even more Pacific Arts Festival

I decided that since I could spend my evenings watching the performances, I should spend my lunch breaks looking at the other arts so we headed over to the festival village. Every group had a fale with things for sale from their island and demonstrations of traditional crafts: carving, weaving, tapa cloth making, tattooing, etc.

Many of the crafts were similar or the same. Weaving and tapa cloth are done nearly everywhere in the Pacific. There are subtle differences, some that I could catch, and I'm sure there were others that I overlooked.

Niuean basket.

These baskets from Papua New Guinea were very different from most other places and a clear hit among festival-goers. Nearly everyone I know ended up with at least one.

Tonga had some huge tapa cloth! Tapa cloth (siapo) is bark cloth, made out of mulberry bark, and lots of Pacific cultures used it for clothing before fabric was so easily available. Anyway, it ranges from fairly soft to stiff, depending on the quality. I've seen some that looks like it would make a tolerable skirt and some that's rough as sandpaper. I have never seen tapa anywhere near this big before though.

There were carvings from Palau that start like this:

And end up like this:

Someone from Guam carved a partially-husked coconut shell to look like lovebirds.

The kids and Ruth got to hang out and watch Tonga perform while I headed back to work.

In the evening, we went to the Fogotogo Malae to see more performances. Ruth was pulled up on stage by a guy from Rapa Nui. When she first got here, I took her to dance class with me for a few weeks. It turned out to be a good thing, she knew exactly what to do!

We saw the dancers from the Solomon Islands.

We saw indigineous people of Australia.

We saw more groups from Papau New Guinea.

And, we even saw a group from Kiribati, a place that I would never have known about if it weren't for The Sex Lives of Cannibals, a book written by an American guy living on Kiribati. It's pretty funny and a good representation of what life is like on a small island in the middle of the Pacific.