The Pacific Festivals Of Aotearoa New Zealand

With a history now stretching back four decades, Pacific festivals of Aotearoa assert a multicultural identity of New Zealand and situate the country squarely within a sea of islands. In this volume, Jared Mackley-Crump gives a provocative look at the changing demographics and cultural landscape of a place frequently viewed through a bicultural lens, Pākehā and Māori. Taking the post–World War II migrations of Pacific peoples to New Zealand as its starting point, the story begins in 1972 with the inaugural Polynesian Festival, an event that was primarily designed as a Māori festival, now known as Te Matatini, the largest Māori performing arts event in the world. Two major moments of festivalization are considered: the birth of Polyfest in 1976 and the inaugural Pasifika Festival of 1993. Both began in Auckland, the home of the largest Pacific communities in New Zealand, and both have spawned a series of events that follow the models they successfully established. While Polyfests focus primarily on the transmission of performance traditions from culture bearers to the young, largely New Zealand–born generations, Pasifika festivals are highly public community events, in which diverse displays of material culture are offered up for consumption by both cultural tourists and Pacific communities alike. Both models have experienced a significant period of growth since 1993, and here, the author presents a thought-provoking and wide-ranging analysis to explain the phenomenon that has been called a “Pacific renaissance.” Written from an ethnomusicological perspective, The Pacific Festivals of Aotearoa New Zealand incorporates lively first-person observations as well as interviews with festival organizers, performers, and other important historical figures. The second half of the book delves into the festival space, uncovering new meanings about the function and role of music performance and public festivity. The author skillfully challenges accounts that label festivals as inauthentic recreations of culture for tourist audiences and gives both observers and participants an uplifting new approach to understand these events as meaningful and symbolic extensions of the ways diasporic Pacific communities operate in New Zealand.

This volume brings together a number of perspectives on the musical landscape of Invercargill, a city at the bottom of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Invercargill is in many ways unique; it is relatively isolated, its access to liquor is controlled by a licensing trust, and it is home to the longest-serving mayor in Aotearoa. The musicking that occurs within Invercargill is surprisingly diverse and wide-ranging. This book acknowledges and explores many of the South’s musical communities, and in, doing so, illustrates the importance of music in local communities. It highlights the ways in which social connectedness, local identity and individual lives are enriched through musical activities being interwoven through communities.

Aotearoa New Zealand in the Global Theatre Marketplace offers a case study of how the theatre of Aotearoa has toured, represented and marketed itself on the global stage. How has New Zealand work attempted to stand out, differentiate itself, and get seen by audiences internationally? This book examines the journeys of a dynamic range of culturally and theatrically innovative works created by Aotearoa New Zealand theatre makers that have toured and been performed across time, place and theatrical space: from Moana Oceania to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, from a Māori Shakespeare adaptation to an immersive zombie theatre experience. Drawing on postcolonialism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and globality to understand how Aotearoa New Zealand has imagined and conceived of itself through drama, the author investigates how these representations might be read and received by audiences around the world, variously reinforcing and complicating conceptions of New Zealand national identity. Developing concepts of theatrical mobility, portability and the market, this study engages with the whole theatrical enterprise as a play travels from concept and scripting through to funding, marketing, performance and the critical response by reviewers and commentators. This book will be of global interest to academics, producers and theatre artists as a significant resource for the theory and practice of theatre touring and cross-cultural performance and reception.

An up-to-date, contextualized assessment of the impact of the 'festivalization' of culture around the world.

