Festival of Pacific Arts, day 2

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Yesterday (Tuesday) began the amazing feast of performance and arts from around the Pacific. The activities take place all over Honiara, but one of the main hubs of activities is the Festival Village, specially constructed for this event. With electricity, plumbing, man-made waterfall elements, countless bush-material houses, food court, first aid station, two performance stages, and even a wi-fi hotspot, it's really an incredible feat. One half of the village is dedicated to the delegate countries. Each country has one (or more) house(s) in which they can do demonstrations of their arts traditions, display their crafts, and just hang out and talk with visitors. It's fun to see so much pride in local artistic traditions. One thing that might be jarring here is the juxtaposition of what we think of as "traditional" with what seems much more modern. For example, a number of countries' houses yesterday featured wood-carving exhibitions. These carving projects begin with two things: a tree and a chainsaw:

Carvers from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) begin work

A Samoan carver at work
The Festival Village has two stages for performances: the Poolside stage, which is surrounded by water, and the large, main stage, called the Pasifika. By 3 p.m., the stages were live with music and dance performances, which continued until past 9:00. The Pasifika Stage is meant to be the centre for traditional performances, but actually the performances ranged widely from strictly traditional to very contemporary dance. It's hard to put everything into words, but I'll show a few pictures of the variety that was on-stage yesterday:

Performers from Guam, the host of the next (2016) Festival of Pacific Arts




American Samoa













Contemporary dance from Fiji





Performers from Niue, against a beautiful sunset sky






An awesome contemporary dance routine from New Zealand

Bamboo band from the host country, Solomon Islands


Part of the crowd watching the spectacle














































It was an incredible day. Today (Wednesday) I'll be going to the National Museum, to stand by the "Languages of the Pacific" display from our mission organization, and then probably back to the Village this evening for more music and dance.

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