Six months of devising went into Suitcase and it shows in the work.

The actors bring their stories of migrating to and living in New Zealand. It starts very effectively with a museum exhibition representing Māori and settler New Zealanders, from Chinese gold miners to Irish, Scottish and German migrants.

We find out the frustrations of a young Asian woman battling with New Zealand Customs after her mother put some herbal remedies in her suitcase, and the endurance demanded in long-distance sea voyages to this part of the world. Feel good theatre.

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What is culture in New Zealand? What does culture mean? What does it mean to live here? Why do we live here? Where do I actually belong? Am I 100% pure?

These are the questions posed on the programme of Suitcase, a group-devised work brought to the Fringe from Palmerston North by The Voice Project Aotearoa (so called because they give people their voice, not because they are vocal artists).

The starting point is museum statues – the performers in frozen poses – which represent the standard/archetypical/stereotypical notions of early immigrant/inhabitants of Aotearoa New Zealand (click on the ‘Suitcase’ title above for details). In the 50-odd minutes that follow we get some insight into the more contemporary stories of the eleven performers.

Direct-address storytelling is interspersed with movement segments of varying interest and quality. And creeping about in the background is a Māori woman, while a Māori man adds to the atmosphere with traditional instruments.

A Kiwi woman of Irish extraction is at the airport ready to cross the world to "see if anything resonates" with her. After a Chinese woman is detained at Customs – by outrageously rude, racist and unprofessional Customs Officers (which adds nothing to the value of the work) – for letting her mother pack her case and include herbal medicines, the Irish woman is silently given an old suitcase by the ever-present Māori woman who then fades away.

This almost gives the work some sort of spine but it’s more confusing than binding or resolving. The case turns out to be full of bones (which intuitively feels culturally insensitive to me, although in reality they are probably animal bones) and I think it represents the heke or wheke (rafters) in a Whare Tipuna (ancestral house): the ribs of the ancestor. I guess it is the way of saying "home is where the heart is".

When one of the two Chinese women sings ‘I Have a Dream’ her value systems seem to be trite but later she sings ‘Aotearoa’ (the Māori version of ‘God Defend New Zealand’) impressively and reveals she is a high-level medical researcher.

Snippets of Split Enz’ ‘Aoteroa’ and Dave Dobbyn’s ‘Slice of Heaven’ are also in the musical mix …

The most powerful moment is when a South African woman delivers her mihi and declares her commitment to making te reo and tikanga Māori part of her life. The group-harmonised waiata that ends this sequence is also beautifully committed.

Other ingredients are relatively randomly scattered throughout the show but while they are true ("I belong where my children belong") and interesting ("I’m a nobody’s child with three of her own"), they are yet to be integrated into the coherent whole that Suitcases may yet become.

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