Interview with Daley Rangi

Introducing Daley Rangi

Daley Rangi (he/they/ia) is a shapeshifter, a Te Ātiawa Māori artist at large. They generate joyfully unpredictable works investigating language, play, memory, and resistance. At Liveworks, they will present dissent.

dissent is a joyful and irreverent excavation of everyday resistance, inspired by roleplaying games old and new. Each roll of the dice, and each change of heart, shapes an unfolding, collective story - faced with escalating choices, the lines of responsibility between ‘individual’ and ‘community’ begin to blur.

Passersby are invited to join in, and bystanders are invited to stand by. They could be anyone, and so could you.

"Performance fallows me to hold contradictions: the political and the poetic, the personal and the collective, the sacred and the ridiculous." - Daley Rangi

What can audiences expect from your performance?

It’s a roleplaying game disguised as a civic ritual, an experiment in choice and consequence. Audiences can expect to be unsettled, implicated, and maybe even moved - not by spectacle, but by the discomfort of participation, the intimacy of decision-making, the friction of being seen.

There will also be joy, and genuine surprise. It’s about finding, in the mundane, the flicker of something sacred - the quiet rebellion in believing the world can be otherwise.

What is the role of performance in your life?

It’s the act of being fully present while dreaming of elsewhere. It’s a way to resist, to reach, to reimagine - to speak in tongues the world forgot it could hear. It's a space where imagination becomes a shared resource, where people come together not to consume but to co-create. Performance allows me to hold contradictions: the political and the poetic, the personal and the collective, the sacred and the ridiculous.

What are you most looking forward to at Liveworks?

Liveworks is one of the few spaces that still feels genuinely alive - unpredictable, messy, full of artists who are trying things, breaking things, building new worlds from the fragments. I’m looking forward to seeing work that doesn’t behave and connecting with artists who are equally restless. I'm really looking forward to what dissent becomes when it meets the participants. It doesn't exist until someone decides to join me at the table. No interaction will be the same - it’s built by whoever’s in the room, whoever wants to play. Somewhere between the real and the mythical, between choice and chance, we might just find each other.