaglehole, The Journals of Captain
James Cook, i. 94, n.1.
51. Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas
(Oxford: Clarendon Press,1995), 99.
52. John Hawkesworth (ed.), An Account of the Voyages , 3 vols (London: W. Strahan
& T. Cadell, 1773), ii.128.
53. Rennie notes that Hawkesworth made the man slightly smaller and the girl some-
what older, which ‘suggest some concern to moderate, if not expurgate, the
‘Spectacle’ for the British public’; Far-Fetched Facts, 99.
54. Ibid., 101.

Notes 223
55. Ibid., 100.

56. While Charlotte Hayes actually existed, the events related in the book cannot,
for obvious reasons, be historically verified. In Westminster’s Magazine, March
1774, 111, there is a reference to Charlotte Hayes. Referring to a debuting actress
cum ‘Gentlewoman’: ‘she was very lately a boarder with the celebrated Charlotte
Hayes; a circumstance which will inform our readers that her figure is pleasing
and also that she is young and handsome.’ Cited in The London Stage, 1660–1800,

pt 4, vol. 3, under 26 March 1774, Covent Garden. My thanks to Martin Meisel
for providing me with this reference.
57. Anon., Nocturnal Revels (London: Goadby, 1779), ii. 21–2. Further citations will
be given in the body of the text.
58. Hawkesworth, Account, ii. 128.
59. Beaglehole suggests that the word is derived from ti moro–iti or te ai moro iti, both
of which refer to copulation, The Journals of Captain Cook, i. 127.
60. Hawkesworth was at this point relying more heavily on Banks’s journal than on
Cook’s. In his long description of Tahitian customs from 17 July 1769, Banks
notes: ‘Besides this they dance especialy the young girls whenever they can collect
8 or 10 together, singing most indecent words using most indecent actions and
setting their mouths askew in a most extraordinary manner, in the practise of
which they are brought up from their earlyest childhood; in doing this they keep
time to a surprizing nicety, I might almost say as true as any dancers I have
seen in Europe tho their time is certainly much more simple. This excercise is
however left off as soon as they arrive at Years of maturity for as soon as ever
they have formd a connection with a man they are expected to leave of Dancing
Timorodee as it is calld.’ J. C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Endeavour Journal of Joseph
Banks, 1962, 351.
62. J. C. Beaglehole, ed., Journals of Captain Cook, iii. 978.
63. Beaglehole, Journal of Joseph Banks, 351.
64. G. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, ii. 1777, 400–1.
65. This is evidently a reference to the dance interludes and divertissements which
were a standard part of opera performances.
66. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York:
Routledge, 1993), xvii.
67. For a discussion of colonial mimicry, see Chapter 7.
68. Robertson, Discovery, 193.
69. Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, 3.
70. In Polynesian cultures mana refers to a complex system by which prestige and
authority are attained and lost.
71. ‘This morn several Canoas came on board among which were two in which were
people who by their dress and appearance seemd to be of a rank superior to those
who we had seen yesterday. These we invited to come on board and on coming
into the Cabbin each singled out his freind, one took the Captn and the other
me, they took off a large part of their cloaths and each dress’d his freind with
them he took off: in return for this we presented them with each a hatchet and
some beads.’ The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, entry for 14 April 1769. For
Jonathan’s reappearance, see Robertson, Discovery, 193.
72. William Pearson has attempted to systematize first encounters between Europeans
and Polynesians. According to his topology, the exchange of clothing could be
the third stage in a possible six-stage process beginning with the display on shore
of white tapa cloth and culminating in full-scale festivities on land; ‘The reception

224 Notes
of European voyagers on Polynesian islands, 1568–1797’, Journal de la Société des

Oceanistes, 26 (1970), 121–54.
73. J. C. Beaglehole (ed.), Journal of Joseph Banks, entry for 9 June, 1769, i., 288.
Beaglehole transliterates the Tahitian term as Heiva no metua, literally a ceremony
for a parent, meaning here the funeral for the deceased mother.
74. Ibid., 289.
75. Ibid.

76. Works of P. Pindar, i. (London: 1816), 464. See also Bill Pearson, Rifled Sanctuaries:
Some Views of the Pacific Islands in Western Literature to 1900 (Auckland: Auckland
University Press, 1984), 18.
Chapter 2 Staged authenticity: the South Seas and

European theatre, 1785–1830
1. See, for example, William Ellis, An authentic narrative of a voyage performed by
Captain Cook, 2 vols (London 1782); and, A[n] authentic narrative of four years resid-
ence at Tongataboo, one of the Friendly Islands, by Vason George in 1796, with
an appendix by an eminent writer (London 1810).
2. For the importance of visual verification in travel accounts, see Barbara Stafford,
Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account,
1760–1840 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1984); and Judith Adler, ‘Origins of Sight-
seeing’, Annals of Tourism Research, 16:1 (1989), 7–29.
3. In a recent article, Paul Ranger has discussed theatrical representations of Cook’s
voyages to advance the argument that in Georgian London the stage was just such
a medium of documentation, ‘Transformations and Theophanies: Documentary
on the Georgian Stage’, Theatre Notebook, 56:3 (2002), 156–172.
4. Astrid Betz records at least half a dozen further performances of Muzzarelli’s
‘dance pantomime’ between 1784 and 1791; see her, Inszenierung der Südsee
(Munich: Herbert Utz, 2003). Muzzarelli was a leading choreographer and disciple
of Angiolini. I am assuming that Vassallo is the author of the libretto, although
it is not made entirely explicit in the extant copy. The libretto contains no
mention of the composer, which is entirely consistent with the approach to
musical performance of the time.
5. See p. 37.
6. Greg Dening, Performances (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996),
148–49.
7. Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages (London: W. Strahan & T. Cadell,
1773), ii. 168–9.
8. On Vico, see Edward Said, ‘We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that
men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made
and extend it to geography’, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 4–5.
9. Sergio Moravia, Beobachtende Vernunft: Philosophie und Anthropologie in der
Aufklärung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989), 12. Italian original: La Scienza
dell’uomo nel Settecento (Bari 1970).
10. Denis Diderot, ‘Sur les femmes’, Oeuvres, ed. André Billy (Paris: Gallimard, 1951),
987; my translation.
11. Both Rousseau and Diderot were intrigued by what could be called feminine
theatricality in the area of ‘staging’ or faking orgasm. See Rousseau’s Lettre à
d’Alembert for an extended discussion of the subject and Diderot’s essay ‘Sur les
femmes’.

Notes 225
12. See Das weinende Saeculum: Colloquium der Arbeitsstelle 18. Jahrhundert, ed. die
Arbeitsstelle 18. Jahrhundert Gesamthochschule Wuppertal (Heidelberg: Winter,
1983).
13. Umilissimo Vassallo, Cook o sia Gl’Inglesi in Othaiti Dramma per Musica (Naples:
1785). All page references to quotations from the text will be given immediately
afterwards in brackets. Translations are mine.

15. George Robertson, The Discovery of Tahiti: A Journal of the Second Voyage of the H.M.
‘Dolphin’ round the World, 1766–1768, ed. Hugh Carrington (London: Hakluyt
Society, 1948), 227. William Pearson remarks: ‘Such tenderness at the departure of
visitors, which embarrassed later English travellers and made them suspect hypo-
crisy, was not universal to Polynesia, but it was the practice in the Society group.’
‘European Intimidation and the Myth of Tahiti’, in Barrie MacDonald (comp.)
Essays from the Journal of Pacific History, (Palmerston North: Massey University,
1979), 132. First published in The Journal of Pacific History 5 (1969), 199–217.
16. Hawkesworth, Account, ii. 104f.
17. Cook o Gl’Inglesi in Otahiti: ballo storico-pantomimo in cinque atti, inventato, composto
e diretto dal Lauchlin Dusqueney / Cook oder die Engländer auf Otahaiti: ein historisch-
pantomimisches Ballett in fünf Akten, erfunden und zusammengesetzt von Lauchlin
Dusquesney (Berlin, no publ., 1801).
18. Omai is by far the most intensively studied theatrical text to treat a Pacific theme.
William Huse first pointed out the link between the illustrations of John Webber,
the official artist on Cook’s third voyage, as the basis of the scene and costume
designs; ‘A Noble Savage on the Stage’, Modern Philology, 33:3 (1936), 303–16.
Ralph G. Allen focused more on de Loutherbourg’s contribution: ‘De Louther-
bourg and Captain Cook’, Theatre Research, 4:3 (1962), 195–211. Bernard Smith,
European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985) (first pub. 1960); and Rüdiger Joppiens, ‘Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s
Pantomime Omai, or, a Trip round the World and the Artists of Captain Cook’s
Voyages’, in T. C. Mitchell, ed., British Museum Yearbook 3 (1979), 81–136, have
provided considerable extra information on de Loutherbourg’s designs. Joppien
was the first to study intensively the recently discovered costume-designs by
de Loutherbourg, see 107, n.50. The most recent addition to the growing liter-
ature on the pantomime is an exhibition catalogue from the National Library
of Australia curated by Michelle Hetherington, Iain McCalman and Alexander
Cook, Cook & Omai: The Cult of the South Seas, exhibition catalogue (Canberra:
National Library of Australia, 2001). See also Paul Ranger, ‘Transformations and
Theophanies: Documentary on the Georgian Stage’, Theatre Notebook, 56:3 (2002),
156–72.
19. Jean François Arnould, La Mort du Capitaine Cook, à son troisième voyage au nouveau
monde. Pantomime en quatre actes (Paris: Lagrange, 1788), 3. My translation.
20. Ibid.
21. The Death of Captain Cook: A Grand Serious-Pantomimic-Ballet, (London:
T. Cadell, 1789). Page references to quotations from the English version will be
given in brackets in the body of the text.
22. For an account of the historical persons, see Marshall Sahlins, How ‘Natives’ Think,
About Captain Cook for Example (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 49,
67–68.
23. Arnould, La Mort du Capitaine Cook, 9–10; italics in the original; all translations
from the French are my own.
24. Ibid., 17.

