Dream Sequence: Latai Taumoepeau and Peter Polites

You can download a transcript of Episode 7 - Latai Taumoepeau & Peter Polites here.

Latai Taumoepeau and Peter Polites present Aunty Oracle Codex of Rayon Island, a work in progress that reflects on current shifts in pandemic travel allowances as well as the collaborative practice of Latai and Peter.

Aunty Oracle Codex of Rayon Island will be presented as a journey to Rayon Island in the form of an audio visual work.

Latai and Peter have shared the below text about this project with us as a starting point for their Dream Sequence work.

"The fern frond unfolds and a cyrillic neon font says "Welcome to the Realm of Rayon Island" In this place all our tenses have merged, it's past, present and future. An oracle is welcoming us and she tells us the history of the water levelling up, debris filling our breath and the missing Christmas Beatles. In this tragedy, she documents the others who warned us and you listen to this priestess and patient, realising the more ancient they are, the more relevant it all is."

The artists have requested that where possible audience members wear headphones when experiencing this work.

Latai Taumoepeau makes faivā (live art). Her faivā (performance practice) is from her homelands, the Island Kingdom of Tonga and her birthplace Sydney, land of the Gadigal people. She mimicked, trained and un-learned dance, in multiple institutions of learning, starting with her village, a suburban church hall, the club and a university.

Her body-centred performance practice of faivā centres Tongan philosophies of relational space and time; cross-pollinating ancient and everyday temporal practice to make visible the impact of climate crisis in the Pacific. She conducts urgent environmental movements and actions to create transformation in Oceania. Engaging in the socio-political landscape of Australia with sensibilities in race, class and the female body politic, she is committed to making minority communities visible in the frangipanni-less foreground.

In the near future Latai will return to her ancestral home and continue the ultimate faivā (performing art) of sea voyaging and celestial navigation before she becomes an ancestor.

Peter Polites is a novelist from Western Sydney. He has written two queer noirs, Down the Hume and The Pillars, which won the 2020 NSW Premier’s Multicultural Literary Award. He also won the 2020 Woollahra Digital Literature Prize for Fiction. In 2021 he will be a writer in residence and Adjunct Lecturer at UNSW Canberra and working on his third novel, God Forgets About the Poor. 

Sidney McMahon

The program is made possible through the generous support of Create NSW.