I have come to love the body quite deeply. In my personal life, as someone who has suffered from an (often debilitating) overactive immune system my whole life, I am fascinated by the ways in which the body functions, compensates, breaks down and repairs. As a storyteller and educator, I am motivated by the way Indigenous performance practices do not separate the training of our instrument as ‘voice’ and ‘movement’, but strengthen stamina and mana simultaneously.

McKalee Steen, of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, defines body sovereignty as you, an individual, with full control over your body: “Whether it’s what you eat, how you dress, or who you are intimate with, you have the power to determine how your body moves through this world.”

The word ‘yau’ has a dual meaning in vosa vaka-Viti. It can be a pronoun, referring to yourself. It can also be a noun, referring to the plethora of treasures in rai vaka-Viti (iTaukei worldview) that are gifted and exchanged within ceremony. Yau are sacred materials derived directly from the land and ocean: masi kesa (bark cloth), tabua (whale’s tooth), ibe (woven mats), salusalu (neck garlands), magimagi (coconut-husk fibres) – all derive from the land and ocean, as do we as Taukei.

Walking on the street in Fiji, it is very common for strangers to embrace my children (ten months old and three years old) like long-lost kin. Market vendors will hold out their hands to grab my baby’s chunky cheeks or tickle his toes, hotel workers will greet my toddler with Kuku ‘kisses’, parents or kids with snacks will willingly offer my children a drink or bite of their food. When walking past people’s houses in the village or having a chance encounter in town with an old friend, they will shout out for you to come and eat lunch or invite you for dinner. These continual invitations for connection are the textures of thousands of years of relations, expressed in modern-day Fiji.

I am often struck by my own surprise when I witness such outward displays of affection – despite knowing that this is how my people are. My surprise is, in fact, grief. A slow-burning grief that I only experience in British colonies such as Australia and New Zealand, because the body and spirit are intentionally reduced to the mechanics of productivity by imperialism.

How do you quantify the value of intimacy across differing lived experiences and cultural expressions of the body? And where does this value meet the self-determination of story within collective projects in the storytelling landscape?

For years, the role of the actor has been agreed upon as the interpreter of someone else’s vision – writer, director, producer. You receive a script, interpret it, and present it. Actors are rewarded for their neutrality, with maximum creative output and minimal creative authority. This model is the foundation of an entertainment industry that allows actors to perform multiple ethnicities and rewards them for being ‘racially ambiguous’, because it’s easier to ask an actor to employ an accent than for a white writer or director to learn the nuances of a dialect and/or language other than English. The steady global story-sovereignty movement has highlighted how this framework is a vehicle of colonisation, rejecting the violence of perpetuating shallow and disrespectful presentations of Indigenous peoples.

Alongside this movement, there has been a growth in the training and employment of intimacy co-ordinators, choreographers and directors.

Intimacy Coordinators of Colour, a US-based organisation founded by stage director and educator Ann James, defines intimacy choreographers as “responsible for the consensual crafting and staging of stories of sex, race, disability, religion or age with appropriate cultural context and competency. They consult on scenes with loaded, heightened, or charged content that draws on the actor’s identity.”

Here in Aotearoa, there was a notable increase in the demand for intimacy co-ordinators following #MeToo. Jennifer Ward-Lealand, a leading intimacy co-ordinator and the founder of Intimacy Coordinators Aotearoa, notes in a 2022 Stuff article that there were no intimacy co-ordinators in this country prior to 2018.

The scope of an intimacy choreographer is huge, and I can think of many Indigenous storytellers doing the unpaid labour of making rehearsal rooms and actor training ‘culturally competent’, because naive and under-resourced writers and directors want to be ‘inclusive’ yet provide no framework to support this.

The majority of practitioners in the intimacy choreography and co-ordination industry, both locally and internationally, are kaivalagi (white or European), and the skeptic in me dares to ask: Is the demand for intimacy co-ordinators, choreographers and directors just colonialism rebranding itself to undermine our sense of collective morale and personhood?

When considering these reflections, I am acutely aware of the ways that Indigenous, d/Deaf, Disabled and Queer storytellers and communities understand body sovereignty intimately and enact consent every day to identify our needs. We are consistently placed in positions that require our participation to be conditional. Why should I, as a Tokelauan and Fijian woman, accept that the authorities on intimacy choreography are kaivalagi?

My question is rooted in oral knowledge that the European wives of missionaries in Fiji during early settlement were an important tool of colonialism, by shifting iTaukei values of femininity and the body to a Victorian model of womanhood in places of learning, such as schools. The reconstruction of how iTaukei women – daughters, mothers, wives, grandmothers – relate to their own flesh was an intentional strategy of the colonial project to undermine our collective morale. Fiji only became independent 54 years ago, and this model is still very much present in how iTaukei women are expected to hold and present themselves today.

Every day, as a parent, I am confronted with new realisations about my responsibility to emerging consciousness. Some days, this consciousness appears when my baby becomes curious about new things, or the same things in new ways. Other times it’s shown through the way other children respond to my child in the park. Every moment that I am navigating how to be in relationship with my child, I am forced to dialogue with consent and cultural expectations of behaviour for Taukei. I am teaching a child to understand: this is how Taukei read, understand and enact our values through our body.

Tabu around the body is an ancient practice for iTaukei, uniquely expressed through iTovo (protocols and customs for behaviour). Through repetition, our bodies remember to behave in particular fashions within specific cultural and relational contexts as a means of placing reverence on the space between. This manifests through brothers and sisters avoiding eye contact or conversation as a sign of respect, uttering ‘jilou’ whenever we pass something over and near the head, always walking around the perimeter of a soqo (meeting) or lowering your body when moving in front of or near seated people.

