Three years ago this month, Lady Shaka was at the centre of an excited crowd in a basement club on Auckland’s Karangahape Road. “I’m your girl, Lady Shaka,” she said. “And I want to dedicate this set to my beautiful people of the Pacific, of our moana! Lessgo … cheehoo!”
A lot of people have heard and seen what happened next. Shaka’s DJ set was part of an event staged by Boiler Room, the UK-based global music media enterprise. Boiler Room’s video of Lady Shaka fiercely twirling poi as the beats roll in and the crowd lights up has been viewed nearly 200,000 times since.
Last month, the 27-year-old played to a crowd of thousands at the Splore festival. Splore’s owner, John Minty, gave her a budget and told her she could headline the festival’s main stage if she came up with a live show. She brought a cast of dancers and Pacific drummers to the stage with her and closed a triumphant performance with the same tune that opened her Boiler Room set three years ago: Oceania’s Kotahitanga, a soaring, propulsive 25-year-old collaboration between Hinewehi Mohi and the British musician-producer Jaz Coleman. The song’s “whaka awe” refrain translates as “be inspired”.
That wasn’t the only local anthem she wove into a set of contemporary dance music. The crowd roared when she dropped some electronic fa’a Samoa into Scribe’s Not Many and when she slid a drum and bass riff under Katchafire’s Get Away. She’s been known to slip Ardijah and Nesian Mystik into the mix overseas, but this was a chance to make a statement for a home crowd. It felt meaningful.
“I wanted it to be unapologetically Māori, unapologetically Pacific,” she says. “I wanted people to shine in doing the things that they do. I already knew how amazing those drummers were, I knew how amazing those dancers were. So, I was like, this is your time to be on main stage and share that with the world.”
Whanganui-born Shaka – real name Shakaiah Perez – wears a korowai of many colours: her identification as “Afro-Pasifika” encompasses Māori, Samoan, Tahitian, Tokelauan and, through her Tokelauan grandfather, Cape Verdean heritage.
The whānau moved to Auckland when she was 4 and, according to family lore, she declared at the age of 8 that she wanted to learn in te reo Māori. Her parents registered her at the bilingual unit at Richmond Road School in Grey Lynn and she later attended Ngā Puna o Waiōrea, the immersion school within Western Springs College. Like the members of the champion slam poetry group Rehekōrero – the other Waiōrea graduates to perform at Splore this year – she seems to have emerged from those years with a striking confidence.
“We were taught at Waiōrea to be outspoken, that you can challenge opinions, that the world is your oyster and that your language can take you everywhere. There’s always this misconception that te reo Māori can only do things for you inside New Zealand. It’s not quite true.”
She’s also a femme queen.
“Femme queen is a ballroom term for someone who’s a trans woman,” she explains. “I’m a trans woman of colour. I kind of identified more with ‘femme queen’, because it’s a word for our community, rather than being like, ‘I’m trans!’ For me, that was just something that’s been a part of who I am since I was a little kid. It wasn’t anything new. It wasn’t like I came out, per se, it was just like, that’s Shaka, that’s who she is.”
Among the guests onstage for her Splore set were House of Coven, local exponents of the LGBTQI+ subculture known as “ballroom”. They’re part of a vibrant local queer brown scene that encompasses the Fafswag arts collective and Filth AKL, the DJ collective Shaka was playing in as part of that 2021 Boiler Room video.
She’s done a string of Boiler Room sets since, in London, Berlin and Melbourne. She’s particularly suited to the format where the DJ plays centre stage on the dance floor, because she was a dancer long before she was a DJ. She was dancing competitively by the age of 8, and before she entered her teens, she’d won an international gold medal as part of Parris Goebel’s Royal Family hip-hop dance troupe.
The lure of dance was strong enough that Shaka walked away after only two months of study at the University of Auckland – where she’d earned a full scholarship – to follow the dream. Her parents knew better than to stand in her way.
“I’ve been very lucky that I have parents who’ve always said to us, whatever it is that you want to do, we will support you as long as you work hard at it and you commit to it.”
She moved to London in 2016, working part-time jobs and getting what gigs she could as a stage dancer. In keeping with her focus on the collective, she also created Pulotu Underworld, a club night for Britain’s Pacific disapora, some of whom whakapapa back to the families of Fijian men recruited into the British armed services during World War II.
“I was like, we are such a small minority here in the UK, wouldn’t it be awesome if we could find spaces where we could come together and celebrate being Pasifika, in a space that’s not a traditional cultural thing? Let’s go hang out and have a drink and a dance and enjoy these amazing Pacific DJs. It was our way of trying to connect our people. And it did quite well.”
This month, she headlines at two more local festivals, Womad and Homegrown, before shows in Australia. Then it’s back to her base in London and shows booked for Europe, Latin America, Canada and the US. She’s just released her first single, E Tū, which samples Kei A Wai Rā Te Kupu E, the reo Māori pop hit recorded in 2000 by the group Aaria.
This “crazy year” in music will crowd out her other creative work, in the visual arts: she has exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and Jacques Chirac Museum in Paris. She’d like to get back to that some day. She’d like to create her own festival and she’d like to open for Beyoncé. But for now, she’s a busy DJ, one who dances.
“People out there are like, are these new [Boiler Room] DJs, it seems you have to be a dancer to be a DJ. Honey, no, I’m just having fun. I’m not dancing for the camera, I’m dancing because I love to dance. I guess I’m just a party girl.”
Lady Shaka plays at Womad on Friday March 15 and at Homegrown in Wellington on March 16.
