#faleaitu

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The Laughing Samoans take on “Jack and the Beanstalk”, then “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (Little People)”

Gets completely hijacked into a math lesson and a tug-of-war about which folk tale they’re trying to recount to their audience of boys and girls.

Both Tofiga and Eteuati adopt interesting personas while in narrator or presenter mode: smiling to excess, always positive, even while clueless about the topic at hand. On face value, this could be taken as a dig at non-Samoan presenters and teachers as strained and inauthentic, attempting to observe political correctness while a native Samoan might rather endeavour to keep things simple, even at the risk of offense (”little people” vs “dwarves”).

Although this can paint Samoans in an ignorant light, the Island Time skits highlight the greater ignorance of the non-Samoan presenters and caricatures’ in failing to appreciate the cultural misalignment when non-Samoan stories, principles or ideas are brought into the Samoan context and become absurd (”Heigh ho” / “Hi, ho”).

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The Laughing Samoans take on “Little Red Riding Hood” aka “Little Red Riding Lavalava”

Demonstrating another negotiation between narrator and performers for the final outcome of the narrative, this version of Little Red has a lot of fun mixing up with the Three Little Pigs (”too much huffing and puffing”) as the wolf is once again put in his place by not by an other saviour, but by the home owners. Elders and Samoan women, especially, possess a sacred position in the cultural hierarchy, and they’re not going to be fooled by any canine huffing on their doorstep.

“But the grandmother, being Samoan, ate the wolf instead.”

Little Red Riding Lavalava shows none of the customary respect or deference to her grandmother in her childish naivete, and Grandmother is not impressed.

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO74sO6TkWY)

The Laughing Samoans take on the “Three Little Pigs”

“And before too long that big, bad wolf came along... and I think he was already huffing and puffing.”

The only thing this has in common with the original folk tale is that three characters are called “pig” (by their mother), the pigs construct houses and are terrorised by a wolf stranger who threatens to breathe on them. Houses are collapsed, swine are consumed, but all with the recurring Island flavour of trimmed down storytelling, simple props, and the direct impact of the performer on the style and events of the narrative.

Awesome turnabout how the only little pig whose house stands at the end is the kia kaha Chur-Bro-Kiwi who builds his whare under Aotearoa’s second anthem of Poi E. The tale becomes less about the integrity of your building standards, but another kind of foundation, where hereditary customs of respect trump (”Didn’t even take off your shoes, bro”); where the invader whose hubris towards tangata whenua creates their own undoing.

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Starting at 4:20. I love excuses to share treasures like our Laughing Samoans, the well-established comedic duo here demonstrating a more explicit intersection of their usual trade in faleaitu (political satire theatre) with fagogo (storytelling) tradition.

Faleaitu (literally, “house of the spirits”) is historically a site of social and political commentary. In faleaitu sketches, normative status roles are reversed: the high are made low and the world momentarily “turned upside down,” as found in carnival traditions elsewhere (Sinavaiana, 1992). The intention of faleaitu satire is to turn convention on its head, reverse balance of power to mock pretension and hypocrisy.

In this skit, they stack on a second layer of subversion, “speaking back to the Empire” by telling the imported folk tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears through a Samoan lens.

Samoan!Goldilocks quickly reveals the fault in Original!Goldilocks’s logic when it comes to food (waste not, equalize temperatures), and the privilege of conveniently smaller stature when invading someone’s home to eat their food and sleep in their beds with no thought of replacing what she has taken.

She is a ridiculous spectre endeared for her familiar childish innocence and cheek, forgiven of her colonialist transgressions as we absolve our own children of their infant logic and incomplete understanding.

At one point in the fagogo, Goldilocks refuses to climb the stairs, and the narrative changes to accommodate this.

I’m unsure if this simulated experience of negotiated storytelling between faifagogo (storyteller) and performers is more typical of fagogo travelling troupes or faleaitu, so that’s something to investigate in further literature review.

Academics aside, enjoy the laughs.

References

Sinavaiana, C. (1992). Comic theater in Samoa as indigenous media. Pacific Studies, 15(4), 199.