The Buiniga, Fiji’s historically unisex hairstyle, is a very visible remaining resistance to colonialism that is worn proudly today, with an exciting resurgence happening amongst emerging generations in Fiji and the diaspora, elevated by work from artists such as Natasha Ratuva. This honours the belief in iTaukei culture that the head and hair is considered tabu, the most sacred part of the body. Tabu is demonstrated through the distance we keep between our flesh and someone else’s head. It is tabu to touch another person’s head without their permission, it is tabu to walk near the head of another person who may be lying down, it is tabu to pass things over the head. When someone passes away, tabu can be set so that hair is not cut for 100 days. The sacredness of the head and hair cannot be overstated.

As a reflection of this, the ways iTaukei carve pathways around the head in space spotlight the innovation and creativity of body sovereignty. The unique ways we move objects and carry out tasks in relation to the head and hair is a set of rules for behaviour in space. Someone who does not respect tabu of the head and hair is understood to be raised poorly.

To me, this is like breathing. I know and understand this intimately. But to a non-iTaukei intimacy co-ordinator, director or fellow actor, the head and hair will likely register as less tabu than genitalia or lips. I am interested in a practice surrounding body sovereignty that is not mechanical; one that understands that, for me and my people, flesh is not separate from noqu Vanua.

To develop and implement intimacy co-ordination practice through rai vaka-Viti is to ensure that a relationship with land and waters in bodywork is equitable to a relationship with human flesh. It rejects any attempts to elevate anthropocentric values.

When approaching the possibilities of intimacy choreography or co-ordination in embodied practice through rai vaka-Viti, we are called into enacting ancient acts of kinship with human and non-human kin that frame relations for sustainable wellbeing. And by looking at existing roles, responsibilities and iTovo within our kinship system – veiwekani – perhaps we don’t need to re-invent the wheel to imagine what intimacy co-ordination, choreography and direction look like from an iTaukei perspective. Why should we separate self and ecosystem in creative practice? Why should we starve our imaginations of the possibilities that exist through this? The concept of Vanua is framed beautifully by Dr Unaisi Nabobo-Baba in her essay ‘In the Vanua’. From a Taukei perspective: “the self is self, then, because the Vanua is, and in essence the self cannot be without the Vanua – it ceases to be.”

It makes sense that the ways in which we practice intimacy in performing arts and screen shouldn’t only consider the ‘how’ but also the ‘where’. How does our environment – the feeling of southerly winds from Antarctica on our skin, or sweat on our foreheads from a searing sun and 90 percent humidity – impact how we understand intimacy? The danger of ‘neutrality’ not only dissolves our perception of who can and should tell stories, but disembodies what stories feel like when engaging with the real, tangible world. I often laugh (sadly) at the irony of how normalised it is to fabricate training and performance environments for storytellers – inside brick and mortar for hours on end, clean and temperature-controlled rooms, deprived of natural air-flow and light – in order to tell stories of the messy, imperfect, non-linear and beautiful world.

I want to contribute to, support and nurture opportunities for all storytellers to be experts in brave and respectful intimacy practices in an equitable way. This means shifting mindsets and expectations around accreditation and acknowledging life experience.

A formative text for me in this space as storyteller and educator was Holding Change by adrienne maree brown, in which she says, “to ‘hold change’ or to ‘hold space’ is to hold both the people in, and the dynamic energy of, a room, a space, a meeting, an organization, a movement.” She understands the nuanced skillset required to nurture exchanges of energy or people with shared visions – through shared values and navigating conflict – and I cannot help but connect the dots and see that the skills required for leading movements are also the same skills required for leading creative spaces. For what is the work we do as storytellers, if not to make the revolution irresistible (to paraphrase Toni Cade Bambarra – shout-out to The Well for putting me on to Toni’s work)?

Intimacy choreographer Chelsea Pace, in her article ‘The Certification Question’, notes that the organisation Theatrical Intimacy Education actively refuses to offer accreditation. Pace asserts that the existence of “certification seeks to leverage systems of power to promote inequality, exclusion, and the dynamics of deeply problematic master–teacher models. All of which continues to capitalize, financially or otherwise, the gatekeeping of access to knowledge and opportunity.”

It makes sense to me that no single person should be responsible for making intimacy work safe – that responsibility must be entrusted to every person who is working within and outside story-making rooms.

I must be committed to the refusal of idolisation of my own role in our arts ecosystems, and any distance that the title ‘expert’ places between myself and storytellers, because the liberation of my body is tied to the liberation of yours, is it not?

Sure, I could become an intimacy co-ordinator, but all I have to gain from that is status and money. As an actor and director, it is far more fulfilling for me to work in a collaborative story-making process where everyone is an expert in their identities and bodies. I don’t want to stand in front of a room full of people and tell you about your bodies, I want you to invite me to drink tea and tell me about your bodies whilst we eat babakau.

The lack of Taukei in training institutions and working within the performing arts and screen industries has me – someone who wants to connect with and meet fellow Taukei actors, directors, writers, producers – asking, “Where are my people? Where are my Vanua?”

In the words of Matua Hone Hurihunganui, director of Engaging Well, during a workshop held at Toi Whakaari: “We deserve more than safety!” I’m not interested in diversity for the sake of Black Pacific bodies being seen in white story-mediums and institutions. I couldn’t care less about that.

Black Pacific bodies deserve to be held, spoken to and of in the tongues of our ancestors and wisdom of our Vanua. It is our right to demand complexity in story making, to incite provocation of process and relish in the fluidity and expansiveness of our personhood.

Header photography: Emele Ugavule