by Brian Diettrich
In November 2024 New Zealand representative Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke rose in parliament to haka (perform a posture dance) in protest to the contentious Treaty Principles Bill being pushed forward by the country’s conservative coalition government. Joined by members of Te Pāti Māori (The Māori Party) and others, and with expressive and defiant gestures, she chanted the poetry of the famed haka “Ka Mate” as she simultaneously ripped up a copy of the bill on the floor. This haka in parliament was a powerful response to political oppression, and it galvanized the nation and the world, with hundreds of millions of social media engagements in the days that followed. Since then, the presentation of “Ka Mate” in the New Zealand parliament continues to be debated, but the use of dance expression as a form of social action is not new in Aotearoa or the Pacific, and despite the recent attempted silencing of Te Ao Māori (the Māori World) within the government of Aotearoa (Gardiner 2007, Kāretu 1993). The 2024 haka performance in parliament prompts us to consider the wider role of dance in the Pacific as expressive movements for social action.
In the Pacific Islands dance and expressive culture have always been practices that convey aspects of society and culture, to communicate ideas, to respond to changes and pressures, but also to unify peoples. Dance, as a system of structured movements focused on coordinated bodies, conveys priorities, aspirations, and social desires in the world. Whether choreographed or spontaneous within set movements, and deeply integrated within sung poetry, dance carries corresponding meaning, and sometimes contrasting meanings, among observers and practitioners. This essay for the 2025 Asia Pacific Dance Festival addresses relationships between dance and broader society in the Pacific. I ask how dance conveys priorities and values for Pacific societies, and moreover, how have Pacific communities deployed dance in times of change, trauma, and within global issues? The examples I explore below offer case studies in response to these questions, drawing from published writings and my own research over the past twenty-five years. The social power of dance was something repeated and demonstrated to me by elders in Micronesia during my years of living and research in the islands, and which is found too in the history of dance forms across the Pacific region. In this short essay I ask readers to reflect on the social power of dance performance and to consider how dance forms connect us to the deep and rich histories of performance across Oceania.
Presentations of Society
Across the Pacific, dance forms are deeply representative of societies. The structures, presentation, persons involved in the dance, and the responses by audiences, all involve aspects of kinship, rank, gender, age, and skill in practice. Past research about dance has emphasized its social capital within and among Pacific societies. The late, prestigious scholar of Pacific dance, Adrienne Kaeppler, for example, explained this when she wrote, “the complex visual and auditory product communicates social values in an artistic form—but only to those who have the cultural knowledge to understand” (Kaeppler 1993:49). Writing about the broad influence of the lakalaka dance in Tonga, Kaeppler explained, “[lakalaka] are major artistic productions that combine history, politics, and entertainment as sung group speeches with choreographed movements” (Kaeppler 2012:10). In writing about dance in the Cook Islands, Kalissa Alexeyeff emphasized the active role of dance in the islands and explained its movements as “generative forces rather than passive mirrors of other aspects of social life” (Alexeyeff 2009:12). These views of dance as both presentations of society and a means for social action recalls how many dance practices are foundational presentations and experiences within the Pacific.
How dance presentations reveal important aspects of culture and society can be seen and heard in iconic dance genres across the Pacific. For example, in the case of the national dance of Tonga—called lakalaka and involving large stationary groups—specific dance positions in performance denote rank within the group in addition to skill in performance. In a lakalaka the central position of the front line is called vāhenga and is designated for the highest-ranking man and woman, while next to these are the positions of ta’ofi vāhenga, the ceremonial attendant rank; the end positions of the front line are called fakapotu and filled by those of chiefly lines (Kaeppler 1993:36). But performance skill is also emphasized with the position of mālie taha, placed third from the center and reserved for the most skilled in the dance. Within this large group presentation, the lakalaka visually presents both artistic skill but also the stratification and politics of rank as important in Tongan society.
