Pacific time. It's a phrase often used to describe the languorous, sometimes frustrating experience of dealing with timetables in the island region. "If things are meant to happen, they will happen," says Australian choreographer Raymond Blanco. "It may not be now, but it will happen." For the Festival of Pacific Arts in New Caledonia last week, Pacific Time kicked in.
A crippling mix of rain, wind and French bureaucracy had forced the cancellation of Blanco's planned Oct. 23 opening ceremony. But three days later, on a starry night at the Numa-Daly Stadium in the French territory's capital of Noumea, a conch shell was sounded, calling on stage 500 flouro-lit schoolchildren and 24 island delegations festooned in every conceivable variation of feather, tapa cloth and shell, with the raffia-bedecked Tuvalu crew as colorful as Christmas crackers. There they mingled with figureheads such as the Maori Queen, Dame Te Atairangikaahu, and New Caledonia's president Jean Leques, before a volcano of tin drums (a reference to the shantytowns, or bidonvilles, that surround the city) erupted with fireworks. Exploded, too, was the postcard image of the South Pacific. "We blow that up," said Blanco before the ceremony, "and the next thing is the festival."
Reimagining the Pacific was obviously meant to be. Founded by Fijian Prime Minister Ratu Kamisese Mara in 1972, the quadrennial Festival of Pacific Arts "has been a beacon," said guest Michael Mel, head of humanities at Papua New Guinea's Goroka University, "shedding light into the Pacific." Unlike most Western festivals, which are shaped by the need to sell tickets, with the Festival of Pacific Arts, ceremony-not commerce-is everything. This began early on the morning of Oct. 24 at Noumea's Anse Vata Bay with the arrival of a dozen canoes, including three outrigger pirogues from the nearby Isle of Pines. After an eight-day journey from New Zealand, the double-hulled Polynesian voyager Te Au o Tonga delivered a sacred stone to the local tribal chiefs on shore. Then, in about the time it took 10,000 athletes to fill Sydney's Olympic Stadium, some 2,000 Pacific artists ambled across the road into the festival village, where an elaborate exchange of gifts lasted well into the night. Ceremony "is one common aspect of the Pacific," says Emmanuel Kasarhrou, director of Noumea's Tjibaou Cultural Center, which promotes the territory's indigenous Kanak culture. "It's always done with the heart, not a kind of gimmick."
And with ceremony comes discovery. Until Nov. 3, artists representing South Pacific nations from Australia to Easter Island have the unique chance "to sit down together, to talk and to exchange our experiences," says New Caledonia's culture minister Dw Gorod, a Kanak writer. With concerts and exhibitions overflowing from city to countryside, the trick is to "just be here and let go," says Blanco. While Torres Strait Island weaver Margaret Andrews, one of Australia's 90-strong delegation, fashions her coconut-leaf taro baskets in the festival village, she also catches the making of tapa fans in Fiji's neighboring far: "I hope to be able to learn some of their techniques as well as share some of what I know." A veteran of the last two festivals, in the Cook Islands and Samoa, Maori moko tattoo artist Derek Lardelli meanwhile checks out the rival tapu talent of the Tahitians. Noumea's festival "has an impromptu feeling," says Lardelli, "that really works for the artists."
It has also allowed for some more personal rediscoveries. The offspring of missionaries displaced by the French in the 19th century, Torres Strait Islander delegates Frank Cook and Betty Tapim are traveling to the New Caledonian island of Lifou to meet their ancestral kin for the first time. "To put our minds at ease, we will try and trace back and form a family tree," Cook told last Tuesday afternoon's gift-giving ceremony, "so we can understand where our bloodline is."
The interconnection of the Pacific's Melanesian, Micronesian and Polynesian cultures is instantly apparent onstage. "They sing in their own language," says Guillaume Soulard, head of performing arts at the Tjibaou center, "but the way of singing was brought by the missionaries." And while performance styles differ from Vanuatu's joyful jog to Samoa's more showy axe and fire dances, "the rhythm, the sound, the chanting, the repetition-it's all environment-influenced," says Blanco, with the Pacific as both undercurrent and muse.
At the festival in Noumea, performance also acts as a bridge to the visual arts. "There is always this kind of voyage between," says Kasarhrou of the Tjibaou center, host of the contemporary art biennale "Nouma-Pacifique 2000," which has opened as part of the festival and runs until next February. At the unveiling last week, artists from Western Australia's Fitzroy Crossing inaugurated their ground painting with a ceremonial dance, while Papua New Guinea's Igsie Jimike performed in one of his feathered dance machines.
Here the Pacific ebbs and flows with breathtaking variety. "The ability to have and acknowledge difference is significantly Pacific," said biennale selection panelist Michael Mel. Confronting Jimike's exotic hybrids is Samoan painter Nanette Lela'ulu's Virgin with a Child, 2000, in which a moustached man of mixed race cradles an alabaster-white child before a ruined church and palm-fringed road-a kind of Pacific Gothic, contemporary reality staring down a colonial past. With this shared history, no wonder so many Pacific artists are grappling with issues of identity. "The South Pacific is the crystal bowl of the future," says Maori painter Emily Karaka, whose Polynesian Potae, 2000, mixes exuberance with angst. "As artists, we're all these fish swimming around. How do we spawn, how do we develop, what do we do?"
Other artists are as content to catch the breeze as the field of taro glimpsed through the gallery windows. In young Maori Lisa Reihana's SHOAL, 2000, a fur-and-feather-festooned mobile of horns drifts before the viewer-tradition winking with a modern edge. Such works generate "a kind of dialogue," says Kasarhrou, "between the remains of the past and new forms, new ideas, new energy." This repositioning of South Pacific art is not confined to New Caledonia. In Paris in April, historic treasures of Oceania entered the Louvre as part of its new display of Arts Premiers. And in the Jean Nouveldesigned Quai Branly Museum, set to open near the Eiffel Tower in 2004, Pacific art will share space with that of Africa, Asia and the Americas. "It might be a rediscovery for European eyes," says Philippe Peltier of the Muse des Arts d'Afrique et d'Ocanie, one of a handful of European curators at last week's festival symposium at Noumea's South Pacific Commission.
But perhaps the biggest rediscovery in New Caledonia is that of artistic openness and old-fashioned friendliness. "Please reach out, I'm asking you to," New Zealand's Ngahiraka Mason told her fellow delegates at one symposium session. But in the festival village down the road, dreadlocked Aboriginal curator Djon Mundine didn't need to ask. As he struggled to climb a tree to watch a performance at the overcrowded central stage, "the people who pulled me up were so friendly," he said. "What a beautiful festival, what a beautiful place." A creative village in Pacific Time. Who could ask for more? n