226 Notes
25. James Cook and James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (London: T. Cadell,
1784), 172.
26. Marshall Sahlins, How ‘Natives’ Think, 85.
27. The Mutiny on the Bounty was also the subject of a pantomime, The Pirates, Or
the Calamities of Captain Bligh, produced only seven weeks after Bligh’s return, on
3 May 1790. For an account, see Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion,
Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),

286ff.
28. This is not to say that the theatrical treatment ends here. A pantomime entitled La
mort du Capitaine Cook, ou, Les insulaires d’O-Why-E was premiered at the Théâtre
Olympique in 1814, authored by François Jeune. For a by no means exhaustive
overview of Captain Cook dramatizations, see Marlies Thiersch, ‘Cook Plays Now
and Then’, in Walter Veit (ed.), Captain James Cook Image and Impact: South Seas
Discoveries and the World of Letters (Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, 1972), vol. 2,
43–53. See also Astrid Betz, Inszenierung der Südsee, 73–75.
29. Intelligenzblatt der Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung, 15.4.1795, cols 314–18; 20
June1795, 498–500; here 500.
30. Augustus von Kotzebue, La Perouse: A Drama in Two Acts, trans. Benjamin
Thomson, (London: Vernor & Hood, 1799), 3. A rival translation appeared the
same year by Anne Plumptre, who, like Thomson, translated several of Kotzebue’s
better known plays into English. All page references to quotations are from
Thomson’s version and will be given in parentheses after the citation.
31. See Jürg Mathes (ed.) August von Kotzebue, Schauspiele (Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum
1972), 566.
32. Ibid., 115f.
33. Ibid., 569.
34. Ibid., 569–70.
35. On the tradition of the sacrificial woman in Western literature, see Elisabeth
Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1990); and in the opera, Catherine Clément,
Opera, or the Undoing of Women (Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press,
1989).
36. John Fawcett, Obi; or, Three Finger’d Jack (London, 1800). Reprint in Peter J. Kitson
and Debbie Lee (eds), Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation: Writings in the British
Romantic Period, vol. 5, Drama, ed. Jeffrey Cox (London: Pickering & Chatto,
1999). John Davy (1763–1824) joined the orchestra of the Covent Garden theatre
in the 1790s, John Moorehead (?-1804) was an Irish violinist.
37. The Times, 2 March 1801, 3.
38. London Chronicle, 28 Feb.–3 March, 1801; cited in Betz, Inszenierung der Südsee, 97.
39. This summary is based on an account given in The Dramatic Censor, 28 February
1801, 133–6.
40. Ibid., 138.
41. Ibid., 139.
42. Evening Paper, 19 May 1824.
43. Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: University
of Hawai‘i Press, 1968), 73.
44. The Times, 20 May 1824, 2 col.e.
45. The reference here is to General James Oglethorpe, who took a party of Creek
Indians to London as a publicity stunt for the new colony of Georgia. Even more
noteworthy were the famous ‘Four Indian Kings’ with ties to the Iroquois confed-
eracy, who created a genuine sensation in the London of the early eighteenth

Notes 227
century. Their ‘progress’ has many parallels to that of the Hawaiians. See Eric
Hinderaker, ‘The “Four Indian Kings” and the Imaginative Construction of
the First British Empire’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 53:3 (1996),
487–526; and Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circumatlantic Performance (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996), ch. 4, ‘Feathered Peoples’.
46. Unidentified newspaper clipping held by the National Library of Australia, acces-
sion number s8467. Citations from this source will be marked NLA.

47. Ibid.
48. See The Times, 31 May 1824, 2 col. c.
49. NLA.
50. The description of the performance at Covent Garden is taken from a clipping
in NLA.
51. Cited in Johann N. Schmidt, Ästhetik des Melodramas (Heidelberg: Carl Winter
1986), 54.
52. See Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nine-
teenth Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). According
to Meisel, a ‘realization’ is a frozen moment of significant action.
53. The Times, 12 July 1824, 5, col. c.
54. Daws, Shoal of Time, 74.
55. See Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South
Seas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); and Rod Edmond, Representing the South
Pacific: Colonial discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
56. For a detailed discussion of the ballet, see Betz, Inszenierung der Südsee, 107–15.
Chapter 3 Comedians and crusaders: anti-theatrical

prejudice in the South Seas
1. James Wilson, A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean, 1796–1798, intro.
by Imgrad Moschner (First pub. London 1799; Graz: Akademische Druck– und
Verlagsanstalt, 1966), 73.
2. For a comparative overview of the different missions and islands, see
I. C. Campbell, A History of the Pacific Islands (Christchurch: Canterbury University
Press, 1989), ch. 5; for a discussion of the Catholic approach to missionization,
see Andrew Hamilton, ‘Nineteenth–Century French Missionaries and Fa’a Samoa’,
The Journal of Pacific History, 33:2 (1998), 163–77.
3. Niel Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas,
1797–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 181.
4. Ibid., 48.
5. Ibid., 181.
6. Ibid.
7. Jonas Barish, The Anti–Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1981), 317.
8. Gunson, Messengers of Grace, 181.
9. George Burder, Lawful Amusements: A Sermon, preached at the Thursday-Evening
Lecture Fetter Lane January 10, 1805 (London: Biggs & Co., 1805). Page references
will be given in brackets after the citation.
11. Cited in Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual
Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 82.

228 Notes
12. The best summary of the ethnographic material is still Douglas Oliver, Ancient
Tahitian Society (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1974), ii. 913–64.
13. See Edward Handy, History and Society in the Society Islands (Honolulu: Bishop
Museum, 1930), 62. The feather girdle became an object of considerable import-
ance in internal Tahitian politics. It incorporated the pennant Samuel Wallis
presented to Oberea, and later the hair of Richard Skinner, one of the mutineers
of the Bounty. Its possession gave Pomare I substantial power when he finally

assumed the role of king of the Tahitian group. See Oliver, Ancient Tahitian Society,
iii. 1213–16; and Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2001), 150.
14. Lamb, Preserving the Self, 150.
15. Oliver, Ancient Tahiti, ii. 917.
16. William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, new edn, [1831] (Rutland, Vermont: Charles
E. Tuttle, 1969), i. 236.
17. See J. C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of
Discovery. The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press 1955), 128. Cook’s account is lifted practically verbatim from Banks’s
journal, where he describes the arioi in the section ‘Manners & Customs of the
South Sea Islands’.
18. For these and further epithets, see Oliver, Ancient Tahitian Society, ii. 913.
19. George Forster, A Voyage Round the World, in His Britannic Majesty’s Resolution.
Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the years 1772, 3, 4, and 5, 2 vols, (London:
B. White 1777), ed. N. Thomas and O. Berghof, i. 392.
20. Ibid.
21. J. R. Forster, Observations made during a Voyage round the World, ed. Nicholas
Thomas et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), 289–90.
22. Ibid., 290.
23. Transactions of the Missionary Society (London 1801), i. 216–17.
24. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, i. 233–4; and Oliver, Ancient Tahitian Society, ii. 917.
25. Hiram Bingham, A Residence of 21 years in the Sandwich Islands; on the Civil,
Religious, and Political History of those Islands, 3rd edn [1849] (New York: Praeger,
1969), 123.
26. Ibid., 124f.
27. For an account of hula in the second half of the nineteenth century, see
Chapter 4.
28. Information on the baptism is taken from the annual circular of the Winward
Division of Tahitian Mission, 18 May 1819. SOAS, South Seas Odds, Box 6. The
text is by H(enry) Bicknell and was printed on the mission press. Cited hereafter
as Bicknell.
29. Bicknell, n.p.
30. Bicknell.
31. Missionary Sketches, no. 3, [1818] 2nd edn August 1820, n.p. All subsequent quota-
tions are from this article.
32. V. Smith, Literary Culture, 58.
34. V. Smith, Literary Culture, 58.
35. Ebenezer Prout, Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. John Williams, Missionary to Polynesia
(London: John Snow, 1843), 537.
36. See Kati Röttger, ‘The Devil’s Eye: Goethe, Faust, and the Laterna Magica’, in
Christopher Balme, Robert Erenstein and Cesare Molinari (eds), European Theatre
Iconography (Rome: Bulzoni, 2002), 243–52.

Notes 229
37. Prout, Memoirs, 537–8.

38. Cited in V. Smith, Literary Culture, 59.
39. Prout, Memoirs, 538.
40. SOAS South Seas Odds Box 11, folder 8.
41. Ship Ahoy!: The Story of the Missionary Ships John Williams I. to IV: A Demonstration
for Boys. Arranged by rev. Hugh Parry (London: LMS, n.d.), 11.
42. The list ‘Other John Williams Material’ is contained in SOAS South Seas Odds

Box 11, folder 6.
43. ‘The John Williams Tableaux: Pioneer Missionary to the South Seas, 1817–1839.
Stage Plans and Prolocutor’s Notes’. Typescript (London: Livingstone Press, 1933),
3. Subsequent page references to quotations will be given in the text.
44. ‘John Williams Moving Tableaux: Notes for Producing Moving Tabs; unpub.
typescript, 4. SOAS South Seas, Odds, Box 11, Folder 6.
45. John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Seas (London:
J. Snow, 1837), 119. Williams probably borrowed the idea from a similar anecdote
found in John Martin and William Mariner’s Account of the Natives of the Tonga
Islands (1817), where King Finow of Tonga is astounded by a similar demonstra-
tion of the written word, in this case his own name; see preface to Neil Rennie,
Far–Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995), v.
Chapter 4 Dressing the hulas and taming the haka:

performing identity in Hawai‘i and New Zealand
1. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797
(London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 2.
2. See, in particular, Homi Bhabha, ‘On other things’, in his The Location of Culture
(London: Routledge, 1994); Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Liter-
ature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 216.
3. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), 62, 74.
4. Ibid., 55.
5. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 63.
6. Augustin Krämer, Hawai‘i, Ostmikronesien und Samoa: Meine zweite Südseereise
(1897–1899) zum Studium der Atolle und ihrer Bewohner (Stuttgart: Strecker &
Schröder, 1906), 125–7. My translation.
7. For an account of the coup d’état, see Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the
Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1968). Today, there is
still ongoing discussion of reparations on the model of the Alaska Native Claims
Settlement Act of 1971, or the reparations paid to Maori tribes in New Zealand
in the 1990s, but understandable reluctance on the part of the US authorities to
begin such negotiations. In 1983, the Native Hawaiians Study Commission set
up by President Ronald Reagan reported to Congress that there was no ‘official’
US government involvement in the coup d’état and hence no liability.
8. The discursive means by which this knowledge came about cannot be reflected
on here. For a discussion of this question, see Elizabeth Buck, Paradise Remade:
Politics of Culture and History in Hawai‘i (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1993).
9. Nathaniel Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawai‘i: The Sacred Songs of the Hula
(Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 11–12.