A related example is viewed and heard in the movements of siva Sāmoa (Sāmoan dance), and especially in the genre called taualuga, the apex and finale of Sāmoan performing arts, and which conveys a coming together of Sāmoan society. The most visible feature of the dance is that of the taupo, often termed as the “village maiden”, and who with ceremonial headdress (tuiga) dances with movements that are contained, graceful, and considered refined. Around the taupo, in contrast, others dance in more unpredictable and eccentric ways, sometimes clowning, but with the goal to emphasize the central place of the taupo. For Sāmoans this organization represents the social duality between the ali’i(chiefs) and tulafale (orator), with the dance of the former represented as sa’o, “formally correct” and the later as ‘aiuli“exuberant and less predictable” (Moyle 1988:199). In this way, the Sāmoan taualuga presents foundational aspects of Sāmoan society marked by the center and periphery in its movements and organization (Shore 1982; Moyle 1988:200).
In the islands of Yap, in the Federated states of Micronesia, group dances (churuq) hold important exchange roles within villages. Dances will follow certain procedures and correct ways of protocol, such as the permissions for “taking down the dance” in preparation for a new performance. In celebratory communal exchanges called mitmitt, village leaders hold danced exchanges which sometimes are a means of addressing social challenges, such as discrepancies between villages. In the chants of dances named tayoer, for example, women performers may address specific requests and events that take place. Another social feature of Yapese dance performances is the presentation of aged hierarchy. While many dance genres emphasize youth as performers, elder leaders are ever-present, singing the chants, and are often seen standing behind the dancers, carefully observing the unfolding work. In this way, the social hierarchy and relationships within villages are an integral part of performances. Yapese dancing further demonstrates how public performances are not only geared to an external audience, but to internal families and the broader village. In the case examples above, dancing movements, structures, and contexts present foundational values within Pacific societies, both internally and externally.
Social Action for Change
With social underpinnings so embedded within danced structures, dance presentations are especially powerful vehicles for communication as designed by choreographers and composers. Considering dance performances and their specific contexts in the Pacific reveals many examples in which moving bodies were key to important social changes and political manifestations. Examples might include a coronation (for example in Tonga), or the opening of a new school, or a dance choreographed for a particular regional festival. Some of the more spectacular cases in the Pacific, however, were how Pacific societies and leaders brought dance to bear in times of trouble. During periods of colonization, dances across the Pacific were variously condemned and banned, with fines instituted for performances, particularly from the influence of early Christian missions and some colonial governments which negatively viewed dances through colonial lenses of sexuality, labour, and Indigenous spiritual systems. And while some Pacific dances were indeed abandoned over time, many persisted as choreographers, composers, and creators adapted their forms. In his study of Pacific performances, Christopher Balme noted how colonialism “acted on bodies,” and he suggested that “bodies responded to these impositions more often in performance” (2007: 96). In this way, dance in the Pacific is especially efficacious “where Indigenous peoples moved and danced through, past, and sometimes around imperial impositions” (Diettrich 2021:181). In writing about performances that comment on the imperial violence of the German colonial period on the island of Pohnpei, Glenn Petersen phrased this performance potential as “dancing defiance” (1992). Within this perspective, Indigenous dances, such as the performance of “Ka Mate” by Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, are strategic presentations of power and autonomy, the mobilizing of collective bodies, voices, and language to address social disruption, and to do so in particular culturally valued and appropriate ways. Several documented historical cases in the Pacific reveal how communities deployed dance as forms of resistance to colonial enterprises.
The most well documented and discussed examples of dance employed to resist societal changes took place in nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi. Upon their arrival in the Hawaiian Islands from 1820, Congregationalist missionaries from America quickly moved to censure performances of hula, within the often-cited reasons of religion and ideas about sexuality and idleness. With some support within the growing body of religious leaders, the Hawaiian legislature began to regulate hula through legal means with performances requiring licenses, and otherwise with risk of arrest. Within the changing and pressured milieu of Hawaiian culture in the mid nineteenth-century, King David Kalākaua, who had learned traditional dance and music practices, instituted significant cultural reforms during his reign, with particular emphasis on the arts, music, and dance. Kalākaua’s interests and promotion of hula was perhaps best remembered for his insistence of hula performances in the official programme of his coronation (poni mōʻi) in 1883 and later birthday jubilee in 1886, and which involved large groups of performers, by then under approval and encouragement of the monarchy (Barrere, Pukui, Kelly 1980). These events are widely recognised today as the first Hawaiian renaissance, and which helped turn the tide against the cultural trauma instigated earlier in the century. Kalākaua —the Merrie Monarch, from the festival that honours him—was instrumental in revitalising culture and identity through strategic hula performances. The monarchy’s insistence on unified gatherings shaped by Indigenous poetry and movement, and the stories within mele, are widely viewed as a foundational moment in the history of hula and Hawaiian autonomy (Silva 2004).
