Tu Tangata - 30th Anniversary

For 30 years, Maori and Pasifika high school students have celebrated their unique cultures through an annual event called "Tu Tangata". Tu Tangata literally means, "stand, people" but more generally means, "be someone". It was pretty inspirational to see these students enjoying their heritage and doing very well at something. Here are a couple photos:

Solomon Island Dancers

Here is a short video of one of my favourite groups - the Solomon Island dancers. The Solomon Islands will host the next Pacific Arts Festival in 2012, in case you would like to start planning your trip!

Samoan Dancers

I bought a video camera just before going to the Pacific Arts Festival and just figured out how to downsize the video from high density to a windows media file which can be posted on the blog (this means relatively poor quality, but you can get the idea). This is a dance troop from Samoa, and they are doing a slap dance called the "sasa". You may notice some of the movements represent fishing and other activities related to food preparation and survival. These dances were used to pass stories from one generation to the next.

Fijian Dancer

This guy was one of the funniest of the dancers - from Fiji