Latai Taumoepeau Read Bio Collapse
Latai Taumoepeau makes live art. Her faivā (performance practice) is from her homelands, the Island Kingdom of Tonga, and her birthplace, Sydney, land of the Gadigal people. She mimicked, trained, and unlearned dance in multiple institutions of learning, starting with her village, a suburban church hall, the club, and a university. Her body-centered performance practice of faivā centers Tongan philosophies of relational space and time, cross-pollinating ancient and everyday temporal practice to make visible the impact of climate crisis in the Pacific. She conducts urgent environmental movements and actions to create transformation in Oceania. Engaging in the sociopolitical landscape of Australia with sensibilities in race, class, and the female body politic, she is committed to making minority communities visible in the frangipanni-less foreground. In the near future she will return to her ancestral home and continue the ultimate faivā of sea voyaging and celestial navigation before she becomes an ancestor.
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When we’re looking at our Pacific Island nations, one of the things that holds us together is the body of ocean which we know as the Pacific—also a name that’s come from somebody else. That’s why it becomes crucial to look at the relationships we have as Pacific Island people to this body of water—the largest continent in the world.
