Aqua Nullius: Toe Fai!
Arts House Melbourne, 2022
Writer / Director / Actor / Costume Designer/Performer: Emele Ugavule
People weaver: Linda Iriza
Sound Design: Jane Stark (Arts House)
Choreographer: Amy Zhang (Arts House), Selina Alesana Alefosio (The Basement Theatre)
Stage manager: Amy Zhang (Arts House), Jazmin Whittall (The Basement Theatre)
Community chorus: Te Akoga WA, Melbourne Mataliki Sports and Culture
Floral set designer and maker: Veisinia Tonga
Photography: Tatanja Ross, On Jackson Street
Commissioned by Arts House Melbourne for Bienniea Everyday in the Digital (BLEED) Festival
Aqua Nullius is a century-spanning Pasifika futurist universe created by Emele Ugavule where the Pacific’s waters, lands, lineages, and digital shadows form a contested realm of erased and reclaimed Indigenous sovereignty. Across five plays, it explores water, memory, and colonialism—physical, ecological, and digital. Within this world, amongst everyday peoples we meet Pacific superheroes who wield ancestral, oceanic powers to defend both their homelands from ongoing extraction and erasure.
Toe Fai! is the second play in the Aqua Nullius Universe, and the prequel to Talaucaka.
Set in an uneasy near future, where the world is completely dependent on western technology Toe Fai! examines how our memories betray, transform, and outlive us through Kalala, a British Museum tour guide.
