The Pacific People Celebrate Tradition

TOWNSVILLE, Australia —  In the final moments of the 5th Festival of Pacific Arts, the playing field of the city’s Sports Reserve has suddenly erupted in a wild, spontaneous celebration.

Carrying an enormous banner, a man from the Cook Islands runs recklessly through thousands of people, outpacing the more timid flag-bearers from other island nations. Tahitians are kissing everyone they can find. A group from Papua New Guinea is huddled together, singing intensely about the greatness of that country. And, in the midst of it all, an Australian Aboriginal youth, resplendent in white body paint and not much else, stands watching, his smile as wide as the Torres Straits.

A few moments earlier, the Festival had attempted a more sober finale: one of those everyone-join-hands-and-sing rituals reeking of forced piety. But most of the 2,000 assembled Polynesian, Melanesian, Micronesian and Aboriginal participants had hung back, obviously not in a mood of solemn restraint.

Who could blame them? During the two weeks of the festival they had performed outdoors in blistering heat, heavy rain, high winds and bitter cold and now they needed to cut loose. So, in one last example of the festival’s remarkable ability to correct its own mistakes, Apollonian intentions yielded to Dionysiac drives and the will of the people prevailed--deliriously.

Held every four years in a different country, the festival is a unique event. To begin with, it was not created for the diversion of locals or tourists (though it certainly accommodates both groups), but to foster a sense of cultural solidarity among the participants--the indigenous peoples of the Pacific.

As a result, traditional (and increasingly endangered) forms of music, dance, craft-work and language skills remain the festival’s focus--though the visitor to Townsville could also attend rock ‘n’ roll concerts, art exhibits, a film and video series, contemporary theater and dance performances as well as highly politicized lectures and discussions.

All these events were free, and many of them took place outdoors, held across this scenic, tropical Queensland city of 120,000 and on nearby Magnetic and Palm islands.

The cost: 4.8 million Australian dollars in federal funds plus private contributions and heavy subsidy of their delegations by the 24 other participating nations and territories.

In return, Australia got an event that made its neglected black population absolutely central, a festival that is not only likely to be replayed worldwide on television for years but will affect what audiences in Los Angeles, New York and other cities far from the Great Barrier Reef will soon be seeing on their own stages. Today Queensland, tomorrow Queens or maybe even the Town of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels. . . .

A typical festival day started about 9 a.m. and lasted 14 hours. You could find exotic performance events in such mundane, citified locations as Flinders Mall (Townsville’s shopping center) and the 1,066-seat Civic Theatre. They were also scheduled in such atmospheric venues as Queen’s Park (at the base of craggy Castle Hill), the Craft Village (on the banks of the narrow, winding Ross River) or the Rock Pool (on a platform-stage built over the water across from Magnetic Island).

Some of the groups at the festival had performed all over the world and were used to feeding foreign audiences’ expectations. Other performers had never even been seen outside their own villages; a government commission spotted them, and the next thing they knew they were in Australia being obsessively videotaped by tourists, visiting scholars, Townsville residents, other artists, major media teams and the festival’s own official in-house documentors.

If they sometimes seemed bewildered, so did we: This festival proved long on photo opportunities, short on context. Although much Pacific dance is intimately related to song- and chant-texts, only the Hawaiians provided translations, and some groups told us nothing but the names of their islands. Thus much dance that seemed startling or even profound remained a tantalizing enigma--something fully experienced, perhaps, but certainly not fully understood.

Exactly what ancient rite, for example, were those Vanuatu men re-enacting in their bark-belts and penis-sheaths? What songs roused the men of Tuvalu to such sensational, coordinated box-drumming and the women to such memorably pungent vocalism? When those massive, middle-aged Aboriginal women loped smoothly across an open field, their movements as easy and authoritative as an animal in its native habitat, what did the spare inevitability of their journey mean to them? It would make a difference to know. . . .

On the other hand, these intense, unexplained performances left a deeper impression than those events that were narrated to death: the New Zealand program, for example, which told us things we could easily see for ourselves--such as the number of poi balls the women were swinging on strings. Western audiences may know nothing about Maori culture, but they can usually tell the difference between 2 and 4; in performances of “Swan Lake,” they’ve even been known to count up to 32.

The agony of Australian Aboriginal experience gave this festival a distinct tension and significance--from the pointed simplicity of an “Important Note” in the official press kit--”The Festival is not a Bicentennial event.”--to the passionate eloquence of “Barungin,” a recent work by Aboriginal playwright Jack Davis.

