European theatre landed in Aotearoa in the nineteenth century. Touring and local productions of Shakespeare, in particular, afforded British settlers an aura of a civilized and civilizing force as they went about making homes for themselves on Māori land. Their twentieth-century descendants increasingly took to the stage to ground their identities as Pākehā (not indigenous, but ‘not not’ indigenous) New Zealanders. By the century's end, Māori and Pacific theatre artists were experimenting with ways of telling their stories onstage, weaving ritual and other performing-arts practices into new hybrid theatrical forms. Many of these innovations have become conventional – part and parcel of what is understood to be a uniquely bicultural way of making theatre in Aotearoa New Zealand.

By focusing on the role of the dramaturge, Fiona Graham aims to draw together these various strands of social and theatrical history into an identifiable New Zealand drama and dramaturgical practice. Performing Dramaturgy is a lightly revised version of Graham's PhD thesis (University of Auckland, 2013), but it is not an academic book per se. The press, Playmarket, is the primary agent for New Zealand playwrights and publishes playscripts as part of promoting their work. Graham's book is, in effect, both a personal survey of a number of significant trends and productions and a kind of ‘how-to-be-a-dramaturge’ in that context.

To start, Graham justifies her use of ‘dramaturge’ – a French and Canadian convention – instead of ‘dramaturg’, as is common in the rest of the world. For her, following Marianne van Kerkhoven and André Lepecki, ‘dramaturge’ denotes a wider conceptualization than is attached to more customary and functional understandings of the role. She sees her position more fluidly as a conduit for the creative energies of the collaborators – less about filtering contextual information and ensuring textual rigour than about establishing a safe space for individual voices to tell their truths. In this, the role of the dramaturge becomes ethical, even therapeutic, with Graham establishing her practice as a model for eliciting successful performances from diverse participants. The invocation of Māori tikanga (customs and values) is, in this light, intended to legitimize Graham's claims to have been intimately involved in the development of a new, quintessentially New Zealand, way of performing dramaturgy.

Performing Dramaturgy begins by tracing the ‘Evolution of the Dramaturge in Western Europe, North America and Australia’, arriving in the second chapter at a description of how the role of dramaturge developed in New Zealand. The third chapter offers a brief overview of the emergence of Māori theatre against the backdrop of the twin legacies of colonization and British theatre. The final two chapters largely describe her own work as a dramaturge on diverse theatre and dance projects from Dunedin to Auckland. Much of her narrative is given over to lengthy quotes – full pages at a time – from collaborators reflecting on the value of her contributions, as well as to long lists of questions and precepts. The book closes with a ‘Final Provocation’ in which she makes her ‘case for an expanded, inclusive, non-hierarchical and reflexive practice that can be employed at any stage of development with an individual writer or group of collaborating artists’ (p. 149). For Graham, only this ethical approach to dramaturgy has the potential to create a truly post-colonial theatre in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Performing Dramaturgy, like Graham's dramaturge, occupies an (uneasy) opening between scholarship and artistic practice – neither far enough removed for critical thinking, nor fully immersed in the creative act. As such, it offers readers a reflection of how many New Zealand theatre-makers see themselves. It exposes (inadvertently, I think) the complex and contradictory problematics underlying the idea of ‘decolonizing the stage’ and so raises the question, how can the embrace of Māori (or Pacific or other indigenous) ways of knowing and doing, incorporating ritual acts, traditional performance practices and te reo Māori (or other Pacific languages) into a performance somehow transform the theatre – still very much a European construct – into something other than itself, beyond the still-virulent grasp of colonization and now in the face of globalization?