The Performance Arcade 2018 examined new ideas, alternative visions, and counter narratives. Performance art reveals undercurrents, bringing to life relationships and situations from the worlds of collective dreaming, imagination, fear, uncertainty, pleasure, and resistance. It allows voices unvoiced to be heard, in languages that are not known. This art form has always provided a critical lens on society, constructing lived scenarios for audiences that interact with all the senses to create embodied encounters with art. The shipping container is a potent device in this dynamic, as an artifact of our global, capitalist society, and an ocean-going vessel that carries memories, lifestyles, cultures, and commodities across the many borders that define our contemporary world.

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In 2018 we looked at this object in relation to vessels that define our Pacific culture, from the ocean-going waka to the wharenui and fale structures of the lands and islands. This Arcade was considered in relation to the traditions of pa architecture and the hakari stages of pre-colonial Aotearoa, creating a site for cutting edge new art practices, wananga, public forums, eating, drinking, and live music.