2009: Teuila Postcards by Lisa Fa'alafi, Efeso Fa'anana and Leah Shelton

Teuila Postcards by Lisa Fa'alafi, Efeso Fa'anana and Leah Shelton.  Polytoxic Dance Company at The Street Theatre, April 7-8.

I must begin by saying what a shame it is that you may have missed Teuila Postcards.  The theatre was not much more than half full on opening night, but a two night stand is not enough to build the audience this company deserves.  If you can make it to the Opera House, you can catch them in Sydney April 29 to May 2.

If there is anything we learnt from Coming of Age in Samoa - or rather from Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth - it was the fun the young women had making up witty stories of sexual licentiousness. It is not hard to see where this show comes from, taking tourist stereotypes of the Polynesian island resort experience for a hip-hopping rock'n'roll ride set against inventive background reality checks.  The missionary position gets the serve it deserves, but all done with such a light touch that even Samoans who are sticklers for convention appreciate the traditional humour.  Needless to say, the young Islanders in the audience were beside themselves with excited identification and laughter, adding to the enjoyment of those of us who were not fluent in Samoan language.  We didn't need to be to understand the dance, but I'm sure there were finer points to the jokes for those in the know.

Fa'alafi and Fa'anana are Samoan Australians involved in a wide range of performance and design work, based in Brisbane, working with Shelton who is also an actor, dancer, choreographer and designer, with a specialist background in the Japanese performance training method of Tadashi Suzuki.  The result is a fast-moving constantly surprising mix of dance forms, music styles, costumes, and visual effects which packed so much into one hour that time seemed to be stretched by half as much again, yet without one flagging moment.  The fun made the work appear to be easy, but the detail in the dance, voice, mime and timing across such a range of styles revealed the professional quality of training and experience which underpinned the entertainment.

This work and this company also showed the value of Civic's The Street Theatre as a place for welding community arts and top-class theatre.  With new developments under way at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre and the establishment of the Belconnen Arts Centre, we will soon have the right spread of performance spaces for this kind of original work.  Teuila Postcards could be taken as in memory of Jan Wawrzynczak who did so much, working out of the Belconnen Community Centre, to support the Pacific Islander arts community in Canberra. Polytoxic is just the kind of off-beat title he would have appreciated, just as we have enjoyed the Polytoxic Dance Company.  Send us more Postcards, please. 

©Frank McKone, Canberra