Tame Iti, a Maori activist with blue tattoos all over his face, sticks out his tongue and begins a ritual dance. Four other dancers stamp and clap in aggressive unison – while another man creeps around, monkey-like, on all fours. "He does that dance so well," says Lemi Ponifasio, the Samoan-born choreographer who formed this company, "because he used to live with monkeys."
MAU are not your run-of-the-mill dance troupe. The company, rehearsing at St Mary's Parish Centre, was formed in 1995 by Ponifasio, and named after the Samoan independence movement. The dancers, says Ponifasio, come from a mixture of Pacific locations – Samoa, Java, New Zealand – and are not classically trained. One of them, he adds, used to be a shark fisherman.
MAU are performing two Ponifasio works as part of the international festival: Tempest – Without a Body, a powerful declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples, with Iti as its centrepiece; and Birds with Skymirrors, decrying the pollution of the Pacific islands. The latter, a new work, was inspired by seabirds Ponifasio saw on the remote island of Tarawa: they were carrying glinting shards of plastic waste in their beaks.
While the work aims to reflect our damaging relationship with the earth, it does not set out to preach. "This is not about me reminding people in the audience to take out the rubbish," says Ponifasio with a wry smile. "They already know they should do that." .
