Introduction: Theatre and Spectrality

A River Runs Through Us All: Asian and Pacific Linkages in Contemporary Performance from Aotearoa

“…In addition to characters who actually are ghosts (Choy Kwan and his fellow miners), who are imbued with ghostly qualities (the Ferryman), or who, like Ben, are haunted by an unresolved history that speaks to "heredity itself as a form of ghosting," the opera abounds with memories of the dead evoked and brought back from the past. 71 In a general respect, this resonates with theater scholars' ready acknowledgment of theater as a quintessentially "haunted" medium in its deployment of recycling and repetition, and in a different way, of acting as a process of conjuring and communing with the dead, and of actors "unconcealing and making visible what otherwise is invisible [. .…”

“…73 There is much to say about The Bone Feeder's "dramatic hauntologies," especially-per Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin-about how the opera's decolonial praxis uses ghosts and other spectral tropologies to reveal repressed and unresolved violences, destabilize dominant epistemologies and political hegemonies, and privilege competing histories and narratives that promote more fluid constructions of national identity. 74 But what interests me particularly here is the inventive way in which Liang diverges from conventional tales in which the plot turns on the ghost's quest for justice and its subsequent spiritual ascension through its agentic work on the living. 75 In Liang's work, the Chinese ghosts aren't given this capacity; instead, crucially, the workings of the plot are activated by the agency of Māori women.…”