Written piece
Held Together Softly
Semisi Roavea
New Zealand
About this piece
Pacific & contemporary dance by a Māori/Tongan LGBTQI+ artist, weaving whakapapa, vā and queerness. Unravelling and re-knotting inherited threads, the body claims belonging, resilience and joy in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Held Together Softly is a contemporary dance work that weaves together queer identity, whakapapa, and Moana-Pasifika heritage. As a Māori/Tongan LGBTQI+ artist living in Aotearoa New Zealand, I exist at the intersection of multiple worlds, cultural, political, spiritual, and personal. This work explores how those worlds are held together by different threads: ancestry, language, body memory, desire, and survival.
Through movement, I examine what it means to carry inherited expectations while actively re-weaving a self that honours queerness as sacred, embodied, and unapologetic.
Drawing from Māori and Tongan concepts of whakapapa, vā, and collective belonging, the choreography moves between softness and resistance, rupture and repair. Held Together Softly becomes a metaphor for genealogy, for chosen family, for the ways LGBTQI+ people of Moana descent stitch together new forms of belonging when traditional spaces have not always held us safely.
The dance language blends contemporary floor work with gestures drawn from cultural memory, hands that gather, bind, unravel, and re-knot. Costume, set, or prop elements may incorporate literal thread or weaving materials, symbolising both constraint and creation. Breath, stillness, and repetition are used to honour endurance and transformation.
This work is a reclamation and a prayer, an offering of movement that affirms LGBTQI+ Māori and Tongan existence as strong, ancestral, and deeply connected. It celebrates the act of weaving ourselves into visibility, community, and joy, on our own terms, in Aotearoa New Zealand.