Pacific Dance NZ Festival 2025: 15 Years Of Faiva – Back To Our Roots

This June, the Pacific Dance Festival marks a milestone - 15 years of movement, memory, and mana through 10 annual festivals that bring Pacific choreography into communities and regions where our stories live, breathe and evolve. 

This year, venues reflect the festival's focus on telling our community stories in our community settings. We are thrilled to be back Māngere Arts Centre - Ngā Tohu o Uenuku, which has been home for the festival since 2015. To extend their reach city-wide, the festival is also partnering with Te Pou Theatre in West Auckland.  

“Tāmaki is the globe's largest Pasifika populated city and the Pacific Dance Festival pays homage to our urban stories, our people and our dances,” says Iosefa Enari MNZM Festival Director. 

At the centre of this celebration is the concept of faiva.

Faiva, in Pacific cultures, is more than performance. It is the sacred act of storytelling through movement, chant, poetry, song, and ceremony. Faiva is both an artform and a cultural responsibility — a way to honour ancestors, embody identity, and serve community through creative expression.

This festival season is a living, breathing symphony of movement — where heritage forms such as tau‘olunga and siva intertwine with contemporary choreography to form bold new narratives. Across theatres and studios, we bring together bodies in motion, voices in harmony, and generations in dialogue.

FESTIVAL OPENING: PHAB PASIFIKA
Ngā Tohu o Uenuku, Māngere Arts Centre | South Auckland, 5pm Friday June 6
Festival Launch – Opening Night
We begin in Ngā Tohu o Uenuku - Māngere Arts Centre, the heart of Pasifika visual and performing arts and culture in Auckland, with a performance that redefines who gets to take centre stage.

PHAB Pasifika, a collective of artists living with disabilities, will lead the festival’s first performance — a celebration of inclusion, accessibility, and the power of movement to unify. Their piece is filled with gesture, rhythm, and energy that centres visibility and joy. Their work embodies the idea that movement is for everybody, and that faiva is not just about technique — it’s about truth.

“They certainly serve with their hearts… and I’m especially delighted to hear of the manaaki tanga, alofa, and tautua given to our Pacific and disabled body community. That’s the essence of who we are as proud Pasifika peoples.” – Audience member

THOMAS E S KELLY – KURAMANUNYA
Te Pou Theatre | West Auckland www.tepoutheatre.nz
2-Night Season
Sunday, June 8 at 5:00 pm & Monday 9 June at 7pm
From South to West Auckland, we shift spaces and energies.
Internationally acclaimed First Nations Ni-Vanuatu choreographer Thomas E S Kelly of KARUL Projects returns to Aotearoa with Kuramanunya, a solo tour-de-force that fuses contemporary Indigenous dance, physical theatre, and visceral storytelling.

Kelly’s work explores memory and mourning through dynamic movement language — grounded, repetitive motifs, expressive isolations, and resonant footwork that calls on ancestors with every step.

DOUBLE BILL: SHAPES IN THE CLOUDS & KUINI
Ngā Tohu o Uenuku, Māngere Arts Centre | South Auckland Tuesday, June 10 and Wednesday June 11 at 7pm

Two bold works share the stage in a night of intergenerational insight and ancestral tribute.

• Shapes in the Clouds by Tauveve Andy Tilo-Faiaoga blends dance theatre, spoken word, live vocals, and multimedia in a narrative-driven work suitable for all ages. It is a duet between generations — a superhero-in-training and his father, navigating dreams, duty, and identity.
• KUINI by Lyncia Muller is a poetic homage to Her Majesty Queen Sālote Tupou III. Combining traditional tau‘olunga vocabulary with contemporary phrasing, the choreography interweaves regal poise with contemporary spatial dynamics — resulting in a moving tribute to a monarch, poet, and cultural icon.

MOANA SHOWCASE

Ngā Tohu o Uenuku, Māngere Arts Centre | South Auckland Tuesday, June 17 at 7pm

One Night Only

The annual MOANA Showcase returns with premieres from Aotearoa’s premier dance training institutions: Unitec-Te Pūkenga School of Dance, Ngā Akoranga Kanikani - University of Auckland Dance Studies, and New Zealand School of Dance.

These works highlight the next generation of choreographers and dancers, using innovative technique, fluid partnering, ensemble phrasing, and grounded cultural reference points to imagine the future of Pacific movement.

CLOSING: 

SHAPES IN THE CLOUDS

 x MATARIKI COMMUNITY KAPA HAKA

Turner Centre, Te Puawai | Kerikeri | Northland - Sunday, June 22 

(time tbc)

Pacific Dance and Kapa Haka End of Year performance

To close the festival and acknowledge Matariki, the festival heads north to Kerikeri to perform alongside the Ngāti Rēhia Community Kapa Haka Group  at the Turner Centre Te Puawai.

Shapes in the Clouds takes on new resonance here — performed alongside kapa haka, under the Matariki stars, it becomes a final offering of unity, legacy, and future-facing storytelling in motion.

FESTIVAL ACTIVATIONS ACROSS TĀMAKI MAKAURAU

The festival doesn’t end when the curtains close — it lives, breathes, and moves through shared spaces.

Audiences can join the festival throughout the season for immersive and interactive experiences designed to bring people closer to the art, and the art closer to the people:

• Dance workshops for all ages and abilities — come move with our choreographers, feel the rhythm, and learn from the best.
• Open rehearsals — step inside the creative process, where raw movement becomes magic.
• The Fono — an open space for talanoa, storytelling, and creative exchange, where artists, thinkers, and leaders gather to reflect, provoke, and connect.
• Activations at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Tāmaki Paenga Hira, Auckland War Memorial Museum — unexpected moments of dance, dialogue, and cultural depth in two of our most iconic institutions.

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