A Piece "More Curious Than All the Rest": Re-Encountering Pre-Colonial Pacific Island Theatre, 1769-1855

This essay interrogates the supposition that there was no tradition of "theatrical performance" in the pre-colonial Pacific repertoire. Drawing upon documentary accounts from a range of early foreign explorers, beachcombers, mutineers, folklorists, missionaries, and military personnel throughout the region, it provides evidence of four dramatic performances from the Society Islands, the Marshall Islands, and the Cook Islands that took place between the 1770s and the 1850s. As indigenous performances encapsulated within Euro-American written records, the evidence is highly mediated, and so each instance of presentation and documentation is read as taking place within an "ethnographic moment" of mutual, intercultural translation and interpretation. The final section of the essay assesses possible implications of this historical reconstruction for contemporary Pacific theatre, with a particular focus on artists who have turned to archival records for inspiration, reading the cross-cultural interactions of the past to stimulate alternative forms of intercultural theatrical engagement in the present.