Digital Poster – Them and Us

This digital poster promotes the performance Them and Us - a mixture of hybrid choreography and film. It was a German-Sāmoan co-production between German choreographer and performance artist Jochen Roller (Berlin) and Sāmoan interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara (Apia) with TATAU dance group.

Significance

The production notes for the performance were as follows: "The Samoans are back! A century after they were lucratively exhibited in German Zoos, three of them return to Germany in a folk-colonial spectacle by the Berlin choreographer Jochen Roller and the Samoan performance artist Yuki Kihara.

“Our new countrymen” was the motto under which the Samoans were presented to Germany at the time. The three invited dancers Malili, Lafaele and Paul take this motto literally – they study the culture and customs of their white brothers and sisters and alight on strange connections between the two cultures. The Bavarian people dance the Samoan Fa’ataupati in lederhosen, the painters of ‘die Brücke’ group use Samoan painting techniques and people in Berlin clubs wear Samoan chieftain’s tattoos on their shoulders."(1)

According to reseacher Philipp Schorch, “It explores the history of German colonization of Sāmoa and its ramifications in contemporary German society, staging a “folkoloniales Spektakel” to re-write the German anthropological viewpoint of its former colony, as formerly produced through the ...Völkerschauen.”(2)

Acquisition History

This digital poster promoting the performance was collected for Te Papa by Philipp Schorch as part of the co-collecting project Materialising German-Samoan Colonial Legacies (2016).

Notes

(1) Jochen Roller "Them and Us" http://www.jochenroller.de/en/them-and-us/ accessed August 8, 2019.

(2) Jochen Roller,“Them and Us: Ein folkoloniales Spektakel,” http://www.jochenroller.de/them-and-us/, accessed April 20, 2017.

Reference

Schorch, Philipp, Sean Mallon and Nina Tonga Materialising German -Samoan Colonial Legacies in Schorch, Philipp et al. (2020) Refocusing Ethnographic Museums through Oceanic Lenses. University of Hawaii Press pp.121-147