Mana Moana
2020
Can indigenous healing be transmitted through digital technology? Discover for yourself by immersing in this meditative journey through the heart lines.
Manawa Hau is a Māori immersive VR experience. Activating practices of hauora (wellbeing) Cathy Livermore (creative director, movement artist, hauora practitioner), Rob Thorne (taonga puoro musician), and Jess Feast (director) invite you into a sacred realm woven through reo (Māori language), movement, sound, light and presence.
Manawa Hau shares with the viewer treasures of knowledge from Te Ao Māori( the Māori world) through a guided experience introducing the energetic centres of your manawa (heart) line; pū manawa, manawa and whatumanawa. These energy centres form and create the living core of our presence in the world beyond time and space.
As collaborators we believe that to heal today’s global and local ills and issues, we each must begin with reconnecting to our own inner world, to clean up our own whare (house) within so to speak. We as artists are welcoming, exploring and challenging the potential within our technologies such as VR to support and enable us in such processes, to reconnect not to disconnect. This 14 minute VR guided meditation gives inspiration and opportunity to transform the dominant narrative we hold in our experience of digital technologies and to change and refocus the purpose and application of such technologies in shaping our individual and collective humanity.
Inside a void-like space, Cathy and Rob use sound and movement along with the voices of taonga puoro (traditional Māori instruments) to take viewers on a journey of sacred experiencing that invites deep introspection and calm. Manawa Hau offers an experience and a precious moment to dive deep beneath the surface of our own presence in the world, to listen to the nuanced qualities of our presence. It invites participants to consider how, from our living world within, to grow the healed versions of ourselves that we know we want to and can be.
