Recently a number of young, ultra-talented, Māori and Pacific Island performers have emerged on local stages in Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand) and beyond. Exemplifying this bright, youthful energy is Hone Kouka's multi-media production The Beautiful Ones, a joyful exploration of luminous rangatahi (youth) unleashed in a liminal realm. Adopting the Māori cosmological concept of Te Kore, in this article Nicola Hyland explores the depiction of rangatahi in this performance as transformational: liberated – culturally, sexually, and performatively – from historical tropes of youth and indigeneity. Nicola Hyland is a lecturer in Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and has ancestral ties to the Te Ati-Haunui-a-Paparangi and Ngati Hauiti iwi tribes of Aotearoa.