230 Notes
10. Ibid., 216.

11. For a critical discussion of the early sources, see Dorothy B. Barrère, Mary Kawena
Pukui and Maron Kelly, Hula: Historical Perspectives, (Honolulu: Bishop Museum
Press, 1980), 22–55.
12. Martha Beckwith, ‘The Hawaiian Hula dance’, Journal Of American Folklore, 29:113
(1916), 410–11.
13. Beckwith notes: ‘Because of this artificial form of innuendo, many of the songs

quoted by Dr. Emerson are to-day unintelligible without a key. Many depend not
only upon knowledge of an historical allusion, but upon some specious analogy,
either of sound or of image, which carries the trick of punning and metaphor to
a very high pitch, and makes an art of riddling.’ Ibid., 412.
14. Barrère, et al., Hula: Historical Perspectives, 21.
15. For a theoretical discussion of the problem of representation of performance
and theatrical iconography, see Christopher B. Balme, ‘Interpreting the Pictorial
Record: Theatre Iconography and the Referential Dilemma’, Theatre Research Inter-
national, 22:3 (October 1997), 190–201.
16. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Repres-
entation (New York: Hill & Wang, 1985), 92.
17. James Cook and James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (London: Strahan
& Cadell, 1784), iii. 27; cited in Roger G. Rose (ed.), Hawai‘i: The Royal Isles,
exhibition catalogue (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1980), 186.
18. On this voyage Cook and his crew had little opportunity to witness ceremonial
hula performances; see Rose, Hawai‘i: The Royal Isles, 185.
19. See also the drawings executed by Louis Choris while on board Otto von
Kotzebue’s Pacific voyage (1815–18). Although not published until 1822, his
drawings and the lithographs executed after them refer to a performance Choris
witnessed in 1816. Female dancers are clad in what folklorists and ethnographers
consider to be traditional costume: a skirt made of tapa cloth and anklets plus the
hand-held rattle. Choris makes an interesting gender distinction between women
and men: the former, he says, performing it ‘as an amusement; the men, on the
contrary, are professional dancers, and are paid’. Louis Choris, Voyage Pittoresque
autour du Monde (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1822), 18; cited in Johannes C. Andersen,
Maori Music, with its Polynesian Background [AMS Reprint 1978] (New Plymouth:
T. Avery, 1934), 103.
20. See Andersen, Maori music, 104; and Rose, Hawai‘i: The Royal Isles, 186, fig. 142.
Arienne Kaeppler terms the image Hula kuhi lima in traditional attire; Adrienne
Kaeppler, Polynesian Dance (Honolulu: Alpha, Delta Kappa, 1983), 37, fig. 13.
21. Jacques Arago, Souvenirs d’un aveugle: Voyage autour du monde (Paris: Hortet et
Ozanne,1839), iii. 124. My translation.
22. Ibid., iii. 126.
23. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), xii.
24. Rose, Hawai‘i: The Royal Isles, 186.
25. Theodore-Adolphe Barrot, Unless Haste is Made, trans. Rev. Daniel Dole (Kailua:
Hawai‘i Press 1978), 50.
26. See M. K. Costa, ‘Dance in the Society and Hawaiian Islands as Presented by the
Early Writers, 1767–1842’, unpub. MA thesis, University of Hawai‘i, 1951, 58.
The history of hula, particularly its ill fortune under the missionaries, has been
extensively documented and need not be repeated here. For different perspectives,
see also (in chronological order) Emerson Unwritten Literature of Hawai‘i, 1909;
Barrère et al., Hula: Historical Perspectives, 1980; Kaeppler, Polynesian Dance, 1983;
and most recently, Buck, Paradise Remade, 1993, 112ff.

Notes 231
27. Ambrotype was one of the earliest photographic procedures and involved printing
on glass a positive image on a wet plate collodion. It was superseded by negative
plates and film.
28. Barrère et al., Hula: Historical Perspectives, 41.
29. Rose, Hawai‘i: The Royal Isles, 1980, 187.
30. Kaeppler, Polynesian Dance, 23.
31. For an in-depth study of the touristic context of hula, see Jane C. Desmond,

Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1999).
32. For the origin of the grass skirts, see Barrère et al. Hula: Historical Perspectives, 72.
33. As most tourists to Hawai‘i quickly learn, Hawaiian band music is closely linked
to a Prussian Heinrich (Henri) Berger (1844–1929) who became the acclaimed
bandmaster of the Royal Hawaiian Band, serving under both King David Kalakaua
and Queen Lili’uokalani. Berger, a highly regarded musician in the Prussian army,
was first sent to Hawai‘i in 1872 on loan from Germany to conduct the King’s
band, but assumed full leadership in 1877 and became a naturalized Hawaiian
subject in 1879. As well as conducting and composing, he also devoted himself
to arranging and publishing traditional Hawaiian music. Among many other
compositions he composed the national anthem, ‘Hawai‘i Pono‘i’.
34. Kaeppler, Polynesian Dance, 24.
35. Frank Davey specialized in producing photographs and stereos for the growing
tourist market. See Lynn Davis, Na Pa’i Ki’i: The Photographers in the Hawaiian
Islands, 1845–1900, Bishop Museum Special Publication No. 69 (Honolulu,
Hawai‘i: Bishop Museum Press, 1980). See also Jane C. Desmond, Staging
Tourism, ch. 2.
36. For a discussion of the image of the Maori as a warrior people as an invention
catering to a European discursive construction, cf. the article by Toon van Meijl,
‘The Maori as Warrior: Ideological Implications of a Historical Image’, European
Imagery and Colonial History in the Pacific, ed. Toon van Meijl and Paul van der
Grijp (Saarbrücken: Verlag für Entwicklungspolitik Breitenbach, 1994), 49–63.
37. For a discussion of Seddon’s imperial ambitions, especially in the South Pacific,
see Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth,
1980), 217–21.
38. R[obert] A. Loughnan, Royalty in New Zealand: The Visit of their Royal Highnesses
The Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, June 10th–27th 1901. A Descriptive
Narrative (Wellington: John Mackay, Government Printing Office, 1902), v.
39. The relationship of the Maori to the British Crown has been, and still is, a vexed
one and cannot be easily summarized. In the nineteenth century, a number of
Maori leaders still viewed the British sovereign as an impartial place of appeal for
their conflicts with the white-settler governments.
40. Jennifer Shennan has pointed out the importance of these early large-scale hui
for the exchange of performance ideas: ‘Such gatherings may have sharpened
an appreciation for the contrast between area styles and conventions within the
dance forms, but there may also have been incentive for encouraging uniformity
in some features.’ The Maori Action Song (New Zealand Council for Educational
Research, Wellington,1984), 23.
41. Royalty in New Zealand, 63.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 74.
44. The leader of the group is Mrs Kemp, wife of a Wanganui chief who fought with
the NZ militia during the land wars of the 1860s.

232 Notes
45. Royalty in New Zealand, 76.

46. Ibid., 99.
47. Ibid., 99.
Chapter 5 Kindred spirits: spectacles of Samoa in

Wilhelminian Germany

1. Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978),
xvi. 281. My translation.
2. On Carl Hagenbeck, see Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts (Baltimore, Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002). Despite Hagenbeck’s European-scale operations,
there is not a lot of research available in English. The German literature on
the other hand is considerable. The most comprehensive study to date is Hilke
Thode-Arora, Für fünfzig Pfenning um die Welt: Die Hagenbeckschen Völkerschauen
(Frankfurt am Main/ New York: Campus 1989).
3. Hermann Joseph Hiery, Das deutsche Reich in der Südsee (1900–1921): Eine
Annäherung an die Erfahrungen verschiedener Kulturen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1995), 26–34.
4. See the very early study by Emil Wächter, Der Prestigegedanke in der deutschen
Politik von 1890–1914 (Aarau: Sauerländer, 1941).
5. Quoted in Hiery, Das deutsche Reich, 28–29 (my translations). Bennigsen’s confla-
tion of Melanesians and Polynesians is intentional and caters to the prevailing
discourse that saw ‘handsome’ Polynesians closer to Europeans than the ‘savage’
Melanesians.
6. E. F. Reye, Samoanische Zeitung, 13 January 1906, p. 6. My translation.
7. The positive connotations attached to the Samoans’ light skin colour should
not be underestimated as a determining factor in the discursive construction
of the Samoans in the European mind. Amateur anthropologists, such as the
colonist W. von Bülow, were convinced of the Aryan origins of the Samoans; see
Robert Tobin, ‘Venus von Samoa: Rasse und Sexualität im deutschen Südpazifik’,
Kolonialismus als Kultur, ed. Alexander Honold and Oliver Simons (Tübingen:
Francke, 2000), 197–220, here 203–4.
8. The proceedings of the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und
Urgeschichte were published in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 22 (1890), 387–
94. Henceforth cited as ZfE. Page references to quotations are given in text. All
translations are my own.
9. For an account of the troupe, see Roslyn Poignant’s study of Cunningham’s
activities: Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2004), 198–201.
10. See Virchow’s complaints in ZfE 22 (1890), 404f.; and Sibylle Benninghoff-
Lühl, ‘Die Ausstellung der Kolonisierten: Völkerschauen von 1874–1932’,
Andenken an den Kolonialismus: Eine Ausstellung des Völkerkundlichen Instituts
der Universität Tübingen, ed. Volker Harms (Tübingen: Attempo, 1984), 52–65,
here 58.
11. Benninghoff-Lühl, ‘Die Ausstellung der Kolonisierten’, 59.
12. ZfE 22 (1890), 589.
13. For a critical view of Virchow, see Andrew Zimmerman, ‘Adventures in the
Skin Trade: German Anthropology and Colonial Corporeality’, in Glenn H.
Penny and Matti Bunzl (eds), Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the
Age of Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; 2003), 156–78, here

Notes 233
158. Zimmerman discusses Virchow’s ‘antihumanistic’ stance more fully in his

book-length study, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001).
14. According to Carl Marquardt’s account, the dates were: 1895–96, 1897; 1900, 1901
and 1910–11, Carl Marquardt’s ‘Die Futa’: Ein Sittenbild aus dem dunklen Afrika,
(Berlin: Selbstverlag 1905), n.p. Samoans also featured at American international
expositions over roughly the same period. See Eawan Johnston, ‘ “Polynesien in

der Plaisance”: Das samoanische Dorf und das Theater der Südseeinseln auf der
Weltausstellung in Chicago 1893’, in Eckhardt Fuchs (ed.), Weltausstellungen im
19. Jahrhundert (Leipzig. Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2000), 89–102.
15. Rudolf Virchow, 1896 quoted in Jutta Steffen-Schrade, ‘Exkurs: Samoaner im
Frankfurter Zoo’, Talofa! Samoa, Südsee Ansichten und Einsichten, ed. Gerda Kroeber-
Wolf and Peter Mesenhöller (Franfurt am Main: Museum für Völkerkunde,
1998), 370.
16. See Sierra Ann Bruckner, ‘The Tingle-Tangle of Modernity: Popular Anthropology
and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Imperial Germany’, PhD thesis, University
of Iowa, 1999, 376f.
17. Denkschrift, 4. Bundesarchiv Potsdam, R1001, 5576, cited in Bruckner, 380; her
translation.
18. Bruckner, ‘The Tingle-Tangle of Modernity’, 378–9.
19. Carl Marquardt, ‘Land und Leute der Samoa-Inseln’, Ausstellung Samoa: Unsere
neuen Landsleute, programme booklet (Leipzig: Giesecke & Devrient, 1901), 2–3.
20. Quoted in Bruckner, ‘The Tingle-Tangle of Modernity’, 422, note 90.
21. A copy of this letter with Solf’s handwritten corrections is contained in the
German Colonial Archives (GCA), folder 0454 and 0455, National Archives,
Wellington. Most of the archival material cited in this chapter is found in the
folder ‘Ceremonies and Etiquette’, 1906–1910, collected by German colonial offi-
cials in Apia. It contains several hundred pages of newspaper clippings, letters and
assorted materials, documenting in the main officially organized celebrations.
The very existence of such a bureaucratic category ‘Ceremonies and Etiquette’
testifies to the increasing importance laid on such events.
22. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York:
Performing Arts Publications, 1982), 80.
23. Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events
24. C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 7.
25. Miinchner Neueste Nachrichten, 26 April, 1900, 2. My translation.
26. Samoanische Zeitung, 26 February, 1910, nos. 9, 7.
27. The following account of festivities is drawn mainly from a commemorative
publication: Zur Erinnerung an die Festlichkeiten zur Feier der Wiederkehr des Tages
der Deutschen Flaggenhissung 1900–1910 (Apia: E. Luebke, 1910). The author Erich
Luebke was the publisher of the Samoanische Zeitung. Additional material has
been drawn from newspaper reports.
28. See here Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, 4th edn (London: Verso, 1987).
29. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
30. On German festivity culture (Festkultur) of the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth century, see George L. Mosse, Die Nationalisierung der Massen: Politische
Symbolik und Massenbewegungen in Deutschland von den Napoleonischen Kriegen bis
zum Dritten Reich (Frankfurt a.M. and Berlin: Ullstein, 1976); Reinhold Grimm