In the Islands of Chuuk, in the Federated States of Micronesia, danced resistance came from community level rejections of new cultural upheavals. American and Hawaiian Protestant missionaries arrived in the islands of Chuuk from in the 1880s, and as in other contexts, missionaries and converts quickly banned dancing, and especially on the island of Weno, today the capital of Chuuk, and where the initial Protestant mission was based. In their personal letters to America, the missionaries obsessively complained about the large community dances called éwúwénú, which were central to community cohesion, and which Chuukese today call “moon dances” from their former contexts of dancing under a full moon. This dances involves seated men and women who clap hands and slap thighs and arms, and including solo dancers who intermittently rise and gently sway and rotate their hips. By the 1890s, a few American missionaries and their converts had repeatedly travelled among Chuuk’s many islands to prohibit these dances alongside the new faith. In mid 1895, a former Christian convert and likely spirit medium named Levi had ancestral visions that prompted him to hold large-scale dances in defiance of the mission (Diettrich 2021). These dances quickly became popular and were taken up by neighbouring villages, and including sanction by their chiefs. This powerful revival of the éwúwénú dances spread also to many of Chuuk’s islands following clan and exchange networks. Eventually, the mission itself had to move from Weno to a neighbouring Island in Chuuk, in what was a roll-back of the new religion in the islands. When the German colonial government took over the administration of Chuuk in 1899, they were more tolerant of dances, and they send researchers to document the practices. On Weno Island, chief Takuraar, one of the highest ranked on the island—strategically staged dances in 1907 to celebrate the birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm II. From accounts at the time, this local shift in dance settings helped them to persist. From their staged resistance to the mission and in new political contexts, Chuukese continued to practice éwúwénú across the twentieth century.
The two examples above reveal how communities mobilized dance performances to confront changing societies. Across the Pacific region, dance has continued to be employed for its capacity for social impact. In Aotearoa New Zealand, haka (posture dance) performances have been a long-standing practice related to politics and protest, and even within the many types and contexts for the dance genre. For example, haka have been central to hikoi (walk or march) organized to elevate issues and protest, particular from government action, and such as the large political protests in the country in late 2024. As a comment on contemporary dance mobilizations, in the last section I examine Pacific dance in one of the largest unified events in Oceania.
Dancing Unity at FestPAC
Some of the best examples of Pacific dances employed for reoccurring and significant social action have been seen and heard at the Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture (FestPAC), the largest gathering of Pacific dance in the world. Interrupted for several years by COVID, FestPAC has generally taken place every four years in a different Pacific location and involves most Pacific nations for two weeks of arts and culture engagements, and with a large focus on formal dance presentations. In 2024 Hawaiʻi was host to the 13th Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture that involved twenty-seven nations and coming after the Guåhan (Guam) festival in 2016. From its initial gathering in Fiji in 1972, the festival was designed to addresses broad cultural and social issues through performances, and this impact has widened to encompass numerous themes in subsequent event. The 2024 festival focused on “Ho’oulu Lāhui: Regenerating Oceania”, and a constant message among delegates was one of unity through diversity, with Pacific peoples coming together for dialogue and shared creative space. As the Sāmoan delegation put it during the opening ceremony: “One body, one people, one ocean, one Pacific.” The dance presentations at FestPAC involved regional sharing and learning for attending delegations.
