Moana Dance-Drama – Tongan Lakalaka

• Tonga – Choreographed poetry performed in communal rituals

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

 “The Choreopolitics of Memory and Rank”

1. Embodied Sovereignty and the Ethical Shaping of Speech

The Lakalaka is a form of punake (artistic composition), where poetry, genealogy, choreography, and hierarchy converge. Participants do not perform for amusement; they enact their place in the cosmos. The voice is not owned but authorized, shaped through ancestral command and social obligation.

Foucault’s concept of parrhesia (truth-telling) becomes poignant here: in the Lakalaka, one speaks not for oneself but through one’s lineage, engaging in ritualized truth-acts sanctioned by tradition and monarchy. This is a choreography of ethics—where every hand movement, gaze, and cadence expresses both duty and self-fashioning.

2. Technologies of the Self and Royal Protocol

Foucault’s notion of the care of the self manifests through the dancer’s submission to protocol. The Lakalaka is governed by strict compositional rules—movement hierarchies, gendered positioning, spatial alignment with the monarch. To participate is to refine one's self in accordance with collective values.

Here, subjectivity is not liberated by breaking with norms, but by becoming masterful within them. In Lakalaka, self-care means knowing one’s rank, one’s poetic lineage, one’s embodied grammar of movement. The punake (composer) is both artist and ethicist.

3. Ritualized Power and the Visibility of Structure

Foucault’s enduring interest in power not as possession, but as relation reveals itself in the Lakalaka’s spatial economy. Every dancer’s position is a statement: the highest-ranking stand center, motion is differentiated by social strata. The dance unveils power, not to challenge it, but to honor and reflect it.

Yet within this honor lies a Foucaultian paradox: by rendering power visible, the Lakalaka invites reflection on how subjectivities are shaped by performative obedience—the aesthetics of dignity, not rebellion.