234 Notes
and Jost Hermand (ed.), Deutsche Feiern (Wiesbaden: Athenäum, 1977); for the
Sedan and Kaiser’s birthday celebrations, see Fritz Schellack, ‘Sedan- und Kais-
ergeburtstagfeste’, in Öffentliche Festkultur: Politische Feste in Deutschland von der
Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Dieter Düding et al. (Reinbek: Rowohlt,
1988), 278–97.
31. Most of these monuments (except the Bismarck memorial) are still extant on the
Mulinu’u peninsular in Apia and have been joined by Samoan additions.

32. See the article in the Samoanische Zeitung, 20 January 1906, announcing the
Kaiser’s birthday celebrations: ‘As in former years, the anniversary of the birthday
of His Imperial Majesty, Kaiser Wilhelm II, will be celebrated on the 26th and
27th, with the usual functions and festivities’ (my italics).
33. Quoted in Zur Erinnerung an die Festlichkeiten, n.p.
34. For vivid descriptions of ta’alolo of the period, see Siegfried Genthe, Samoa:
Reiseschilderungen (Berlin: Allg. Verein für Dt. Literatur, 1908), 175f.; and Frank
Lenwood, Pastels from the Pacific (London: Humphrey Milford and Oxford
University Press, 1917), 56–9.
35. Schulz went so far as to have himself tattooed in the Samoan fashion. See Hans
Fischer, Warum Samoa? Touristen und Tourismus in der Südsee (Berlin: Dietrich
Reimer 1984), 274–5, who cites N. A. Rowe, Samoa under the Sailing Gods (London
and New York: Putnam, 1930), 85.
36. The reference here is Erving Goffman’s concept of frame analysis, keying being
the procedure whereby conceptual frames are changed. See his Frame Analysis: An
Essay on the Organisation of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1974).
37. See here the recent publication: Bilder aus dem Paradies: Koloniale Fotografie
aus 1875–1925, ed. Jutta Beate Engelhard and Peter Mesenhöller (Cologne:
Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde, 1995).
38. Augustin Krämer, Die Samoa-Inseln: Entwurf einer Monographie mit besonderer
Berücksichtigung Deutsch-Samoas (Stuttgart, E. Schweizerbart, 1902–03), ii. 315. My
translation.
39. Samoanische Zeitung, 8 January 1910, n.p.
40. At the outbreak of World War I, New Zealand sent a military force to Western
Samoa and occupied the islands. The German administration capitulated without
putting up any significant armed resistance. For a detailed account of this period,
see Hermann J. Hiery, The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the influence
of World War I (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995).
Chapter 6 Birds of Paradise: American-Pacific dramas

of displacement
1. For a discussion of other theatrical representations of the Pacific resulting from US
military and political involvement in the region in the early twentieth century,
see Margaret Werry, ‘The Greatest Show on Earth: Spectacular Politics, Political
Spectacle, and the American Pacific’, Theatre Journal 58:3 (2005), 4–35.
2. Homi Bhabha, ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency’,
in his The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
3. Despite the play’s popularity, there is very little literature on it. An early discussion
of the play and its fortunes can be found in a now out-of-print account of
Hawai‘i and the Pacific, Anatomy of Paradise, by the social historian and novelist
J. C. Furnas, first published in 1937 and revised in 1948: Anatomy of Paradise:

Notes 235
Hawai‘i and the Islands of the South Seas, rev. edn (New York: W. Sloane Associates,
1948). Jane C. Desmond provides a brief analysis in her study of hula, Staging
Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1999), 65–6. For a more detailed discussion, see my article ‘Selling the
Bird: Richard Walton Tully’s The Bird of Paradise and the Dynamics of Theatrical
Commodification’, Theatre Journal, 57:1 (2005), 1–20.
4. Richard Walton Tully, ‘A Bird of Paradise: An American play in three acts’,

no place (1911). All quotations are from the typescript held in the Library of
Congress, page references are given in parenthesis in the text. This appears to be
the only extant copy. The indefinitive article of the title was later changed to
‘The Bird of Paradise’.
5. Anon., ‘Bird of Paradise has Scenic Beauty’, The New York Times, 9 January 1912,
VIII. 4.
6. The Times, 21 August,1919, 8, col. d.
7. On the eve of the London production, The Times reported that in the previous
season, i.e., 1918–19, it brought in receipts of over £40,000, which converts to
approximately $100,000 at the exchange rate of the time. The Times, ibid.
8. See J. C. Furnas, Anatomy of Paradise: Hawai‘i and the Islands of the South Seas, rev.
edn (New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1948), 416.
9. Fendler v Morosco, Opinion of Court of Appeals of New York, 18 March 1930,
16. Source: <https://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document>. Accessed 6 April
2002.
10. Hawaiian slack key guitar (ki ho’alu) is a unique acoustic guitar tradition developed
in the islands. In this tradition, the strings (or ‘keys’) are adjusted or ‘slacked’ to
produce many different tunings and the characteristic lingering sound.
11. See Tim Gracyk and Frank Hoffmann, Popular American Recording Pioneers,
1895–1925 (New York, London and Oxford: The Haworth Press, 2000), 117–19.
Also significant, according to the authors, was the appearance in 1915 of Keoki
Awai’s Royal Hawaiian Quartette at the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in
San Francisco. In late 1915 Victor began issuing Hawaiian discs on a monthly basis.
12. According to Library of Congress records, the poster was produced between 1936
and 1941. An exact date of the production is not given.
13. There had of course been sporadic hula performances on the mainland before
then; for an account, see Desmond, Staging Tourism, ch. 3.
14. Marguerite Courteney, Laurette (New York: Atheneum, 1966), 113.
15. Ibid., 113–14.
16. In her determined pursuit of cultural authenticity, Taylor managed to acquire
something like a Hawaiian accent which, in the ‘eyes’ of some reviewers, was
detrimental to her diction. In a feature article on her in the New York Times, she
relates how she cultivated the accent: ‘When I accepted the role [Tully] told me
that the Hawaiian women were soft-spoken, that they fondled the vowels like
all warm-climate people, and that they dropped the t’s and the d’s. And another
friend said that Hawaiian women always seemed to be apologizing when they
spoke in English. So I took all of the suggestions, and that’s why Luana speaks
as she does.’ ‘Laurette Taylor Confesses: Actress Discusses Her Hawaiian Role and
tells of Her Ambitions’, The New York Times, 9 January 1912, VII. 8.
17. Furnas, Anatomy of Paradise, 115. Tully’s ‘expertise’ in matters of Hawaiian culture
had been acquired in the course of two visits to the islands, one of which was
financed by an advance from Morosco on the strength of the original scenario.
18. The 1932 version was an RKO Radio production, produced by David O. Selznick.
The rights to the stage play had been purchased by his predecessor at RKO

236 Notes
W. LeBaron. It was filmed again in 1952, directed by Delmer Daves, and featuring
Louis Jourdan as a French sailor who falls in love with the sister (Debra Paget) of
his Polynesian friend (Jeff Chandler). The similarity with the original is again the
volcanic sacrifice.
19. For the term ‘salvage paradigm’, see Chapter 7, note 18.
20. Tully, ‘The Bird of Paradise’, 1.
21. For an account of the coup d’état, see Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the

Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1968).
22. Cited in Fendler v Morosco, 13. See note 8.
23. I do not want to argue that Tully was an active advocate of eugenics. His anxiety
regarding racial ‘dilution’ with its attendant enervation of ‘the Anglo-Saxon race’
constitutes part of a wider set of beliefs that fed into the ‘science’ of eugenics.
In his recent study, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Plan to Create a
Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), Edwin Black demon-
strates that the programme was not just racially motivated but was also directed
at ‘inferior’ members of the ‘superior’ race, as the Nazi euthanasia programme so
lethally demonstrated.
24. Los Angeles Times, 12 September 1911, II. 5.
25. See Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race
(London: Routledge, 1995).
26. Melville’s anti-missionary diatribe can be found in Typee, ch. 26, where he excori-
ates the local American missionaries in Honolulu.
27. Robert Lorin Calder, W. Somerset Maugham and the Quest for Freedom (London:
Heineman, 1972), 138.
28. See Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South
Seas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 220.
29. W. Somerset Maugham, ‘Rain’, in The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset
Maugham (London: Heinemann, 1972), i. 38.
30. For information on Colton and the background to the play, see Ward More-
house, Matinee Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Our Theatre (New York: Whittlesey House,
1949), 194–5; and John Gassner, ‘Introduction’ to Rain, in Best American Plays,
1918–1958 (New York: Crown, 1961), 48. All quotations from the play refer to
this edition, page references are given in parenthesis in the text. It was first
published as Rain; a play in three acts, founded on W. Somerset Maugham’s story,
‘Miss Thompson’, by John Colton and Clemence Randolph (New York: Boni &
Liveright, 1923).
31. The passage in question reads: ‘Most of all we would need to intensify the illusion
in reconstructing the environments, less for their picturesque quality than for
their dramatic utility. The environment must determine the character.’ Émile
Zola, ‘Naturalism in the theatre’, trans. Albert Bermel, in Eric Bentley (ed.), The
Theory of the Modern Stage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 368.
32. It is perhaps not irrelevant to note that the real Sadie Thompson was deported
back to Honolulu not for her past life as a prostitute or her flirtations with US
Marines, but because she evidenced an inordinate interest in the local Samoan
men. She even propositioned a local policeman.
33. For an account of William Jennings Bryan and the Monkey Trial of 1925, see
Sprague De Camp, The Great Monkey Trial (New York: Doubleday, 1968). The case
returned to public consciousness in 1955 against the background of McCarthyism
when the play Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee was
premiered in Dallas, Texas, before transferring to New York. It was filmed in 1960,
starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March.

