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FUEL FESTIVAL OF NEW ZEALAND THEATRE. Hamilton, New Zealand. 23 June-10 July 2004.
When Hamilton presented the first FUEL Festival of New Zealand Theatre in 1998, what seemed most remarkable was that an ongoing festival with a single focus on domestic work was not already in existence elsewhere in the country. Rather than competing with the larger and better established New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington, the country's artistically-vibrant capital city, Director Cristian Pilditch conceived FUEL as a festival devoted to staging the widest possible range of new and recent domestic work. Under Pilditch's leadership the festival, now in its fourth year, has benefited from a partnership with the WEL Trust Academy of Performing Arts, Hamilton's user-friendly arts center. In the center's attractive lakeside setting, patrons mingle to celebrate and critique a festival participating in the ongoing constitution of New Zealand's contemporary cultural identity. In the last few decades, New Zealand has completely separated itself from the long shadow of British cultural influence and carved out a uniquely bicultural and sometimes quirky style of artistic expression. While New Zealand is still primarily composed of the descendents of immigrants from England, Scotland, and Ireland, its white European (Pakeha) population has increasingly shared the country's cultural landscape with its indigenous Maori and Pacific Island populations. The 2004 festival in many respects challenged the prevailing construct of biculturalism by offsetting Pakeha work with programming not by Maori practitioners, but by other minorities, notably those of Pacific Islander and Indian descent. Those groups have historically found it difficult to find cultural space within the rigidly bicultural framework for national identity and have long complained of being "the wrong brown." Perhaps, too, it is a marker of the power and prominence of a resurgent Maori culture that their relative absence from this year's festival was not seen as particularly newsworthy or indeed even noteworthy.
Theatre artists across the ethnic and cultural spectrum possess the famed "Kiwi ingenuity," a key cultural trope extending from the country's history as a remote, lightly populated country in which settlers found it necessary to become adept at building or repairing anything. In the arts, Kiwi ingenuity translates into a willingness to cross disciplinary boundaries and create work that might otherwise seem outside one's area...