Justice Kalolo, a Samoan actor and up and coming talent debuts his first work Empty this clip at Te Auaha in the Wgtn Fringe Festival 2025. Empty this clip uses mask, physical theatre, and hip hop dance to convey messages about overcoming failure, and the heavy societal pressures to conform.

We enter the brightly lit theatre to a compelling scene with hip hop blaring loud on the speakers and 10 masked performers in black suits and glimmering silver face masks. Audience anticipation is high as we choose our seats, watched by these unrecognisable performers.  There is just one performer with no mask directly in front seated at a small table contemplating his next vital chess move.

We are faced with so many `chess moves` so to speak every day. If only we could just press the freeze button to check we are in fact making informed decisions, but no we can`t, we have to show up and face them ourselves.  What comes through immediately in this opening scene is the influence and immense pressure that this mask-less performer is up against.  So, inevitably he gives in and now the stage is flooded with the dynamic masked dancers and their raw hip hop energy.

Sound designer Ete Reupena manages to thread hip hop tracks, soundscapes, along with spoken messages such as `they are watching us`, or `each choice and thought you make are not yours’.  Kalolo uses pure physicality to play out his role of eccentric and persuasive storyteller.  This style of demonstrating the message using over the top body language definitely sparked some memories of Akram Khan’s Jungle Book Revisited, however in Khan’s work they had the luxury of using their faces to convey all their emotions.

Light and Costume designer Grace O`Brien creates a warm and vital ambience beaming from the back of the stage that fooled us into believing there were up to 20 people dancing on stage at one time as they melted in and out of the warm fog during their impressive dance formations.  

It is understood that the performers are in some way or form oppressed by their system.  Using his physicality Kalolo asks us if we’d like to escape, and announces to us it will just cost you `your identity`.  The audience is transported back in time to a smokey vintage jazz club scene referred to by Kalolo as `here at the capital` where the characters aspire for and dream of more in their lives but tragically have all the odds stacked up against them.  

Throughout the piece each group choreography is consistently euphoric because of the clubbing energy of the music and moves, the smokey haze, and the strobe.  

When the finale arrives and everyone removes their masks and black suit jackets it feels like pure catharsis.  The dance is high energy while remaining very grounded and fluid. Now, without the masks, there is an opportunity for us to celebrate the subtle differences in the men’s and women’s movement vocabulary which is highlighted within their choreographic formations.

To our amazement and surprise they return the masks to their faces.  Seeing this return to masks seemed like a defeat of sorts for the audience but it was clearly a creative choice by the cast to spell out that this is not a success story, and the struggle to escape conformity is real.  

Justice Kalolo and his cast and crew of Pasifika performers devised and developed this thought provoking piece collaboratively in 2024. Their aim was to reach their own communities and create an opportunity for their people to dream and see that their interests can in fact be a lifestyle should they choose it.

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