This essay seeks to broaden and diversify discussions of the transpacific itineraries that weave throughout Oceania by exploring artistic transactions among Māori, Pasifika, and Chinese peoples that are routed through Aotearoa New Zealand. I consider how New Zealand-based performance artists move beyond US-dominated categories and priorities to expose new relationships between islands and continents, and between Indigenous, diasporic, and immigrant identities and ways of being. I chart this terrain by examining three collaborative, intercultural performance works. The multilayered, photographic series Red Coats + Indians: The Games We Play (2019–20), created by New Zealand-born Sāmoan artist Greg Semu in collaboration with Indigenous Formosans in Taiwan, uses the iconic figure of Captain James Cook as an allegory for Chinese colonialism. Renee Liang’s opera The Bone Feeder (2017) and choreographer Moss Te Ururangi Patterson’s choral and dance ensemble piece Awa: When Two Rivers Collide (2017) trace geographical and spiritual connections between Aotearoa and China, but do so in ways that weave Aotearoa into wider Pacific circuits and crossings. The essay demonstrates the important role of the visual and performing arts in imagining mobilities, dispositioning, place-making, and identities in Oceania, and in highlighting alternative Pacific and Asian linkages and modes of knowledge production.
