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As performance pieces go, its radiance is revealed slowly, even shyly, from darkness to light, like the onset of a full moon—in Fijian, a vula. For presenting Pacific life on stage, there would seem to be no better guide: in the islands, time doesn't run to a clock, but rather follows the lunar pull of the tides. And in Vula, at the Sydney Opera House until June 25, the moon watches over the gentle unfolding of life, from kava ceremony to funeral song. In many Pacific cultures, the moon is also seen as a female deity, and in Vula womanhood is worshiped just as fully, from the languorous flick of a maiden's hair to the ribald jokes of a group of washerwomen, whose laughter becomes the ebb and flow of lagoon life.

With its gorgeous image-making, Vula is a sensual antidote to the geopolitical seriousness of much of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, which opened last week. While the piece hovers between theater and dance, it fits in perfectly with artistic director Charles Merewether's "Zones of Contact" theme, which seeks to introduce audiences to world cultures not often presented in a contemporary-art context. Just as Palestinian artist Raeda Saadeh makes viewers peer through wardrobe doors to see her recreated lounge room, so Vula director Nina Nawalowalo immerses audiences in the Pacific flow.

She does this physically by turning the stage into a 7.5-m by 4.8-m swimming pool through which her actors move, and imaginatively by cutting the action between real and mythological time. Even when the village women gather to wash clothes, the constant call of the conch reminds them of a more spiritual life beyond the lagoon. Devised by Nawalowalo and her four actors, Vula evokes a state of being as natural as the tides. "You shut five Pacific Islander women in a room," the director says, "and then you come out with this piece that's that kind of rhythm."

For the four New Zealand-based performers of mixed Samoan and Fijian ancestry, there was the opportunity to share their stories through the unifying medium of water: Hellen Stowers performs a Fijian meke that was originally danced at the water's edge to farewell men going to war. But Nawalowalo, who is more interested in "how one adds to a picture," pushes traditional imagery into new realms. In a Samoan siva dance, she spotlights the hands so they appear out of the darkness like swimming squid. Later, she dramatizes the arrival of missionaries with a ship's sail, which passes before a dancer, revealing three church ladies in its wake.

After such deft sleight of hand, it's not surprising to learn that the director's preferred medium is magic. New Zealand–born Nawalowalo, 43, played basketball for her country before joining a mime troupe that took her to Europe in the late '80s. For seven years she worked with English illusionist Richard McDougall, melding mime, masks and magic. But a 1994 trip back to Fiji with her ailing father proved to be a turning point. Being exposed to the female rituals of village life made the director "want to go deeper into my own culture," she says. By decade's end, she had returned to live in New Zealand, and a few years later her theater company The Conch was born. As a teacher at Wellington's New Zealand Drama School, she had seen the need for Pacific performers to devise their own material: "There are only a number of brown parts on a TV series. So it's about making your own market." The Conch's first theatrical offering is a case in point. Born in a tiny 100-seat theater in Wellington, Vula now comfortably fills the Sydney Opera House's Playhouse space. Its success has been buoyed by a growing international demand for Pacific stories, with playwright Toa Fraser's film version of the Fijian family epic, No. 2, recently taking out the audience prize at Sundance. And when Nawalowalo takes Vula home to Fiji for the first time next month, she'll begin researching her next work, Masi, named after the Fijian word for tapa cloth-making. To this age-old tradition, one can already see Nawalowalo bringing her modern mix of moon magic.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• A Fijian-Samoan theater piece set in water plunges audiences into the rhythms of island life and helps launch the Sydney Biennale with a splash