Recently a number of young, ultra-talented, Māori and Pacific Island performers have emerged on local stages in Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand) and beyond. Exemplifying this bright, youthful energy is Hone Kouka's multi-media production The Beautiful Ones, a joyful exploration of luminous rangatahi (youth) unleashed in a liminal realm. Adopting the Māori cosmological concept of Te Kore, in this article Nicola Hyland explores the depiction of rangatahi in this performance as transformational: liberated – culturally, sexually, and performatively – from historical tropes of youth and indigeneity. Nicola Hyland is a lecturer in Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and has ancestral ties to the Te Ati-Haunui-a-Paparangi and Ngati Hauiti iwi tribes of Aotearoa.

Draped in a tatty woollen korowai (cloak), Ben Hana, aka ‘Blanket Man’, was an iconic, polarizing and mythical presence on the streets of central Wellington, New Zealand, until his death in January 2012. A critical character in contemporary urban folklore, Blanket Man captivated public attention as ‘Brother’, the leader of a band of fellow street-dwellers, a troubled anti-hero transformed into celebrity by the trend-setting hoi polloi as evidence of the capital's underlying quirk. This essay explores the unsettling representation of the puppet ‘The Blanket Man’ in the theatre production The Road That Wasn't There (2013) by the collective Trick of the Light. As a brave tribute or cross-cultural opportunism, the reanimation of the now ‘absent’ Brother as a performing object provokes questions about the representation of ‘real’ indigeneity – exploring notions of authenticity, exploitation and tokenism.