When English Isn't Enough: The NZ Creators Inventing Whole New Ways to Tell a Story

There's a Māori concept called ihi — a kind of electric presence, a shiver of awe that moves through a crowd when something truly powerful is performed. You can describe it in English. You can gesture at it. But the moment you try to translate it directly, something essential slips away, like trying to carry water in your hands.

For a lot of Aotearoa's artists, that slippage used to feel like a problem to solve. Now, many of them are treating it as the whole point.

The Constraint That Became the Catalyst

Across theatre, visual art, and literature, a generation of New Zealand creators are deliberately stepping away from the idea that English is the default container for storytelling. Instead of retrofitting their work into a language that wasn't built to hold it, they're constructing new artistic vocabularies from scratch — visual grammars, sonic structures, narrative forms that carry cultural meaning without needing a glossary.

Wellington-based theatre director Aroha Ngata has been working this way for nearly a decade. Her recent production Te Kore — which roughly gestures toward the void, or potential, or the space before creation, depending on who you ask — used almost no spoken dialogue. Instead, the piece moved through breath patterns, spatial relationships between performers, and a lighting design that shifted in rhythms drawn from traditional karakia structure.

"People kept asking me for the translation notes," she says. "But that's not how it works. The experience is the meaning. The moment you explain it in English, you've already reduced it."

That refusal to reduce isn't stubbornness. It's a creative methodology — and it's producing work that feels genuinely unlike anything else in the Pacific region right now.

Visual Languages That Carry What Words Drop

In visual art, the same instinct is showing up in fascinating ways. Auckland-based artist Mere Tūhoe works with what she calls "whakapapa composition" — a layering technique where images, textures, and forms are arranged according to relational logic rather than Western compositional principles. The work doesn't read left to right. It doesn't have a focal point in the conventional sense. It asks the viewer to navigate it the way you'd navigate a genealogy — following connections, tracing relationships, understanding that meaning lives in the between-spaces.

"Western gallery audiences sometimes find it disorienting at first," Tūhoe admits. "But disorientation is interesting. It means something new is happening in the brain."

Her recent exhibition Hono — which toured to Sydney's Carriageworks last year — drew some of the most engaged audience feedback the venue had recorded in years. Not because everyone understood it immediately, but because the work demanded a different kind of attention. Visitors stayed longer. They talked to each other. They came back.

For Australian institutions increasingly worried about passive audiences and shrinking engagement, that kind of response is hard to ignore.

Literature That Refuses the Single Language

In writing, the untranslatability question gets even more layered. A handful of Aotearoa authors are producing work that doesn't just include te reo Māori alongside English — it uses the two languages in deliberate structural tension, so that neither version is complete without the other.

Christchurch writer Tama Hēmi describes his approach as writing in the gaps. "There are things you can say in te reo that English simply doesn't have architecture for," he explains. "And vice versa. So instead of translating, I write the thing that lives between the two. The reader has to meet me there."

His debut novel, Kei Waenganui (loosely: In the Between), was published last year through Wellington indie press Huia Publishers and has already attracted interest from Australian literary festivals, with appearances at the Perth Writers Festival and the Byron Bay Writers Festival confirmed for next year. Critics have struggled to categorise it — which, Hēmi says, is exactly the response he was hoping for.

"If it fits neatly into an existing box, you haven't done anything new."

Why Australian Institutions Are Leaning In

For a long time, the dominant attitude in Australian cultural programming toward work that resisted easy translation was cautious at best. There was a quiet assumption — rarely stated outright — that audiences needed access points, that difficulty was a barrier, that the job of programming was to smooth the path.

That thinking is shifting. And a lot of the shift is coming from watching what's happening across the Tasman.

Melbourne's Arts Centre has been quietly building relationships with NZ companies producing this kind of work, and several state gallery curators have spoken openly about the influence of Aotearoa's approach to Indigenous contemporary art on their own acquisition strategies. The feedback from audiences has been consistent: work that doesn't explain itself, that trusts the viewer or reader or listener to do some of the labour, tends to create deeper and more lasting connections.

It turns out that untranslatability isn't a barrier to engagement. It's an invitation.

"There's something really exciting happening in NZ right now where the artists aren't asking for permission to be complex," says Brisbane-based curator Danielle Marsh, who visited Auckland last year as part of an Australia Council-funded research exchange. "They're not softening the edges for international audiences. And paradoxically, that's exactly what makes the work land so hard."

Making Space for the Untranslatable

What does this mean for Australian cultural institutions, festivals, and galleries trying to engage with this work?

For starters, it means rethinking what support looks like. Contextual notes and translation glossaries aren't always the answer — sometimes they're actually in the way. Programming teams are learning to trust that audiences can sit with not-knowing, and that the discomfort of unfamiliarity is often where the most meaningful experiences begin.

It also means building genuine relationships with the communities whose knowledge systems underpin this work, rather than treating it as exotic content to be slotted into a diversity quota. The artists creating these new languages are doing so from deep within living cultural traditions — and they can tell the difference between an institution that gets that and one that doesn't.

Mere Tūhoe puts it plainly: "We're not making work for people who want a quick explanation. We're making work for people who are willing to be changed by it. Those audiences exist in Australia. We know they do."

She's right. And if Australian cultural life is serious about expanding what stories can look and sound and feel like, it could do a lot worse than following where Aotearoa's artists are already going — into the untranslatable, and out the other side.