For choreographers, composers, and cultural leaders involved, FestPAC events have been central to new revitalisations in dance, for example in revivals of practices that have shaped future performing arts. The 2016 Festival, for example, offered Indigenous Chamorro dance a regional and global stage, after these dances had been carefully re-created over past decades, extending within a long and destructive period of colonisation. The 2016 festival provided regional valorisation and local pride for Chamorro performers, after decades of deep cultural work. Dance performances at FestPAC also invoke debates about identity, as was the case of the 2024 performance by Vou Dance Group, a contemporary collective from Fiji. Despite an outstanding and exciting performance at the opening ceremony, some Fijian commentators criticised the performance’s contemporary choreography alongside the traditional focuses of other Pacific groups, and amid concerns of national representation. Other commentators, in contrast, valued the integration of new practices within the festival. The media commentary that followed the presentation by Vou Dance Group demonstrated the high stakes of dance performances amid regional and global identities. At an international level, however, the most galvanising issue at the 2024 FestPAC, was the absence of dance—specifically the inability of the New Caledonia delegation to attend, given the period of intense and violent political unrest that was taking place at the time. In Hawaiʻi participants and performers held space in the village hale dedicated to New Caledonia, and the absence of their performances were the subject of frequent public commentary by other delegations. The situation was amplified by the announcement of New Caledonia as host the next FestPAC in 2028. From creative work that addresses local, national, and international issues, FestPAC presents opportunities for Pacific delegations to deploy performances for awareness and change.
Within the creative work that is central to the 2025 Asia Pacific Dance Festival we are reminded that dance (and music) maintains a powerful place in societies. Across the Pacific, this capacity includes within spirituality, unity and cohesiveness, and a special ability to galvanize ideas and broader movements in society. Dance moves people in profound ways, and we would do well to remember this at times when arts and cultural activities are under threat, undervalued, and when opportunities may be removed. In the Pacific Islands, dance has been useful in life for generations, as a potent force within society and communities. As the 2025 Asia Pacific Dance Festival welcomes performers from Pua Aliʻi ʻIlima, Arzoo Dance Theatre, and Rako Pasefika, we acknowledge their artistic skill and aesthetic accomplishments, but we also recognise the important cultural and social work that these groups offer for communities and the world, through their poetry, music, their coordinated gestures and movements, and their profound impacts within the world.
References
Alexeyeff , K. 2009. Dancing from the Heart: Movement, Gender, and Cook Islands Globalization. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Barrère, D.B., M.K. Pukui and M. Kelly. 1980. Hula, Historical Perspectives. Honolulu: Dept. of Anthropology, Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum.
Diettrich, Brian. 2021. “Disturbing Bodies: Danced Resistance and Imperial Corporeality in Colonial Micronesia.” In Perspectives in Motion: Engaging the Visual in Dance and Music, edited by Kendra Stepputat and Brian Diettrich, 179–196. New York: Berghahn Books.
Diettrich, Brian. 2024. “Regenerating Oceania: the ‘unique and unifying’ Festival of Pacific Arts & Culture makes a comeback.” The Conversation, 6 June 2024.
Gardiner, Wira. 2007. Haka: A Living Tradition. Auckland: Hodder Moa.
Kaeppler, Adrienne 1993. Poetry in Motion: Studies of Tongan Dance. Nukuʻalofa, Tonga: Vava’u Press
Kaeppler, Adrienne. 2012. Lakalaka: A Tongan Masterpiece of Performing Arts. Nukuʻalofa, Tonga: Vava’u Press.
Kāretu, Tīmoti Sam. 1993. Haka!: The Dance of a Noble People. Auckland: Reed.
Shore, Bradd, 1982. Sala‘ilua: A Samoan Mystery. New York: Columbia University Press.
Silva, Noenoe K. Aloha betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Throop, C. Jason. 2009, ‘Becoming Beautiful in the Dance’: On the Formation of Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap, FSM. Oceania 70:179–201.
Brian Diettrich (PhD, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Originally from Pennsylvania, for the past twenty-five years Brian has conducted collaborative research with culture bearers and communities in the Pacific Islands, across Micronesia, in Hawaiʻi, and in Aotearoa. Brian’s publications include the co-authored book Music in Pacific Islands Cultures, the co-edited volume Perspectives in Motion: Engaging the Visual in Dance and Music, and numerous articles appearing in Ethnomusicology,Yearbook for Traditional Music, the Journal of Pacific History, and other journals and edited collections. Brian is currently Vice President of the UNESCO-affiliated International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance, and he has held numerous international service roles including as ICTMD Executive Board Member, Chairperson of the Oceania Study Group, Advisory Board Member for RILM, and Advisory Board member for Lyrebird Press. Brian previously taught at the College of Micronesia-FSM, and he has held numerous residencies in the Asia Pacific region. Recently in January 2025 he hosted the 48th ICTMD World Conference in Wellington with some 800 attendees and as one of the largest music conferences in the Pacific region.
