Sounds of Arts
p. 27 · Read in the full issue
Festival abound
By Christine Hatcher
THE rasping of wood echoes around the Pacific as 14 ocean-sailing vaka (canoes) are hollowed out for the 6th Pacific Festival of Arts to be hosted in Rarotonga in October.
The theme, Seafaring Pacific Islanders , has spurred construction efforts. The Cook Islands will be represented by six vaka from Rarotonga, Atiu, Mitiaro, Mangai and Aitutaki. The Marshall Islands and Tahiti have confirmed they will be sailing to the Cooks, the Hokule’a from Hawaii, and some 130 New Zealand Maoris with two vaka are
expected.
At least 2000 visitors are expected to attend the festival, which also will feature performing arts such as poetry reading and storytelling, and other arts and crafts such as carving and cooking.
Prime Minister Geoffrey Henry said the Council of Pacific Arts and its Secretariat, the South Pacific Com mission, sought to “combat the erosion of Pacific customs and cultural ways of life which have, for more than a century, been subdued by alien influ ences”.
For former Prime Minister Sir Thomas Davis, the festival meant a childhood dream becoming a tangible reality in his own backyard. Curved perfectly to a 2.56 arc, a 60-foot long, one-and-a-half-ton albesia, plywood and pine lakitumu canoe has emerged, which will guide visiting canoes on to the picturesque beach at Muri.
Teremoana Davis, who has been working on the vessel, said his father had been studying canoes since he was seven years old. “This vaka is a one third size replica of the original 180-foot Takitumu Kaila, which had a life of 300 years. She was documented in pre missionary times and built in Samoa in 1000 AD,” Termoana said.
Sir Tomas says: “It is the canoe of all our ancestors. It is what we are today.”
Tamarii Tutangata, the director of the festival, said crops have been planted for food and materials to make costumes. A Beautification Department has been set up with $500,000 to establish plants. About $2 million of the S 6 million needed to fund the festival will be spent on upgrading school facilities, to house participants. Some funds have come from a world premier in November of The Other Side Of Paradise , a television mini-series filmed in Rarotonga last year, and the people of the tiny island of Palmerston have donated an unsolicited SIOOO from the selling of fish and paua. □