I Have Loved Me a Man by Sharon Mazer

Author:Sharon Mazer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography Social Sciences and Contemporary Issues
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mika with Gareth Farr during the making of Ahi Ataahua in 1998. Photo by Nicholas Alexander.

As a film, directed by Warrick ‘Waka’ Attewell in 1998, Ahi Ataahua is stunningly beautiful, one of the many taonga on the NZ On Screen website. Farr performs with his percussion group, Strike. They’ve been costumed by Suzanne Tamaki, a founding member of the Pacific Sisters, a collective of performance artists that another founding member, Rosanna Raymond, describes as ‘a Polynesian version of Andy Warhol’s Factory: artists, designers, fashion, street, people’;7 this is the aesthetic that we see in the film. The percussionists wear black tee-shirts and long black, patterned skirts. Mika is crowned with feathers, adorned with seashells but otherwise bare-chested, girded in a loincloth with a long, long train made of videotapes, and platform boots. His moves appear effortless, but the videotapes in the cape, Mika says, ‘cut my body to slashes’. Lightly made up, his long hair flying, Farr appears intensely focused on the sounds, the other percussionists and the camera. Mika begins his performance in mōteatea (lament, or traditional chant) mode, in close-up daring the camera to collapse the distance, and in longer shots pulling himself across the moody blue set through the beat, body arching and tongue occasionally flicking.

The performance is poised between burlesque and high art in a way that threatens to dissolve such distinctions. For the first half of the six-minute film, Mika’s movements are slow curves, absolutely controlled, perfectly disciplined, contained – aside from a blinking moment of pure camp, when he yanks his train up to his shoulders, first one arm, then the other, with a quick wink to the camera. The chant turns to haka, the beats accelerate, and everyone lets loose(r). Mika disappears, then reappears on stilts, painted moko, long red plastic grass skirt, surrounded by the musicians, as they move towards the climax. In some shots, water pours on him and then on the musicians, so that the whole experience is immersively otherworldly. They are, Mika and Farr, captured here some twenty years ago, impossibly beautiful.

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