The Savage Coloniser Show is theatre that is as provocative as it is necessary.

A provocative and dynamic show about colonisation, race and racism, by a New Zealand born Samoan female writer.

The show brings to ferocious life Tusiata Avia’s The Savage Coloniser Book, for which she became the first female Pasifika poet to win the Ockham Award for poetry. Under the artful direction of the equally formidable Anapela Polata’ivao, Avia’s unapologetic and clear-eyed examination of race and racism, the colonised and the coloniser, is full of bold humour, courage and lacerating truths.

The voices of Tusiata Avia are infinite. She ranges from vulnerable to forbidding to celebratory with forms including pantoums, prayers and invocations. And in this electrifying work, she gathers all the power of her voice to speak directly into histories of violence. Avia addresses James Cook in fury. She unravels the 2019 Christchurch massacre, walking us back to the beginning. Avia’s unapologetic examination of race and racism is full of bold humour, courage and lacerating truths: where red-sequinned dusky maidens train their sights on James Cook, Samoan school girls play an innocent game of patty-cake as they describe the atrocities on Nauru, and a Tour Guide offers instructions on how to be in a room full of white people. She describes the contortions we make to avoid blame. And she locates the many voices that offer hope.
※ Pantoum: A form of poetry that originated in Malaysia, emphasizing the theme of the poem with a certain repetitive structure and creating unique rhythm.