Through an investigation of Samoan performing arts, I argue that artistic innovation is intentional, but not fully conscious in the linguistic sense. Performance artists grapple with disturbing shared experiences neither they, nor their cultural consociates, can get into words, but that artists render through a play of figures. By reframing figures and the cultural models they symbolise, artists think and feel through cultural memories in ways that germinate social, psychological, and artistic change. This capacity is particularly useful in historical periods of abrupt transition, as the colonial era was in the Pacific. The performances I review are wonderfully coordinated, collective endeavours in which players and audience together, within the quotation marks of play, consider interactions between foreign males and local females and their implications for models of race and gender.