Part of a trilogy about the urban plight of an Aboriginal extended family, “Barungin” also incorporated a lament for those who have died in police custody (still an incendiary issue in Australian race relations) and a protest against the glorification of white brutality.

“Your highways and streets are named after our murderers,” one of Davis’ black characters told us, and the accusation proved just as raw and stinging as an outcry by Belle Wharton, an Aboriginal elder from Brisbane, during a discussion at James Cook University: “People talk about concentration camps,” she said, “but we lived in them.”

Forbidden in her youth to seek an education (and punished when she disobeyed), Wharton now sees the issue as more important and complex than ever--as Aboriginal traditions erode in the manner that Davis’ play depicted. “We don’t just have to educate white people (about Aboriginal culture),” Wharton concluded, “We have to educate our own people, too.”

The difference between a true festival and a mere performance series often hinges on interaction between spectators and participants. This festival passed the test even if it sometimes undermined classic fantasies about the South Seas--and its own credibility--in the process.

For example, you could come around a corner and catch the American Samoan dancers applying baby oil to their chests for that archetypal gleaming-skin-in-the-torchlight look, or you might talk to that bare-breasted, tattooed young woman outside the Papua New Guinea booth in the Craft Village and learn that she’s studying ballet at the art school in Port Moresby, so all her tattoos wash off--except for the tiny one across her wrist.

The most obviously interactive festival events took place during the last few days: a traditional Samoan feast (with cooking-smoke so rich you could gain 10 pounds by just inhaling), a traditional Tahitian wedding (a nightmare of poor planning and blocked visibility ending with the guests dancing ballroom-style to “Que Sera, Sera”) and also what was touted as the first traditional firewalk ever held outside French Polynesia.

Presented at Alma Bay, Magnetic Island, on the ninth evening after the new moon, this “sacred ceremony of Umu-Ti” involved some 200 people (including this reporter) walking barefoot across volcanic stones that reportedly had been heated to 482 degrees. (The Times’ tootsies felt no more than pleasantly warm during the brief ordeal and emerged unsinged.)

Incredibly, some cynics dared to mock this epochal, inspiring miracle of faith--perhaps because it seemed staged for the benefit of the official media crew (they had the only decent view). Or maybe because it ended with a no-doubt-traditional Tahitian invitation for photographers to bring their cameras inside the sacred, roped-off ceremonial arena. Their mission: to take pictures of High Priest Raymond Graffe officially presenting his hot rocks to the mayor of Townsville. Truly, the Tahitian appetite for self-promotion sometimes seemed as great as the Pacific itself. . . .

Despite such lapses and miscalculations, as well as the inevitable accidents and overload, enough festival events remained that were rare, authentic, overpowering.

Nearly everything by the huge Papua New Guinea contingent (almost a festival within the festival) pulled your eyes out of your head with its astonishing theatrical force and primal emotion. In contrast, some Aboriginals danced as uninsistently as clouds reshaping their contours when they float across the landscape; watching them you glimpsed dance forms that have evolved from the oldest continuous culture on earth.

Finally, if you needed such familiar dance values as virtuosity and the body beautiful--the pillars of Terpsichore in the West--there was always the heat and joy and endless variety of Polynesian dancing: from the creamy, serene style of Wallis and Futuna to the head-wagging vivacity of Tonga.

To Museum of Contemporary Art media and performance curator Julie Lazar, “It was an extraordinary festival and it makes me think a lot about the responsibility that any of us have who bring people to Los Angeles.

“The Museum is going to be participating in the (1990) Los Angeles Festival,” she revealed, “and there are several things that we’re considering, ways in which we could participate, and one of them may be a tie into the outgrowth of what’s taking place here.

“I’m also interested in trying to see, for lack of a better word, more multicultural work integrated into the overall program at the museum,” she continued, “and this (trip to Townsville) was really the first step toward a long-term commitment in terms of research. So many contemporary artists have borrowed or stolen from traditional art forms, or incorporated them in some way in their work, that I find the festival a natural tie into the work that I do.”

Lazar especially liked the social cross section that many festival performing groups represented. “It wasn’t like we were just getting art careerists,” she explained. “There were old people, young people, fat people, naked people, people who integrated Western things like brassieres where they would wear them properly or throw them around their waists. All those things. It was somehow very meaningful to me.

“And I know this is romantic-sounding,” she said, “but I’m going to have a hard time adjusting. It’s going to be very hard for me to look at things that are just taken from the media, that don’t ring as true as some of the work that I saw here. . . .”