Lemi ponifasio biography books
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Lemi Ponifasio
Lemi Ponifasio is a Samoan and New Zealand choreographer, dancer, director, designer, and artist, whose work defies conventional definitions. In 1995, he founded MAU in Auckland, New Zealand, in collaboration with communities and artists from all over the world. MAU, in Samoan, is a reference to the quest for truth. His works—in which light and darkness fight each other and black challenges white—plunge the audience into a dreamlike and ceremonial space, into a cosmogonic reflection. His show Birds With Skymirrors, created in 2010, testified of the disappearance of the Pacific islands, homeland to many of its performers, devastated by climate change. Among other shows, Lagimoana was presented at the Biennale in Venice in 2015, and Apocalypsis at the Luminato Festival in Toronto that same year. Stones In Her Mouth in 2013 was the beginning of a long collaboration with Maori women from communities whose powerful evocation of life has been transmitted through
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Sea Beneath The Skin
BackThe Song of the Earth and the Sea
by Jérôme Quiqueret
Summer 1908: reeling from his young daughter’s death, convinced of his own grave illness, and beset by antisemitism, the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler finds himself embroiled in an existential crisis. Seeking solace, he turns to Chinese culture for inspiration. The result is Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), a composition capturing the essence of a joyous world and humanity’s fleeting grasp on happiness.
Spring 2024: the Samoan and New Zealand artist Lemi Ponifasio draws on this seminal work of Western classical music to express a shared reverence for nature, while reflecting on humanity’s future in the face of climate change – a crisis born of our own hubris.
Theatre of Cosmovision
Sea Beneath The Skin brilliantly showcases the choreographer’s vision of theatre rooted in cosmovision, a concept that grounds performance in a territor
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Lemi Ponifasio
Lemi Ponifasio is acclaimed internationally for his radical approach to theatre, activism, and collaboration with communities.
While firmly established within the international avant-garde, Ponifasio grounds his work within communities and diverse Maori and Oceanic cultures, exploring complex forms of knowledge such as oratory, navigation, architecture, dance, performance, music, ceremony, philosophies, and genealogies as a driving force in emphasizing local-oriented arts, indigenous cultural recovery, language and knowledge, thought and narratives that have been silenced or excluded.
After traveling and performing around the world for over a decade he returned to New Zealand and established MAU in 1995, as the philosophical foundation and direction of his work, the name of his work, and the people and communities he works with. MAU is the Samoan word that means the declaration to the truth of a matter as an effort to transform.
In 2013 Ponifasio created MAU Wahi