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THE LAST WORD Medicine Makers & Aroha Alchemists. Making Aroha an All-Encompassing Climate for Live Performance-Making in Aotearoa by Cat Ruka.
In case you didn’t know, The prevalence of indigenous women in our industry is here to stay. We will devour every last atom of leadership space We will take first dibs on the microphone (for we are here in the country of our ancestors) We will write our aunties into the starring roles of our stories We will look out for each other, an impenetrable coven We will give the final budget sign-off and without an ounce of guilt, or sheepish glance to the floor, We will take every reparation owed, We will happily thieve every award, And every accolade. And just like our nans taught us, we will do it all with aroha. When we moved house recently, I came across a box of old journals from my early days at uni. Swollen with ink and dripping with a dark and heaving rage toward my Karen educators and the racist systems that pervaded our industry at that time, these journals were a reminder of how far we’ve come in our racial politics in the 20 years since then. For you may have noticed there’s been an uprising in the sector, and even the nay-sayers are admitting… That indigenous women are the intervention needed for the arts of tomorrow. Within contemporary performance making in Aotearoa, the term innovation has for a long time been heralded as perhaps the most crucial
objective to aspire to. It permeates our learning institutions, our industry infrastructures, the strategic plans of arts companies, our funding bodies, our stages, and the practices of the artists we’ve been told to look to. And like anything, if you chant something repetitively enough it becomes god-like. If we were to peel back the layers on innovation though, we wouldn’t have to get too deep before realising that as a concept, it really can’t be untied from some other, pretty grotesque concepts also. Things like colonisation, competition, individualism, neoliberalism, and racial superiority, just to name a few. Who here has been labelled a “ground-breaking” artist and thought they’d died and gone to heaven?
