As the world prepares to mark International Women's Day on Friday, Silo Theatre unleashes one of the most powerful celebrations of what it is to be a Samoan woman today.

For the Auckland Arts Festival, it's bringing to town a new stage adaptation of Samoan New Zealander Tusiata Avia's poetry collection Wild Dogs Under My Skirt. Avia launched the collection in 2002 as a spoken word piece at the Dunedin Fringe Festival and it was published two years later.

Back then, Wild Dogs was one of the first poetry collections to explore what it meant to be a young Pacific Island woman in New Zealand. Writer Sia Figiel, the first Samoan woman to have a novel published, described it as revolutionary, "In the sense that, not only does it define the face of Pacific literature in New Zealand, but it redefines the face of New Zealand literature itself."

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