Fragrant tropical flowers, opulent batik fabrics, magnificent bronze gamelan orchestras, and, of course, aromatic coffee. Such are the exotic images of Java, Indonesia's most densely populated island, that have hovered at the periphery of North American imaginations for generations. Through close readings of the careers of four "javaphiles"—individuals who embraced Javanese performing arts in their own quests for a sense of belonging—Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance explores a century of American representations of Javanese performing arts by North Americans. While other Asian cultures made direct impressions on Americans by virtue of firsthand contacts through immigration, trade, and war, the distance between Java and America, and the vagueness of Americans' imagery, enabled a few disenfranchised musicians and dancers to fashion alternative identities through bold and idiosyncratic representations of Javanese music and dance. Javaphilia's main subjects—Canadian-born singer Eva Gauthier (1885–1958), dancer/painter Hubert Stowitts (1892–1953), ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood (1918–2005), and composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003)—all felt marginalized by the mainstream of Western society: Gauthier by her lukewarm reception as an operatic mezzo-soprano in Europe, Stowitts by his homosexuality, Hood by conflicting interests in spirituality and scientific method, and Harrison by his predilection for prettiness in a musical milieu that valued more anxious expressions. All four parlayed their own direct experiences of Java into a defining essence for their own characters. By identifying aspects of Javanese music and dance that were compatible with their own tendencies, these individuals could literally perform unconventional—yet coherent—identities based in Javanese music and dance. Although they purported to represent Java to their fellow North Americans, they were in fact simply representing themselves. In addition to probing the fascinating details of these javaphiles' lives, Javaphilia presents a novel analysis of North America's first significant encounters with Javanese performing arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. An account of the First International Gamelan Festival, in Vancouver, BC (at Expo 86), almost a century later, bookends the epoch that is the focus of Javaphilia and sets the stage for a meditation on North Americans' ongoing relationships with the music and dance of Java.

Unearthing the messy and sprawling interrelationships of place, wellbeing, and popular music, this book explores musical soundscapes of health, ranging from activism to international charity, to therapeutic treatments and how wellbeing is sought and attained in contexts of music. Drawing on critical social theories of the production, circulation, and consumption of popular music, the book gathers together diverse insights from geographers and musicologists. Popular music has become increasingly embedded in complex and often contradictory discourses of wellbeing. For instance, some new genres and sub-cultures of popular music are associated with violence, drug-use, and the angst of living, yet simultaneously define the hopes and dreams of millions of young people. At a service level, popular music is increasingly used as a therapeutic modality in holistic medicine, as well as in conventional health care and public health practice. The genre of popular music, then, is fundamental to human wellbeing as an active and central part of people’s emotional lives. By conceptually and empirically foregrounding place, this book demonstrates how - music whether from particular places, about particular places, or played in particular places ” is a crucial component of health and wellbeing.

The recent proliferation of events as a subject of study in its own right has signalled the emergence of a new field – event studies. However, whilst the management-inspired notion of planned events, which strives for conceptual slenderness, may indeed be useful for event managers, the moment we attempt to advance knowledge about events as social, cultural and political phenomena, we realise the extent to which the field is theoretically impoverished. Event studies, it is argued, must transcend overt business-like perspectives in order to grasp events in their complexities. This book challenges the reader to reach beyond the established modes of thinking about events by placing them against a backdrop of much wider, critical discourse. Approaches and Methods in Event Studies emerges as a conceptual and methodological tour de force—comprising the works of scholars of diverse backgrounds coming together to address a range of philosophical, theoretical, and methods-related problems. The areas covered include the concepts of eventification and eventual approaches to events, a mobilities paradigm, rhizomatic events, critical discourse analysis, visual methods, reflexive and ethnographic research into events, and indigenous acumen. Researchers and students engaged in the study of events will draw much inspiration from the contributions and from the volume as a whole.

What is a New Zealander? What does it mean to be a citizen of or a resident in this country? How do we understand what makes New Zealand complex, and unique? And what creates a sense of belonging and identity, both here and in the world?Now's a critical time to be thinking about these sorts of things. In a post-Trump, post-Brexit world, easy slogans have taken the place of reasoning and reasonableness, empathy is in retreat, and intolerance is on the march. History tells us that this is never a good mix.In this engaging book, experts and thinkers direct their sharp analysis at these and other important issues. Written for university students, it will appeal to anyone interested in where we have come from and where we are headed. It's a book for active participants in Aotearoa New Zealand and in global society.