Lemi Ponifasio

While at high school in New Zealand he started to attend a series of workshops with the Maori Matua Tohunga master artist Irirangi Tiakiawa[1] in Rotoiti.

[citation needed] Ponifasio began his artistic career as an avant-garde experimental performer, staging his epic ten-year solo dance investigation Body in Crisis, primarily in non-theatrical and outdoor spaces.

[2] He explored the life of the body through cosmic vision, genealogy, philosophy, architecture, chant, dance and ceremonies of indigenous communities, especially Maori, Kiribati, Kanaky people of New Caledonia, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti and the diverse islands of the Pacific region.

[citation needed] Ponifasio's collaborators are people from all walks of life; the works are performed in factories, remote villages, opera houses, schools, marae, castles, galleries, and stadiums.

[citation needed] While established within the international avant-garde, Ponifasio grounds his work within local communities and Māori and diverse Oceanic cultures.

[18] Other MAU creations include The Crimson House (2014),[19] probing the nature of power and a world that sees all and no longer forgets; Stones in Her Mouth (2013),[20] a mauopera with Maori women as transmitters of a life force through oratory and ancient chants; Orff's opera Prometheus for the Ruhrtriennale (2012);[21] Le Savali: Berlin (2011),[22] confronting the imperial City of Berlin with its own communities of immigrant families in search of belonging and constrained by threat of deportation; Birds With Skymirrors (2010),[23] responding to the disappearing Pacific Islands, homelands to most of his performers and devastated by climate change; and Tempest: Without A Body (2008), concerning power and terror and the unlawful use of state power post 9/11.