The cross-cultural confluence of museum and theater in Victoria Kneubuhl's Hawaiian plays

Abstract

In this paper I will explore the significance of Hawaiian playwright Victoria Kneubuhl’s interfacing of museum and theater in the context of postcolonial challenges to museum conventions. Such challenges have in a more general sense foregrounded performative or ‘theatrical’ aspects of museum practices, be it in the form of recognition of non-European traditions of curatorship and memorial display, in more or less entertaining forms of community engagement by contemporary museums, or in the engagement with a Western history of activities of collecting and displaying. In this confluence of museum and theater, cultural traditions can join and seemingly forgotten practices surface, around notions of play, memory, and the symbolic drawing and crossing of boundaries. As such, the interfacing of museum and theater accentuates what, following Victor Turner, we could call their liminoid character, favoring the creative release and recombination of institutionally controlled meanings. Time permitting, I will concretize these observations with reference to Kneubuhl’s three plays, The Conversion of Ka‘ahumanu, Emmalehua, and Ola nā Iwi (The Bones Live).