Lemi Ponifasio

Salā Lemi Ponifasio (born 1964) is a Samoan and New Zealand choreographer, dancer, stage director, designer and artist.

Ponifasio was born in Lano, Samoa. He studied philosophy and politics at the University of Auckland.

In 1995 Ponifasio founded Mau dance company in Auckland, New Zealand, working with communities and artists from all over the world. Mau is a Samoan word that means a declaration to the truth of a matter.

In 2014, The Guardian reviewed the Mau company's performance of "I AM" at the Edinburgh Festival as "a juggernaut of a piece, walk-of-the-dead slow in parts, genuinely chilling in others, its black heart pulsing to the sound of a thunderous, nuclear undertow."

In 2014 the Mau Company performed "Birds With Skymirrors", a piece on climate change, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The New York Times reported that Ponifasio "conceived of 'Birds With Skymirrors' not as a political rant but as a meditation on the end, an examination of the threshold between life and death." When the piece was performed at the 2010 Edinburgh Festival, The Guardian called it "physically extraordinary and imaginatively charged."

In 2016, UNESCO invited Ponifasio to write the official message for International Dance Day.

Lemi Ponifasio’s most recent works include Lagimoana (2015) for the Venice Biennale 56th Visual Arts Exhibition; Apocalypsis (2015) with music of R. Murray Schafer at the Luminato Festival, Toronto; I AM: Mapuche (2015) and Ceremony of Memories (2016) with MAU Mapuche the indigenous people of Chile; and I AM (2014) for the 100th Anniversary of WW1, which premiered at the Avignon Festival followed by seasons at such places as the Edinburgh International Festival and the Ruhrtriennale, Germany. His other creations include The Crimson House (2014) probing the nature of power and a world that sees all and no longer forgets; Stones In Her Mouth (2013), a work with Maori women as transmitters of a life force through oratory and ancient chants; the opera Prometheus (2012) by Carl Orff for the Ruhrtriennale; Le Savali: Berlin (2011) confronting the imperial City of Berlin with its own communities of immigrant families in search of belonging and constrained by threat of deportation; Birds With Skymirrors (2010) responding to the disappearing Pacific Islands, homelands to most of his performers and devastated by climate change; and Tempest: Without A Body (2008) concerning power and terror and the unlawful use of state power post 9/11.

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