Say Your Right Words: The Extrasensory Experiences of Māori Storytelling and ‘Re-storying’ Contemporary Performance Methodologies

Abstract

Tukua tō reo kia rere – Let your language flow. 

This article draws on my whakapapa, or lineage, as a serial story-weaver. Sharing these stories is my attempt to articulate – or conjure – experiences of activated embodied encounters: how storytelling helps me to feel Māori. I connect these feelings with Indigenous methodologies which posit the role of storytelling in First Nation cultures as vital for cultural renewal - in holding history, but also as fundamentally future-facing. I draw specifically on a recent project working with Māori actors in motion capture performance, ‘the Wiri Project’, where we adopted storytelling as a critical and creative methodology. I argue that this project represents the contemporary Indigenous performing body as archive: simultaneously past and present, as a living resource for the future.