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The effectiveness of any haka performance is measured by the performers’ ability to elicit an emotional and psychic response in the spectator: to incite ihi. The (re)action of US pop star Beyoncé to an impromptu haka sparked vigorous online debate. Stripping back preconceptions regarding tradition, gender, and ethnicity, this spontaneous performance is read as an unbound moment where reciprocal awe and respect invoke a powerful tripartite performative energy, the wana.

Recently a number of young, ultra-talented, Māori and Pacific Island performers have emerged on local stages in Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand) and beyond. Exemplifying this bright, youthful energy is Hone Kouka's multi-media production The Beautiful Ones, a joyful exploration of luminous rangatahi (youth) unleashed in a liminal realm. Adopting the Māori cosmological concept of Te Kore, in this article Nicola Hyland explores the depiction of rangatahi in this performance as transformational: liberated – culturally, sexually, and performatively – from historical tropes of youth and indigeneity. Nicola Hyland is a lecturer in Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and has ancestral ties to the Te Ati-Haunui-a-Paparangi and Ngati Hauiti iwi tribes of Aotearoa.

Like a published play script, a book of spoken word lyrics represents a site of potential: one which requires performance to truly come alive, but also offers up a myriad of imagined embodied possibilities.