Unburdening the Past through Theatre: How Harry Dansey’s Te Raukura: The Feathers of the Albatross Constructs and De-Constructs History

<p><strong>Since the emergence of Māori theatre in Aotearoa in the 1970s, Te Raukura: the Feathers of the Albatross, a Narrative Play in Two Acts, and its author Harry Dansey have been largely overlooked for their place in the genre. This thesis studies Te Raukura, showing its multidisciplinary capacity to construct a historical narrative of the New Zealand Land Wars in Taranaki during the 1860s to 80s on stage. In doing so, Dansey, a Māori writer, speaks to other Māori people as an articulation and validation of identity, speaks back to the settler state and dominant Pākehā narratives of racial harmony and New Zealand identity, and speaks about colonization in an era when truthful and frank accounts about the pain of the “settlement” of Aotearoa were largely ignored. Through a hybridised New Historicist lens and autoethnographic positioning, the project reads Te Raukura through its cultural and historical contexts to learn more about the events being portrayed, as well as their connection to the present moment of protest and resistance in its representation of cyclical temporality through embodied history.</strong></p>