ABSTRACT
In 2014, celebrated Tongan-New Zealand performance artist Kalisolaite ‘Uhila lived for three months on the streets in and around Auckland’s main civic art gallery in a performance entitled Mo’ui tukuhausia, meaning a life set aside. Foregrounding the complexities of encounter between artist and spectator, Mo’ui tukuhausia enacted a dramaturgy of separations: between the high-cultured art world and the street, between performance and the real, between the experience of the artist and that of the spectator, between knowingly or unknowingly taking a place in the frame of a work. This chapter draws on Samuel Weber’s description of separation as integral to theatricality in order to consider the complex performativity of Mo’ui tukuhausia’s dialectical structure of presence and non-presence, connection and separation. Rather than simply eschewing theatricality in favour of the ‘real’, the work crafted the ‘linked separation’ of artist and spectators through oscillating between and overlapping the roles of watcher and watched, and by delicately balancing reciprocity and non-reciprocity.