Notes 237
34. For an account of moral ‘backsliding’ among the missionaries, see Niel Gunson,
Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas. 1797–1860 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1978), 152–9.
35. Colton’s only other notable success was the melodrama The Shanghai Gesture
(1926), which was filmed by Josef von Sternberg in 1941 with Gene Tierney in
the leading role.
36. Morehouse, Matinee Tomorrow, 196.

37. John Corbin, ‘Rain’, New York Times, 8 November 1922, 18.
38. Gassner, ‘Introduction’ to Rain, in Best American Plays, 48.
39. A. Barnstone, et al. (eds.) The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (Hanover and
London: University Press of New England 1997), xxi.
40. See Donald Denoun et al. (eds) The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 314–15. See also the attempt to
reconstruct the indigenous response to the Pacific war in: The Pacific Theater:
Island Representations of World War II, ed. Geoffrey M. White and Lamont
Lindstrom, Pacific Islands Monograph Series, no. 8, (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 1989).
41. Not only did the stories win the Pulitzer Prize, but so too did the musical play.
The film version, also directed by Joshua Logan, was linked with technical innov-
ations, such as the use of Todd-AO and Cinemascope and colour filters. For a
discussion of these and other media-related ‘breakthroughs’, see Philip D. Beidler,
‘South Pacific and American Remembering; or, “Josh, We’re Going to Buy This
Son of a Bitch!”’, Journal of American Studies, 27:2 (1993), 207–22.
42. See Patricia McGhee, ‘South Pacific Revisited: Were we Carefully Taught or Rein-
forced?’, Journal of Ethnic Studies, 15:4 (1988), 125–30; here 129, note 8; and
Beidler, ‘South Pacific and American Remembering’, for a discussion of the various
technological innovations associated with South Pacific.
43. Bruce A. McConachie, ‘The “Oriental” Musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein
and the U.S. War in Southeast Asia’, in Marc Maufort (ed.), Cultural Pluralism in
American Theatre and Drama (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 57–74.
44. See Burgin’s discussion with Homi Bhabha in Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays
from Visual Anthropology Review, 1990–94, ed. Lucien Taylor (New York: Rout-
ledge), 453.
45. On this point, see Beidler, who argues that Michener’s Tales reveal not only the
‘terse authority’ of the eye-witness but also intertextual debts to Melville, Maugham,
Conrad, Stevenson and others, as well as the genre of the pre-war South Seas
adventure movie; Beidler, ‘South Pacific and American Remembering’, 209–11.
46. Jonathan Culler, ‘Semiotics of Tourism’, American Journal of Semiotics, 1:1 (1981),
127.
47. James A. Michener, Tales of the South Pacific (London: Corgi Books, 1964), 157.
48. South Pacific, in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, 6 Plays by Rodgers
and Hammerstein (New York: Random House 1953). Page references to quotations
will be indicated in brackets after the citation.
49. See the next chapter for a more detailed discussion of Bhabha’s theory of colonial
mimicry.
50. Michener, Tales, 157–8.
51. The replacement of indigenous culture with signs of an Asian or ‘Oriental’
presence is reinforced in the stage version of the musical. The opening scene
direction, describing the setting of Emile De Becque’s plantation, specifies a ‘teak-
wood pagoda’, presumably a shrine for the Tonkinese labourers: Rodgers and
Hammerstein, South Pacific, 273.

238 Notes
52. Michener,Tales, 164.

53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 165.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 168.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 177.

59. See McGhee, ‘South Pacific Revisited’; note 50.
60. For a lavishly illustrated account of the visual culture of ‘Polynesian Pop’, see Sven
A. Kirsten, The Book of Tiki: The Cult of Polynesian Pop in Fifties America (Cologne:
Taschen, 2000).
Chapter 7 ‘As you always imagined it’: the Pacific as

tourist spectacle
1. The official guide distributed in 1996, for example, featured prominently two
attractive young women engaged in manufacturing tapa cloth. On the PCC
Home Page we find the claim: ‘Visitors can experience the charm and beauty of
seven authentically recreated South Pacific Island villages in just one day at the
Polynesian Cultural Center’: http://www.polynesia.com/pcc/Info/Fact.html. Last
accessed, 22 July 2004.
2. Dean MacCannell, ‘Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist
Settings’, Journal of American Sociology, 79:3 (1973), 589–603. MacCannell argues
that the various forms of constructed tourist attractions dissolve the clear dicho-
tomy between ‘staged’ and ‘authentic’, or between ‘front’ and ‘back’ situations as
Erving Goffman terms them. In reality one should speak of a continuum linking
the ideal poles of ‘staged’ and ‘authentic’ with at least four intermediary or cross-
over categories between them (598). These categories are by no means immutable
because the insatiable tourist appetite for ‘sights’ seems to provoke redefinitions
of space to cater for this need.
3. For anthropological perspectives, see particularly Nelson Graburn (ed.) Ethnic and
Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1976); and Valene L. Smith (ed.), Hosts and Guests: The Anthro-
pology of Tourism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).
4. Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania
University Press, 1985), particularly chs 1 and 2. The most prominent perform-
ance studies scholar in this area is probably Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destin-
ation Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 1998). Jane Desmond’s study of tourist destina-
tions in Hawai‘i, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), is also an exemplary combination of
performance and cultural studies.
5. The following analysis is based on a succession of visits to the Center since the
early 1990s. Visits took place in 1992, 1996, 1998 and 2000. As the performances
and exhibits are regularly changed, some of the observations may no longer
correspond with the current offerings.
6. Terry Webb, ‘Highly Structured Tourist Art: Form and Meaning of the Polynesian
Cultural Center’, The Contemporary Pacific, 6:1 (1994), 59–86; here 73. Webb is
a Hawai‘i-based anthropologist who has devoted much research to the PCC.
A Mormon view is provided by Max E. Stanton, ‘The Polynesian Cultural Center:

Notes 239
A Multi-Ethnic Model of Seven Pacific Cultures’, in Valene E. Smith (ed.), Hosts

and Guests, 247–62. Stanton is a faculty member of the adjoining Brigham Young
University. He argues that the PCC is constructed around the notion of ‘a model
culture’ portraying ‘the best of those tangible, believable aspects of Polynesian
culture with which the tourist can identify’ (251). See also James Whitehead, ‘The
Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawai‘i, Journal of American Culture, 12:1 (Spring
1989), 1–6. Whitehead argues that the Mormon faith has had a beneficial effect

on encouraging Polynesian dance forms at the Center in comparison to the early
missionary repression of dance.
7. For a more elaborate typology, see Smith, Hosts and Guests. I am principally
concerned with those involving formalized performative elements in a cross-
cultural situation. Hence the commercially important theatre tourism involving
organized trips to musicals and opera in Europe and the United States is not of
interest here.
8. See Schechner, Between Theater, ch. 2. Schechner differentiates this category into
theme parks (Disneyland, Land of Oz), museum villages mixing fantasy and
history (little or no authenticity factor) and historical museum villages concerned
with presenting authentic recreations. The recreation of the historical past is
either nostaglia-driven and/or concerned with cementing and staging myths of
foundation.
9. For a list, see Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt
to Society (London: Verso, 1994), ch. 1 ‘Cultural Preservation in the Polynesia
of the Latter-Day Saints’, 44. In this chapter Ross provides arguably the most
perceptive and critical assessment of the PCC published to date, in addition to a
wide-ranging discussion of the cultural idea of the Pacific today.
10. This text is based on a transcript of performances recorded on videotape by the
author, on 14 April 1996 and March 1998. Although the performer was different,
the text was the same except for minor details.
11. My observation of performances on several different occasions suggests, however,
that a representative ethnic cross-section of the audience is aimed at.
12. Fanon’s ideas on mimicry are most succinctly formulated in his psychological
study, Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles L. Markman (1956, tr.1967; New
York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1982).
13. Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in
his The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), 91. See also the discussion
of mimicry in Chapter 1 in this volume.
14. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). I would like to thank
Marvin Carlson for drawing my attention to the similarity between the Polynesian
performances and Gates’s theory.
15. As mentioned in the previous chapter, there is little doubt that present percep-
tions of the Pacific in the West have been decisively influenced by the Allied–
Japanese conflict in World War II. The Japanese invasion of the Pacific and its
attempt to established a new sphere of influence was not just an invasion in
military terms, but it signalled a geopolitical realignment of a great magnitude
for the Pacific. The idea of Asia in the Pacific has today even more significance,
although now in economic and cultural terms.
16. For the term ‘Fourth World’, see Graburn, Ethnic and Tourist Arts, 1976.
17. Both cultures have experienced intensive cultural revivals over the past decade, as
suggested in Chapter 4. For an assessment of the Hawaiian cultural renaissance,

240 Notes
see Elisabeth Buck, Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai‘i
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).
18. See James Clifford, ‘Of Other Peoples: Beyond the “Salvage” Paradigm’, The
Politics of Representations, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 121–50;
here 121.
19. See Webb, ‘Highly Structured Tourist Art’, and Stanton, ‘The Polynesian Cultural
Center’, who both note the use of anthropologists from BYU.

20. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 19.
21. Jonathan Culler, ‘Semiotics of Tourism’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 1:1/2
(1981), 127; see also John Frow, ‘Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia’, October,
57 (1991), 125.
22. John Urry notes: ‘Indeed acting as a tourist is one of the defining characteristics
of being “modern” and is bound up with major transformations in paid work.’
The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990),
2f. MacCannell links the feelings of ‘shallowness’ and ‘inauthenticity’ of the
‘moderns’ with their interest in ‘the sacred in primitive society’; ‘Staged Authen-
ticity’, 589f. Frow defines tourism among other things as a quest for an authentic
domain of being: ‘It is thus a marker of the spiritual self-reflexivity of modernity
and directly parallel to the self-consciousness of intellectuals about their own
alienation’; Frow, ‘Tourism’, 129.
23. There is in addition an IMAX cinema on site, which varies the Polynesian theme
in another medium. Andrew Ross notes: ‘I was intrigued by the contradictory
presence of this massive high-tech film complex on a site dedicated to theat-
rical ex-primitivism’; ‘Cultural Preservation’, 81. The IMAX cinema features very
prominently in all the publicity material and is evidently considered by the
management to be a major draw-card.
24. The shift in gender roles from the aggressive male Maori warrior to the demure,
domesticated Polynesian women underlines basically traditional topoi in the
history of European perceptions and iconography of Polynesians. There is
certainly no attempt to represent contemporary roles. A recent brochure from
2004 highlights a Tahitian female dancer, one of the oldest Pacific topoi. See:
http://www.polynesia.com/travel_agents/brochures_images.html. Last accessed
22 July, 2004.
25. Pacific Island students make up in fact only about 30 per cent of students
at the BYU campus and most are of Hawaiian origin. See Ross, ‘Cultural
Preservation’, 44.
26. See Webb on the function of the Marquesas as a symbol of cultural destruction.
Since the publication of his article the Marquesan village has developed an elab-
orate performance routine involving a mock pig hut where (male) tourists are
able to ‘hunt and kill’ a pig played by a Marquesan villager.
27. Ross, ‘Cultural Preservation’, 51.
28. By performative sign I mean more than the conventional definition of the sign
in theatre semiotics, which views all signs on stage as signs of signs and is thus a
special form of fictionalization. A performative sign is defined by its dependency
on human agency and is closer to what Judith Butler, expanding on speech
act theory, defines as performativity: the process of reiteration and with it, the
potential for different modes of subjectivity.
29. The term epistemological framing is derived from the notion elaborated by Erving
Goffman that all social behaviour requires conceptual and perceptual frames
within which human beings agree to regulate fundamental modes of behaviour.

Notes 241
Goffman’s classic definition is as follows: ‘I assume that definitions of a situation

are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events –
at least social ones – and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word
I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify.’ Frame
Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1974), 10.
30. See Frederik Errington and Deborah Gwertz, ‘Tourism and Anthropology in a

Post-Modern World’, Oceania, 60:1 (1989), 37–54; here 49. The ‘hazers’ are the
four members of the initiation ritual who carry out the procedure, consisting
mainly of berating and humiliating the initiates.
31. Ross, ‘Cultural Preservation’, 47.
Chapter 8 Translocations and transgressions: the

postcolonial Pacific
1. Although it is difficult to establish a fixed set of criteria for postcolonial theatre,
the two fullest studies of the phenomenon, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tomp-
kins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996); and
Christopher Balme, Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-Colonial
Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), independently of each other identify
shared formal strategies.
2. For a detailed discussion of the term ‘syncretic theatre’, see Christopher B. Balme,
Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-Colonial Drama (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press 1999).
3. These plays represent only a fraction of the production of Pacific Island drama
produced over the past decade. The most detailed survey to date is the German-
language dissertation by Astrid Betz, Die Inszenierung der Südsee, pt 3. See
also Christopher Balme and Astrid Carstensen, ‘Home Fires: Creating a Pacific
Theatre in the Diaspora’, Theatre Research International 26:1 (2001), 35–46; David
O’Donnell and Bronwyn Tweddle, ‘Naked Samoans: Pacific Island Voices in the
Theatre of Aotearoa/New Zealand’, Performance Research, 8:1 (2003), 51–60; David
O’Donnell and Bronwyn Tweddle, ‘Toa Fraser: Shifting Boundaries in Pacific
Island Comedy’, Australasian Drama Studies, 42 (April 2003), 123–37. For an
account of the Hawai‘i scene, see Dennis Carroll, ‘Hawai‘i’s “Local” Theatre’, The
Drama Review, 44:2 (2000), 123–51.
4. James Clifford, ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, 9:3 (1994), 302–338; here 311.
5. See, for example, Emmanuel S. Nelson (ed.), Writers of the Indian Diaspora: A Bio-
Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993). There
has been little research into the specifics of theatre in diasporic situations. A first
attempt can be found in the special number of Theatre Journal, 50:1 (March 1998),
‘Theatre, Diaspora and the Politics of Home’, ed. Loren Kruger.
6. The term diaspora should not be restricted to Pacific Island migrants. The Indian
population in Fiji constitutes a diaspora as do the various Chinese populations
in the Pacific.
7. All but one of the island states named here (Tonga) were either colonial territories
or protectorates of New Zealand and enjoy the status of a ‘special relationship’ to
the former colonial power.
8. See Christopher Balme, ‘New Maori Theatre in New Zealand’, Australasian Drama
Studies, 15/16 (1989/90), 149–66.

242 Notes
9. John Kneubuhl, Think of a Garden and Other Plays (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i
Press, 1997), 23. Page references to further citations will be given in brackets.
10. For the production in Wellington, the Samoan-born director Nathaniel Lees won
the prestigious Chapman Tripp Theatre Award for Best Director.
11. It’s mission statement reads: ‘Pacific Underground’s aims and objectives include:
to use the entertainment industry to tell the stories of Pacific Islanders who live
here to create an awareness of issues facing them, to promote the talents of young

Polynesian artists, and to develop Polynesian Theatre which is accessible to the
whole community, Polynesian and non-Polynesian.’ Since 1992 it has produced
theatre in education shows as well as acclaimed main bills such as Fresh Off The
Boat, Sons, and A Frigate Bird Sings. Zeal Theatre is a theatre company founded
in 1988 which creates original, devised productions dealing with relevant social
issues for a cross-section of Australian society.
12. Goffman notes: ‘Expecting to take up a position in a well-framed realm, he finds
that no particular frame is immediately applicable, or the frame that he thought
was applicable no longer seems to be. He loses command over the formulation
of viable response. He flounders.’ Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of
Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 378f.
13. All quotations from Tatau are transcripts from a videotape of the production,
kindly provided by Pacific Underground.
14. Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993), 97.
15. Ibid., 93f.
16. Henceforth the word fa’afafine will be used as an overall term and not just as a
designation of and for Samoan transgendered persons.
17. For a detailed discussion of the category, see Niko Besnier, ‘Polynesian Gender
Liminality Through Time and Space’, in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third
Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone Books,
1994), 285–328. For a discussion within the context of cross-dressing, see also
Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London: Routledge,
2000), 460–1.
18. Denis Diderot, ‘Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage or Dialogue between
A and B’, in Diderot Interpreter of Nature: Selected Writings, trans. Jean Stewart and
Jonathan Kemp (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1937; rep. 1979), 160.
19. George Mortimer, Observations and remarks made during a voyage to the islands of
Teneriffe, Amsterdam, Maria’s Islands near van Diemen’s land, Otaheite, Sandwich
Islands, Owhyee, the Fox Islands on the North West Coast of America, Tinian, and
from thence to Canton (Dublin 1791; facs. edn., Amsterdam: N. Israel and Da Capo
Press, 1975), 47.
20. Referring to the inhabitants of the Friendly Isles (Tonga), Forster notes: ‘The
outlines of their bodies are not so beautifully feminine, as those of the chiefs in
the Society-Isles [i.e. Tahiti, C.B.]’ J. Forster, Observations, ed. Nicholas Thomas
et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), 157.
21. See Lee Wallace, Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Textualities (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2003). On Gauguin and the māhū, see Stephen
F. Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997).
22. See Bligh’s description of māhū in: William Bligh, The Log of the Bounty, 2 vols ed.
and introduced by Owen Rutter (London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1937), ii. 17.
23. Bengt Danielsson, Love in the South Seas, trans. F. H. Lyon (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1956).

Notes 243
24. Bengt Danielsson et al., ‘Polynesia’s Third Sex: The Gay Life starts in the Kitchen’,
Pacific Islands Monthly, 49:8 (August 1978), 10–13.
25. There is no space to chart the wider story of media representations of fa’afafine.
Apart from a spate of magazine articles, two longer film documentaries contrib-
uted to publicizing and popularizing fa’afafine among television and film audi-
ences: Fa’afafine: Queens of Samoa, directed by Caroline Harker, was first broad-
cast on New Zealand Television One, on 29 September 1995. For a critique, see

Wallace, Sexual Encounters, ch. 6. The independently produced documentary film
Paradise Bent: Boys will be Girls in Samoa was directed by the Australian-based film-
maker Heather Croall. It was shown around the world at various ethnographic
and gay/lesbian film festivals before being broadcast on television in Australia
and Europe. For a discussion, see Johanna Schmidt, ‘Redefining Fa’afafine:
Western Discourses and the Construction of Transgenderism in Samoa’:
http://www.the-sisterhood.net/transworldnews/id56.html. Last accessed 19 May
2006.
26. Oscar Kightley and David Fane, ‘A Frigate Bird Sings’, unpublished typescript,
1995, 1. The following analysis is based on the script and a video of the original
production, recorded on 29 February 1996.
27. Ibid., 53.
28. Ibid.
29. Transcript of an interview with Nat Lees, Television New Zealand, 29 February
1996.
30. Niko Besnier, ‘Transgenderism, Locality, and the Miss Galaxy Beauty Pageant
in Tonga’, American Ethnologist, 29:3 (2002), 534–66; here 534. The following
remarks draw on Besnier’s article as well as video footage of the beauty pageant.
My thanks to Niko Besnier for making this material available.
31. Ibid., 540.
32. See Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘Cultural Invention and the Dilemma of Authenticity’,
American Anthropologist, 93:2 (1991), 446–9.
33. Within this ‘traditional’ frame there appears to be a comfortable coexistence
between fa’afafine and women as well. Generally speaking, as Niko Besnier notes,
Polynesian gender-liminal persons form friendship networks with other women
in the first instance and not with men, Besnier, ‘Polynesian Gender Limin-
ality’, 297.
34. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and
London: Routledge, 1993), 232.
35. Mary Ann Percy, ‘Having a fa’afafine Time in Samoa’, in the Sunday Star,
3 Feburary 2002, n.p.
36. Lisa Taouma in programme notes, cited in: http://www.in-transit.de/2003/
content/en/program/divasiva.html. Last accessed 19 April 2004.
37. For this argument, see O’Donnell and Tweddle, ‘Naked Samoans’; see note 3. On
the fale aitu, see Caroline Sinavaiana, ‘Comic Theater in Samoa as Indigenous
Media’, Pacific Studies, 15.4 (1992), 199–209.
38. Vilsoni Hereniko, ‘Clowning as Political Commentary: Polynesia, Then and Now’,
Contemporary Pacific, 6:1 (1994), 1–28; here 13.
39. Donald Sloan, Polynesian Paradise: An Elaborated Travel Journal Based on Ethno-
logical Facts (London: Robert Hale, 1941), 78. Cited in Hereniko, ‘Clowning as
Political Commentary’, 13.
40. All citations from Naked Samoans Go Home are from a videotape of a live perform-
ance kindly provided by Armstrong Creative, whom I would like to thank for
their assistance.

244 Notes
41. Laurie Atkinson, ‘Crazy Samoans Pack a Punch’, The Dominion Post, 26 September
2003: http://www.nakedsamoans.com/reviews.html. Last accessed 24 April 2005.
42. There is still little scholarly discussion of Mau. See their website: www.mau.co.nz.
43. The use of Maori rituals of encounter in performance was pioneered by the Maori
theatre movement in the 1980s. See my book, Decolonizing the Stage, especially
chs 2 and 7.

