Birds of Passage

Bird of Passage is a solo performance, site specific installation, digital work for virtual and DOOH (digital-out-of-home) spaces. Created by Charles Koroneho, in partnership with the Performance Arcade 2024, the project explores an infinite field of sensation based possibilities, primarily as a series of live durational performances and hybrid works for digital display platforms. 

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The inspiration for the project is a text written by Koroneho and published in the french language journal LIBERTÉ in 2018, an issue dedicated to the writings of indigenous artists. Bird of Passage references the artist experience of neurodiversity, a lifelong journey of living with mate hūkiki-epilepsy, written from a māori perspective and structured in the manner of ngā mōteatea and relocated as improvisational performance art, indigenous symbolism and poetic imagery. Seizures forge transformational bodies, living with epilepsy releases trauma, imagination and the onset of daily performances. From a harsh landscape of curse-gift or calling, an indigenous perspective of the soma-body dichotomy appears; how trauma, healing and ceremony function in the creation of cultural space and why indigenous bodies occupy and inhabit this space. Bird of Passage renews a relationship for Koroneho that closely resembles the experiences of epilepsy, allowing the artist access to those memories and transformations without the debilitating consequence of re-traumatisation. The project releases memory to an infinite field of sensation based possibilities, primarily as a series of live durational performances and hybrid works for digital display platforms, exploring the liberation of trauma.

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Charles Koroneho works in the fields of performance and culture. He created Te Toki Haruru, a conceptual platform (est. 1997), to explore cultural collaboration and the intersection between dance, theatre, visual arts and design. Koroneho is a graduate of the New Zealand School of Dance and Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. His projects are presented as performances, exhibitions, research workshops and arts collaborations exploring the collision between Maori cosmology, New Zealand society and global cultures.

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Credits:

Charles Koroneho

Teokotai Paitai

Richard Te Are

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With special thanks to sponsor Te Toki Haruru.