| Abstract/Description |
WILD Dogs Under My Skirt is the biggest surprise of The Pasifika Festival, which is back at the Powerhouse by popular demand. The one-woman show comes to Brisbane for the first time having played as far afield as Moscow, Vienna and Honolulu.
When Tusiata Avia, pictured below, sashays on to the stage to the sentimental strains of a Pacific melody, all girlish giggles and lovely hula hands, you can almost smell the frangipani. But this is just her way of crossing the stage to where her cane knife is waiting. She plunges the knife into a two kilo tin of Pacific corned beef and saws it open. Fatty red goo oozes over the sides and on to her hands.
Licking her fingers lasciviously, and acknowledging her ancestors' penchant for ``long pig'', she eyes the audience with the kind of greedy hunger you'd normally lavish on a rare fillet steak. Be very afraid. This performer-poet is Samoa's answer to Germaine Greer: she is subversive, confrontational and powerfully feminist but, unlike Greer, she is also extremely funny. And she delivers her bombshells with a wide-eyed innocence that makes you do a double take: did she really just say that? Yes she did! She did talk about the possibility of roasting and eating Helen Clark despite the New Zealand premier's official apology to the Samoan people for the sins of the past.
When you listen to Tusiata you begin to understand the nature of the cultural collision that occurred when Christian prudery attempted to suffocate Samoan sensuality.
There is an underlying acknowledgment in this monologue that things are not great for the Pacific woman who often finds herself between cultures and a victim of incest, physical abuse and racism. However, Tusiata is not into self-pity. Her response is to out the double standards and reclaim what has been lost. The wild dogs may once have resided under her skirt, but in this performance she has let them off the leash and there's no stopping them. |
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