Selected Bibliography
Further sources are cited in the notes.

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246 Selected Bibliography
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Index
Note: Figures in italics indicate illustrations.

A Frigate Bird Sings, 203–5 Bingham, Hiram (missionary), 84–5,
Adorno, Theodor W., 122, 133, 134 95, 109
Anderson, William (ship’s surgeon), 39 Bird of Paradise, The (see also Richard
Angiolini, Gasparo (choreographer), 56, Walton Tully), 16, 146, 147, 148–55
224 passim, 163, 174, 177, 235 passim
anthropology, 12–13, 50, 128–9, 232–3 adaptations, 153, 235–6
Antitheatrical prejudice, 5, 75–6, 77, 93 and Federal Theater Project, 152
Arago, Jacques (artist), 105–7 and hula, 153–4
Souvenirs d’un aveugle: Voyage autour du London productions, 149,
monde, 106 plagiarism charges, 149–50
arioi (Tahitian cult), 15, 75, 79–84, 87, racial themes, 154–5
161, 163 stage effects, 148
Arnould-Mussot, Jean François (see use of Hawaiian musicians, 149, 150–1
Death of Captain Cook, The) Bismarck, Otto von, 124, 142
authenticity, 5, 47–8, 55–6, 61, 175–6, opposition to colonialism, 125
179, 181, 186–90 Bligh, Captain William, 13, 60, 61
Botany Bay, 61, 65
Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 1, 7, 9,
Bailey and Barnum circus, 127 10, 12, 14, 29, 32, 50, 72, 79
ballet, 48, 50, 56, 58, 66, 67, 72 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7
Banks, Sir Joseph, 12, 36, 40, 49 Brook, Peter, 204
performing in a Tahitian rite, 44–5 Bryan, William Jennings (US politician),
on the arioi, 81 161
Barrot, Théodore-Adolphe (French Burder, George (cleric), 77, 161
consul), 108 Butler, Judith, 17, 201, 208, 240
Barthes, Roland, 104 Butoh, 213, 215
Bartolozzi, Francesco (artist), 41
Beaglehole, J. C., 12 Cannibalism, 79, 166
Belasco, David (theatre manager and Catholicism (see missionaries)
author), 148 Choris, Louis (artist), 230
Benjamin, Walter, 42 Cipriani, G. B. (artist), 27, 28
Bennigsen, Rudolph von (colonial Clifford, James, 154, 186, 192–3
governor), 125 Collier, Jeremy (Anglican cleric), 77, 78
Berger, Henry (aka Heinrich, bandmaster colonial ceremony (see also Samoa), 16,
in Hawai‘i), 111, 231 135–6
Berlin, Irving (composer), 151 colonial discourse, 12, 96
Berliner Geselllschaft für Anthropologie, colonial mimicry, 8, 22, 42, 106–7,
Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (Berlin 167–8, 176, 182–4, 239
Society for Anthropology, Columbus, Christopher, 19, 21, 26
Ethnology and Prehistory), 127–9 Commerson, Philibert (naturalist), 33
Bhabha, Homi, 22, 96, 147, 182 commodification, 8–9, 17, 147, 153, 172
Bicknell, Henry (missionary), 86 Comoran (German cruiser), 135, 140, 142
251

252 Index
Cook, Captain James, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, Evangelical movement (see missionaries),
14, 19, 20, 36, 38, 43, 49, 79, 105, exoticism, 8–9, 47, 61, 155,
216
as a dramatic character, 51–5, 57–60 fa’afafine, xiii, 17, 192, 200–10, 211, 243
A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, 58 passim
A Voyage towards the South Pole, 25 fa’a Samoa, 207
death, 60, 218, 221 fakaleiti, 200, 205

deification as Lono, 26, 58, 221 fale aitu, 192, 209, 210
observes Tahitian sexual behaviour, 36 Fane, David, 202, 210, 212
on the arioi, 81 Fanon, Frantz, 182
use of music and fireworks, 23–4 Fawcett, John, 66, 67
Cook o sia Gl’inglesi in Othaiti, 14, 48–56 Fendler, Grace Altman, 149–50, 155
Covent Garden Theatre, 58, 66, 70–1 Fesche, Charles-Félix-Pierre, 29–30, 33
cross-cultural encounter Fiji, 11, 124, 164, 177, 178, 241
(see theatricality) folkloristic performance, 97, 101, 113,
Cunningham, Robert A. (impresario), 117, 119–20
127, 130 Forster, Georg(e), 24, 27–8, 40, 74, 81,
Forster, Johann Reinhold, 24, 202
dance pantomime, 56 on drama in Tahiti, 82
Dancing (see also haka, hula, Samoa, Foucault, Michel, 96
Tahiti) 41, 55–6, 59–60 Freycinet, Louis, 105
and sexuality, 38–42 Furneaux, Tobias (ship’s officer), 42
Death of Captain Cook, The, 48, 57–61,
67, 72 Gauguin, Paul, 11, 202, 209, 242
Dening, Greg, 13, 49 Geertz, Clifford, 12, 136
Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, 130 Genealogies of performance, 1–2, 6, 12,
diaspora, 191, 192–3, 196–7, 200, 204, 13, 100, 172
208, 241 Goddefroy & Son (German trading
Diderot, Denis, 50, 224 company), 124
Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 64
10, 53, 201 Goffman, Erving, 143, 197, 234, 240–1,
displacement, 16, 147, 149, 151, 153, 242
157–63, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173 Gore, John (ship’s officer), 49, 52–5
Diva Siva – Fa’afafine Cabaret, 209 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
Dolphin, HMS, 30–1, 34, 35, 42–3 (see Japan and Pacific),
dramma per musica, 48, 50 Greenblatt, Stephen, 7–8, 22, 43
Drury Lane Theatre, 70
Duff, HMS, 74, 79, 91, 159 Hagenbeck, Carl (impresario) 15, 123,
Dusquesney, Lauchlin (choreographer), 126–7, 232
56 Haka (see also Maori), 15, 20–1,
94, 95, 115–21, 116, 118, 174, 185
Eagels, Jeanne (American actress), 161, and All Blacks, 95
162 Hau’ofa, Epeli, 193, 219
see also Rain Hawai‘i, 11, 14, 15, 16, 67, 95–115
Ellis, William (missionary), 80–1 passim, 164
Emerson, Nathaniel (folklorist), 102, 230 and tourism, 153
Endeavour, HMS, 43, 49, coup d’état of 1893, 101, 229
Erramanga, 25–7, 27, 28, 91 missionary activity, 84–5, 95, 103–4,
ethnographic spectacles (see 108, 114
Völkerschauen) Hawaiian Quintette, 150–1, 153

Index 253
Hawkesworth, Dr John, 36–7 Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand

Account of the Voyages, 7–8, 37, 38, 39, von, 61, 78
41, 48–9, 51, 53, 54–5, 79 Brother Moritz, the Eccentric, 62
Hayes, Charlotte, 37–8, 42, 48, 223 La Perouse, 14, 62–6
heiva (Tahitian ceremony), 7, 23, 44–5, Misanthropy and Repentance, 62
59, 74, 201 Pizzaro: The Death of Rolla, 62, 70–1, 78
Hodges, William (artist), 25, 27, 28 The Stranger, 78

hui (Maori ceremony), 116, 119 Virgin of the Sun, 78
hula, xii, 15, 94, 98–115 passim, 106, Kotzebue, Otto von, 90
108, 174, 185, 230–1 passim Krämer, Augustin, 98–101, 113, 114, 144
and tourism, 95, 97, 110–11, 113–14,
121, 231 La Mort du Capitaine Cook (see Death of
costume, 99–100, 104–15 Captain Cook)
from a missionary perspective, 84–5, La Pérouse, Jean François Galaup de, 61
104, 230 La Pérouse: or, the desolate island
halau (dance-houses), 103 (pantomime), 66–7
hula kahiko (ancient hula), 101, La Perouse (drama) see Kotzebue, August
102–4, 115 von
iconography, 104–15 La Perouse, Il naufragio di (ballet), 67
kumu hula (hula teachers), 110 Lauvergne, Bathélemy (artist), 107–8, 108
mele (chants), 102 Lees, Nathaniel, 203, 204, 205, 242
Merrie Monarch Festival, xii, 95, 111 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 27
religious character Lévi–Strauss, Claude, 222
lieto fine, 53
infanticide, 79–80, 87 Liholiho (Hawaiian King Kamehameha
invention of tradition, 142, 185, II), 68, 84
187, 207 visit to England, 14, 68–72
attending puppet theatre
Japan and the Pacific, 16, 146, 164, 239 performance, 69, 70
attending theatre performance, 70–2,
Ka’ahumanu (Hawaiian Queen regent) 71
(1768–1832), 85, 95 funeral, 72
Kaiser Wilhelm II, 125, 140 Liliuokalani, (Hawaiian Queen), 101, 146
birthday celebrations, 137–8, 142, Lodge, David, 10
143, 234 Logan, Joshua, 165, 166, 168
Kalakaua (Hawaiian king), 104, 110, London Missionary Society (LMS) (see
111–12, 120 missionaries)
Kamehameha I (Hawaiian king), 68, 101 Loti, Pierre, 72, 165
Kamehameha II (see Liloliho) Loughnan, Robert (NZ historian),
Kamehameha III, 108, 109 117–18, 120
Kamehameha, (Hawaiian Queen), 69–72 Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques de, 225
Kauffmann, Angelica, 28
kava ceremony, 204, 215 Madame Butterfly, 155, 171
Kealakekua Bay (Hawai‘i) (see also Magellan, Ferdinand de, 20
Captain Cook, death), 24 māhū, 200, 201, 202, 242
Kightley, Oscar, 202, 210–11, 212 Mai (aka Omai), 23
Kneubuhl, John, 194 mana, 43, 223
Think of a Garden, 192, 194–6, 202 Maori, 95, 185, 194, 212, 216, 231 passim
Kolomoku, Walter (Hawaiian musician), and 1901 Royal tour, 115–21
150 and attack on Abel Tasman, 20–1

254 Index
marae, 213–14 Evangelical movement, 76–7

maro’ura (Tahitian cult object), 80, 228 London Missionary Society (LMS), 74,
Marquardt brothers, Carl and Fritz 75, 79, 91, 92, 138
(impresarios), 16, 122, 123, 129–30, Marist brotherhood, 75, 139
132–3 opposition to dancing, 75, 77, 78,
Marquesas Islands, 13, 124 opposition to the arioi, 80–1, 83–4
at the Polynesian Cultural Center, opposition to theatre, 77–8

