On the page, Mika is a queer Māori performance artist, entrepreneur and activist. In the flesh, he defies definition. Sharon Mazer's biography explores Mika's body of work in full, glorious colour with a vibrant array of (often provocative) photographs, vital for conjuring his frequently uncategorizable incarnations. Initially intended as a means of preserving Mika's history and extensive archives (p. vii), this is also a portrait of an evolving post-colonial place, his ‘personal journey as a mirror held up to New Zealand social history, both fabulous and revolutionary’ (p. vii).

The nine chapters visit distinct stages in Mika's life, narrated through highly aestheticized, critically crafted vignettes. Mazer begins with Mika's childhood in the South Island port town of Timaru, exploring ‘spoof dancing’ (p. 25) in 1970s Christchurch, and a ‘serious’ turn at acting and activism in the 1980s; she traces the metamorphosis of dancer Neil Gudsell into performance artist ‘Mika’, exploring his global ventures in avant-garde guises, and the recent acts of queer youth advocacy (‘#BusyDragDad’ (p. 232)). Mazer reveals how Mika, adopted at birth by a Pākehā (New Zealander of European descent) family, would never even attempt to ‘fit’ in Timaru – a small town with a bastardized Māori name (from te maru: ‘the shelter’) and a thoroughly conservative Pākeha mentality. Seemingly sheltered from his own whakapapa (genealogy), Mika learned about Māori culture via a cereal-box card album: The Māori Way of Life (p. 13). This seems to speak volumes to Mika's later experiments with hybrid performativities, a constant questioning of how to ‘be’ Indigenous when you've only ever been shown indigeneity via serialized tokens.

Mazer scrupulously unpacks iconic acts from Mika's performance portfolio, ‘a heady campy swirl of song, dance and patter’ (p. 120). His burlesque performances playfully challenge gender binarism with unsettling Indigenous alternatives; Mazer suggests Mika is ‘more gender-contradictory than gender-fluid’ (p. 85). This is certainly indicated, for example, with Mika's borrowing of the facial tattoo moko kauau, a signifier of specifically female mana (power/prestige). In later discarding this habit – ‘it no longer seemed important to express cross-gender’ (p. 124) – Mika reveals his own evolution as a self-defining, gender-defying subject.

Mika's cultural deconstruction is complemented by an impressive visual narrative. Through his ‘native drag’ acts (p. 120), Mika ‘reveals and revels in the construction of the ‘native’ in the contemporary cultural imagination’ (p. 123). His personas are deliberately kitsch, from the ‘Lava Lover’ to the ‘Plastic Māori’, mixing designer Issey Miyake and faux grass skirts with flair. His is a glocalized pan-Polynesian hybridity; integrating forms from the West and the East to fashion a time-traversing Indigenous cyborg warrior, with an infectious Māori sass – ‘No we're not going to be your chocolate-coated fantasies any more, Captain’ (p. 133).

Mika comes alive when Mazer encounters him in performance, through vivid, located analyses of his work onstage, on-screen and within the cityscape. This is no coffee-table biography, although the fusion of scholarly material with name-dropping anecdotes (including Grace Jones!) and meticulously curated, high-resolution imagery indicates that it is intended for a diverse readership. It is also a departure from other recent autobiographical memoirs by high-profile Māori and Pasifika (Pacific Island New Zealander) figures, including novelist Witi Ihimaera's Māori Boy (2016) and celebrity choreographer Parris Goebal's Young Queen (2018); while Mika's voice features throughout, the gaze is always driven from Mazer's perspective. At times there is a tension between Mazer's thoughtful analyses and Mika's often dismissive discussions of his process of creating. The work is mostly witnessed in situ, which contributes to the sense of this story as one of surface, or costume. Even when Mika is presented in the barest of flesh (distastefully, flamboyantly, inviting the gaze, unpacking the Indigenous body politic), he is never entirely uncovered. There also is something unsettling about Mika's haphazard cultural bricolage – but perhaps this is the point. It is not what his performances are saying about Māori culture, but what they are saying about Mika. This is an accessible, insightful account of a contemporary Indigenous performer who refuses to be kept underground, on the margins, or in the closet.