Lemi Ponifasio: a ritual of respect and sorrow

I am thankful for the gift of dance. It is a miraculous spirit that activates our kinship with the world, the living, the dead, the river, stone, sky, and all sentient beings.

--Lemi Ponifasio, "Note from the Artist," program notes for Requiem

Presented in Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival 2008, Lemi Ponifasio's Requiem--inspired by Mozart's Requiem but infused, instead, with movement and music, chant and natural sound invoking the South Pacific--was a work of curiously subconscious effect.

Ponifasio's New Zealand-based company MAU boasts a cast of 24 Pacific Islanders of diverse backgrounds. The full-evening production unfolded like a sacred ceremony with processions, gestures, offerings and blood sacrifice in acknowledgment of the impending loss of a land, a way of life, the precious history of a people. To put it plainly, global warming, unchecked, will ultimately drown the islands of the nation of Kiribati (home to several of the performers). Ponifasio, born in a Samoan village, set this work before an affluent American audience--the audience for Lincoln Center and Mostly Mozart--people who benefit from the advances of a nation whose carbon footprint on this planet is comparable to Sasquatch's furry foot.

Much of Requiem, in its specifics, remains unknown to me, at least on a conscious level, and I believe that was a deliberate strategy. This strategy includes Helen Todd's dim lighting, suggestive of secrecy and disappearance; the chant (rendered in English only in the program notes), suggestive of traditions and holy secrets to which we might feel we bear only remote connection; the uncommon slowness of pace which effectively moves us out of our typical, technologically-enhanced relationship to time and to thought as Westerners and as sophisticated consumers of art.

Ponifasio addresses the tenderness within us rather than our defended ego selves. The risk taken: that those among us who identify most strongly with those ego selves would not get it, would resist it. Was the risk worth it? In his New York Times review, chief dance critic Alastair Macaulay reports his observation of "the surreptitious, apologetic exits of one member of the audience after another." I have sat among audiences where the fleeing of unhappy patrons--one by one or in clumps--was quite noticeable. But perhaps I was too rivetted by what was happening onstage to notice any "apologetic exits" or they were indeed sufficiently "surreptitious."

Yes, the slowness of Requiem challenged me, but it also made all the sense in the world, in time with the gradual disappearance of Kiribati. And it whispered to and opened up another part of my head.

Let us mourn together. Let us exchange our sorrows. (Lemi Ponifasio)

Ponifasio--in his writing and his interviews--is engaging, and his purpose, as I grasp it, is crystal clear. I encourage you to take a look at this feature by Valerie Gladstone in The New York Sun--'Requiem' for a 'Requiem'--and to get a copy of the production's Playbill, if you can.