188, 240 Spanish missionaries in Mexico, 86
Marsden, Samuel (missionary), 88 use of drama and music, 89–93
Marx, Karl, 7, 8 use of magic lantern, 90–1
Mata’afa Josefo (Samoan chief), 124, Morosco, Oliver (theatre manager),
127, 136, 137, 138, 140 148–9
Matavai Bay (Tahiti), 1, 19, 23, 32, 43, Mortimer, George, 201–2
48, 74 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm, 165
Mau (NZ performance group), 18, 192, Mutiny on the Bounty, 60, 226
213–16 Muzzarelli, Antonio (choreographer), 48,
Boneflute, 213 56, 224
Paradise, 213–16, 214
Mau (political movement), 194, 195 Naipaul, V. S., 22
Maugham, W(illiam) Somerset, 16, 93, Naked Samoans (NZ performance
146, 155–6 group), xii, xiii, 17–18, 192, 210–12
Miss Thompson (aka Rain), 156 New Caledonia, 124, 164
East of Suez, 159 New Guinea (see Papua New Guinea)
The Trembling of the Leaf: Little Stories New Zealand, Aotearoa, 10, 13, 15, 18,
of the South Seas, 156, 165 20–1, 95, 96, 115–21 passim, 124,
Mauss, Marcel, 222 145, 185, 191–7 passim, 199–200,
Melanesia, 208, 211–13 passim, 217
compared to Polynesia, 11, 232 nose-flute, 41, 59, 113, 114, 185
Melville, Herman, 72, 155, 160, 165, Noverre, Jean-Jacques, 56
202, 219, 236
Mencken, H. L., 163 Oberea (aka Purea or Porea), 23, 36, 37,
Metonymy (in performance), 96–8, 119, 41, 48, 51–5
144, 174, 191, 207 and feather girdle (maro‘ura), 49
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, Obi, or Three-finger’d Jack, 66
L’Africaine, 155, 171 Omai (see Mai)
Michener, James, 166–7 Omai, or a Trip around the World, 14, 48,
Tales of the South Pacific, 164, 167 57, 67, 225
Mielziner, Jo (US stage designer), 171 opera (see also dramma per musica), 48,
Miller, Arthur, 194 49, 50–1, 53, 55–6, 58, 65, 78–9
mimesis (see also colonial mimicry), 91 Ozai (ballet), 72
and alterity, 20, 42–5
mimetic capital, 7–8, 14, 38, 42, 61, 65, Pacific Arts Festival, xii, 213
67, 106, 153, 216 Pacific Underground, 192, 196, 198, 204,
Missionaries, 15, 73, 74–94, 162, 197 209, 210, 242
American Board of Commissioners for pantomime (theatrical genre), 48, 56–8,
Foreign Missions, 75, 84 59, 60, 61, 66–7, 71
and baptism, 85–7 pantomime as movement, 56, 80, 81, 105
and theatricality, 76–7 Papasea waterfalls, 134, 143, 208
Catholic, 75, 86, 90 Papua New Guinea, 164, 179
destruction of idols, 87–9, 88 and Chambri people, 188–90

Index 255
Paradise, and displacement, 157, 158, 160–2,

and the Pacific, 9–10, 53, 169 163
Paris is Burning, 208 and naturalism, 157–8
Parkinson, Sydney (artist), 40 anti-Calvinist tendencies, 163
Pérouse (see La Pérouse) plot summary, 156–7
Pindar, Peter (pen-name of John premiere, 162–3
Wolcot), 45 representation of Samoans, 158–9

Plato, 77 see also Maugham, W. Somerset
poi (Maori performance form), 117, 120 reciprocity (performative), 11–12, 23–4,
Polynesia and Polynesians, 10, 17, 20, 36, 39
22, 40, 75, 80, 84, 89, 99, 120, 125, Reeves, William Pember (NZ politician),
128–9, 147, 171, 172, 173, 181, 182, 115
190 ritual and performance, 19, 21, 23, 24,
compared to Melanesia, 11, 170 42, 55, 58, 60, 85–6, 135, 178–9,
French Polynesia, 164 186, 189–90, 192, 197, 199–200
sexual practices in, 35, 45 Robertson, George (ship’s master), 31–2,
Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC), 17, 42–3, 51
175–6, 177–90, 191 Rodgers, Richard and Hammerstein,
and authenticity, 17, 175–6 Oscar, 16, 146, 165, 166
and mimicry, 181–5 passim see also South Pacific
performance types, 177–9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 50–1, 54, 79
relationship to Mormon church, 178, Lettre à d’Alembert, 77, 224
239
Hawaiian demonstration and Sahlins, Marshall, 13, 35, 107
performance, 185 Said, Edward, 96
Maori demonstration and Orientalism, 97–8
performance, 185 Salmond, Anne, 13, 20, 35
Samoan village and performance, 175, Samoa, 11, 174, 197–217
180–4, 191 and American (Eastern) Samoa, 146,
Tongan village and performance, 181, 156–7, 194–6
184–5, 191 and ethnographic shows (see also
Polynesian transgenderism (see fa’afafine Völkerschauen), 16, 122–3, 127–34,
and māhū) 131, 133
Pomare I (Tahitian king, aka Tu, or and missionaries, 89
Otoo) (c.1742–1791), 23, 74, and myth of paradise, 135–6
Pomare II (Tahitian king Tu and tourist performances, 132, 143, 182
Tu-nui-ea-i-te-atua) (1782–1821), and colonial ceremonies, 133, 134–45,
83, 88 137
conversion, 86–7 and cricket, 132
Ponifasio, Lemi (see also Mau), 18, 192, and dance (siva, poula), 140, 142,
213 143–4, 208
poula (Samoan dance), 144 as a German colony, 124–5, 135–6
powhiri (Maori welcome ceremony), 214 at the Polynesian Cultural Center,
puppet theatre, 57, 58, 69–70 181–3
Purea (see Oberea) exploration, 61
Schechner, Richard, 176
Raiatea, (see Tahiti) Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig
Rain (drama by John Colton and (actor-manager), 64–5
Clemence Randolph), 16, 93, 146, Schultz, Erich (German colonial officer),
156–63 138, 143

256 Index
Seddon, Richard (NZ premier), 115 and perception, 4–5, 29, 170
Sherwin, J. K. (artist), 27 and sexuality, 29–35, 38, 201, 204,
siva (see Samoan dance) 205, 208
Smith, Bernard, 9–10, 12, 27 Thomas, Nicholas, 13, 22–3
Society Islands (see Tahiti) Timorodee (see also dancing and
Solf, Wilhelm (colonial governor), 125, sexuality), 39–40, 41, 81, 223
133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 140 Tonga, 21–3, 124, 242

Solomon Islands, 164 and Miss Galaxy beauty contest, 205–7
South Pacific (musical), 16, 146, 155 Tonkin, Tonkinese, 146, 164, 165–6,
and commodification, 147, 165, 167, 168–70
169, 172 tourism and tourist performance, 153,
and orientalism, 169, 171 167, 174–90 passim, 209, 238 passim
interracial themes, 17, 171–2 Treaty of Waitangi, 124
Melanesian and Polynesian characters, Tu (Tahitian chief and king, see
166, 170, 171 Pomare I)
Tonkinese characters, 165, 165–6, 167, Tully, Richard Walton, 16, 59–60, 146,
168–70 149, 153, 171, 235
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 72, 143, 237 see also Bird of Paradise, The
Turner, Victor, 39
ta’alolo (Samoan ceremony), 138, 140,
142, 143 Ukeke, Ioane (hula master), 111, 112
Tahiti and Tahitians, 1, 11, 13–14, United States of America,
15, 24, 53, 80–2, 86–7, 124, involvement in the Pacific, 16, 146–7
174
and dancing, 23, 38–42, 55–6, 60, Vassallo, Umilissimo (librettist), 48, 49,
201, 223 50, 52–3, 55, 224
and emotions, 54 vaudeville, 57
as erotic paradise, 30–4 Vico, Giambattista, 49, 224
tableaux vivants, 92 Vidor, King, 153
Tamasese Le Alofi (Samoan chief), 122, Virchow, Rudolf, 127–9, 130
129, 133, 134, 136, 138, 145 Völkerschauen, 15, 122, 126–7, 130,
tapu, 35, 68, 103, 214 131, 174
Tasman, Abel, 19, 20–3
Tatau – Rites of Passage, 192, 196–200, Wallis, Samuel, 9, 30, 40, 41, 49, 51
198 waiata (Maori chant), 185
tattooing, 80, 93, 105–6, 192, 197–9 Webber, John, 105, 225
Taussig, Michael, 42 Wesley, John, 77
Taylor, Diana, 186 Wendt, Albert, 193
Taylor, Laurette (see also Bird of Paradise, Wilder, Thornton, 194
The), 149, 150, 151, 153, 235 Williams, John (1796–1839), 79, 89–91
The Pirates, Or the Calamities of Captain A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in
Bligh, 226 the South Seas, 93
theatricality, 2–3, 218 passim as trader, 89–90
and authenticity, 5–6, 174 death, 91
and citationality, 201, 208, 216 dramatization of his life, 91–3
and colonialism, 123, 135, 144–5, Williams, Tennessee, 194
and cross-cultural encounter, 13, 22–3, Wilson, Captain James, 74
27, 43, 44, 216–17
and duplicity, 76, 77 Zeal Theatre, 192, 196, 198, 242
and eighteenth century, 4, 27 Zola, Émile, 157–8

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Pacific Performances

Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the

10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

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Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case (editors)

Studies in International Performance

10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

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10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

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10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

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10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

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1 Pacific Overtures: Trumpets, Beaches and Women 19

2 Staged Authenticity: The South Seas and European Theatre,

3 Comedians and Crusaders: Anti-Theatrical Prejudice in the

4 Dressing the Hula and Taming the Haka: Performing Identity

10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

Hula kahiko (ancient hula) 102

5 Kindred Spirits: Spectacles of Samoa in Wilhelminian

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6 Birds of Paradise: American-Pacific Dramas of Displacement 146

8 Translocations and Transgressions: The Postcolonial Pacific 191

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1 The Landing at Middleburgh, One of the Friendly Islands 26

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23 Tatau – Rites of Passage, 1996. Tattooing ceremony at the

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In 2003, the current International Federation for Theatre Research President,

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International Federation for Theatre Research

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In March of every year in Auckland, New Zealand, Pasifika, a large-scale fest-

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10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

of theatricalizing other peoples and places, was a necessary prerequisite for

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10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

Library at the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa, was a crucial resource at the

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10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

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10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

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The cross-cultural encounters studied in this book were and continue to be

10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

tremendous upsurge in interest in the term, theatricality remains notori-

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10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

definition is exceptionally broad and needs to be modified for the particular

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10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

ways theatre and role-playing in social life are laminated. Theatricality as

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10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

Therefore the search for authenticity, in people and places, is an attempt to

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10.1057/9780230599536 - Pacific Performances, Christopher B. Balme

Mimetic capital and exotic commodities