Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas (review)

The first encounters between European sailors and Pacific islanders were necessarily theatrical, argues Christopher Balme in Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas. Lacking knowledge of each other’s languages and cultural practices, sailors and islanders performed their distinctive rituals of encounter—with trumpets and fireworks and in dances and songs—to audiences of uncomprehending Others on the beaches of Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Over time, as contact became customary, the theatricalized conventions by which Europeans and islanders encountered each other were transformed, and new forms of cross-cultural performance were created. For Balme, “[a] particular characteristic of cross-cultural theatricality lies in its unexpected power to transform and redefine signs” (6, emphasis in original). What began as a mimetic struggle for understanding quickly became adaptation and appropriation, and what was initially framed and constrained by the colonizer has had surprisingly wide reciprocal effects over time.

In Pacific Performances, Balme traces the performance history underlying the cross-cultural exchange between Europeans and Pacific islanders, beginning with a survey of the earliest visual and narrative records made by sailors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He looks at theatrical representations of the Pacific islands on European and American stages, at performances in courts, fairs, and expositions, and at performances for tourists, before coming to consider contemporary theatrical performances by Pacific islanders, as they can be seen to incorporate European forms and ideas with traditional practices.

The theatrical efforts by sailors and islanders to communicate their identities and intentions in their early encounters are seen to give way to shared entertainments, before the missionaries stepped in to suppress traditional practices—those associated with the worship of other gods, but also the more exotic dances and erotic displays of the islanders. But by this time, the islanders were already being taken, and taking themselves, to the stages of Europe in the flesh—in essence, as imitations of themselves, reframed as “natives” and imported into new forms of European and American theatrical production. The theatrical, in Balme’s narrative, is thus simultaneously seen to serve the act of colonization and to surpass it.

The net Balme casts is very wide. He moves quickly through a dizzying array of examples in what might be described as a summative approach: covering, collecting, and collating evidence to confirm his central thesis rather than pausing to analyze more deeply and parse the particular differences between diverse island cultures and European visitors. The ultimate effect is encyclopedic and catalogic. It is tempting to think it unnecessary to look further than this book to find every possible reference to performances by and about the Pacific islands, but that is not the case. What the book provides is a superb way to begin to understand how rich the study of theatre and performance in the South Pacific may come to be.

The dangers of giving the appearance of a comprehensive approach are perhaps obvious, as are the questions that arise about Balme’s principles of selection. He tells us that his interest in the topic stems from his own history as a New Zealander who has spent his career in Europe, but his early experience does not seem to impact his way of thinking about Pacific performance. In fact, Pacific Performances gives surprisingly little attention to the rich performance cultures that have converged over time in Aotearoa New Zealand. For example, Balme cites British missionary Samuel Marsden’s horror at Maori “idolatry” (88), without taking a longer look at the way Marsden theatricalized his enterprise; in particular, his report of his famous “First Service” (Christmas Day, 1814), and how the minister saw (or failed to see) the Maori performance in response. The wonderfully provocative and eloquent performances of Lemi Ponifasio and Pacific Underground receive serious attention, but not the equally significant work of Neil Ieremia with his Black Grace Dance Company. Similarly, the cultural performances offered by Samoan fa...