Representing Pakeha on stage: Adriann Smith, ‘Performing emotion to remember a Pakeha worldview’, Australasian Drama Studies, 70, 2017, pp. 113-134 | settler colonial studies blog

Representing Pakeha on stage: Adriann Smith, ‘Performing emotion to remember a Pakeha worldview’, Australasian Drama Studies, 70, 2017, pp. 113-134

05Jul17

Abstract: The theatrical depiction of emotion can be a powerful vehicle for the representation of cultural identity.Examining the theatrical use of emotion in Gary Henderson’s play Home Land and Stuart Hoar and Chris Blake’s opera Bitter Calm, this article considers how performed emotions may represent Pākehā cultural identity on the stage.

The cultural memories underlying theatrical emotions empower them to challenge ideas, and this article considers how the theatrical use of emotion represents memories of, and ideas about, Pākehā cultural identity.As a form of cultural language, a performance, as Bert O.States observes, ‘offers an aesthetic completion to a process we know to be endless … The play imitates the timely in order to move it from time, to give time a shape.’

Within this shape, the remembered and reconfigured past is emotionally represented, at multiple performances, to an ever-changing present.This representation to an audience allows for an ongoing examination of personal and cultural identity in which emotional representation performs a key role.For, as Peta Tait notes, ‘[i]f emotions are socially meaningful only as natural, this locates them as opposite to culture and camouflages their immense social power’.

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