The Elema arts of the Papuan Gulf region

Seeking assistance from spirits and supernatural beings is a common practice in almost all PNG societies.
Each village has its own rituals and initiation ceremonies. Some of these rituals are seen as a form of entertainment.
Until the 1930s, the Elema people of Papuan Gulf coast staged festivals known as Hevehe and Kovave, which were addressed to spirits of the forest and sea.
The Elema people also brought together the wider community living along Orokolo Bay. The festivals focused on the production and use of special masks, and were full of drama and comedy.
Men built a ceremonial house, or eravo, for each Hevehe cycle. They also used the house to store special objects, in which they believe spirits lived.
The Kovave festival was held to initiate boys and to entertain forest spirits. Each Kovave mask represented a named spirit. It was made by the father and mother's brother of the boy being initiated.
As they made the mask, men invited the spirit to live in the village for a time. They boys wore the masks on a series of occasions during the festival period, including a final race on the beach. The climax of the ceremony was an exchange of valuables (ornaments and pigs) between each boy's relatives.
The Elema people also made shields which they use in tribal wars. These shields were made of wood, dated to the late 19th century and early 20th century.
The breakdown of relationships among neighboring groups in Elema region led to warfare, which was highly formalized, although people did harm and kill each other. Archers and fighters wore shields slung over the shoulder. Shield designs were usually based on an abstract human face. Rather than camouflaging the wearer, shields were often intended to dazzle the enemy visually and demoralize them.
The Elema shields were designed to leave the wearer's arms free to handle a bow and arrow.
Object remains of these events such as the Kovave mask, shields and painted boards of wood, lime, pigment of Elema people, Gulf of Papua in the late 19th century and early 20th century tell the story.
Pictures of carved boards (hohao) like in the photo below, depicting a whole human figure are now very rare in the area. This board would have housed a spirit and had a personal name. The figure is dressed to dance in a festival, with a pearl-shell crescent on his breast and a bark belt. Elema art emphasizes the comic, in part to entertain and charm the spirits.
Records of Elema art of Papuan Gulf were displayed by the British Museum in London, UK in its Public Gallery known as Living and Dying gallery at PNG's wall display referred to as 'sustaining each other'.
These and other artifacts from all over PNG got there through the colonial movements, tourists, travelers and anthropologists who came to PNG in the olden days.
Last month, I was invited by the British Museum on a project known as the Melanesia Art Project, a joint initiative of the University of London and the British Museum, London, led by Professor Nick Thomas and Dr. Lissant Bolton , to participate in a Museum Residency Programme for the period of four weeks from late April 2007 to early May.
The project is researching contemporary attitudes to the large artifact collections held at the British Museum from Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands.
For Papua New Guinea, the project has also invited Sam Luguna, a professional PNG artist, to London in 2006.
The Melanesian Project aims to explore the relationships between a wide range of indigenous art and artifact forms, socially significant narratives, and indigenous communities from which historical collections of Melanesian art derive.
Focusing on the important but largely unstudied Melanesian collections in the British Museum, this project aims to bring new perspectives to both the study of indigenous art and the understanding of ownership, heritage, and relations between museums and communities in Papua New Guinea and Melanesia.
As part of the project, The Melanesian Way Inc (TMW), an organization established in Papua New Guinea to revive, preserve, protect and promote our traditional cultures through literature has in collaboration with the British Museum in London, aims to raise the spirits of local Elema people in Papuan Gulf region of Papua New Guinea to furnish us with more information on Elema arts and/or other related stories.
Local villagers in the Papuan Gulf region or any other interested persons who wish to join hands to preserve our traditional cultures may call +44 (0) 2073238040 in London, or (+675) 6966247 in Port Moresby or send an email to: lbonshek@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk, and a copy to: yeepai@yahoo.com or write to: The Melanesian Way Inc, PO Box 841, Boroko, NCD, Papua New Guinea.
If you want to write something about your own culture or any other particular culture in Papua New Guinea to keep a record of it for future generations, please contact the above address.
by:www.thenational.com.pg

Global Art: Talismans, a Phantom and a King

You think art fairs aren’t sexy? The New York International Tribal & Textile Arts Show is out to prove you wrong. Just inside the entrance to the Seventh Regiment Armory’s drill hall you’ll find a peppery display of Burmese pornographic drawings. And smack in the middle of the show, bristling like a cactus garden, is a cluster of carved-wood Thai phalluses.

No need to call the vice squad. All this stuff is religious or folk-religious. The sculptures and drawings were created a century or so ago as talismans to ensure prosperity, fertility and supernatural protection. It is said that they can even perform miracles, like warding off bullets and turning ho-hum you and me into Ms. and Mr. Irresistible.

These forceful items are part of a special display organized by Chinalai Tribal Antiquities, a gallery in Shoreham, N.Y., for a fair that has more than a few irresistible features of its own. The wide-open space at the armory, suitable for tanks and tennis, imposes the same regimental format on every fair that appears there: booth beside booth, aisle after aisle. But this show has a look of its own, in part because it is the only tribal fair in town, which seems odd, given that New York is, among other things, an African-American city with a significant African population, a Latino city that grows more Latino by the day and an Asia outside Asia.

As for textiles, where else, even taking the Metropolitan Museum into account, can you lay eyes on the range you see here? Gail Martin’s booth — with a checkerboard-patterned mantle from Togo, a psychedelic silk from Uzbekistan and an exquisite 19th-century Turkish embroidery with languid gold meanders — is effectively an illustrated seminar on weaving versus stitching.

Esther Fitzgerald digs into history with a pictorial embroidery by the English-born artist Alice Natare, who studied with Paul Klee in the 1920s and is now so little known that even her dates are lost. Judging by this piece, a fantasy scene part Ballets Russes and part cosmic Kandinsky, she was really something. Scholars should get on the case.

Add to the Natare piece a small, ancient, abstract Peruvian weaving at Joan Barist that looks like an aerial view of fields with a teal-blue lake in the middle and a marvelously sculptural Moroccan pile carpet in black, white and brown at Gebhart Blazek, and the seminar turns into a global symposium in which we are all invited to participate as rapt students.

The Blazek display is a collaborative venture with Axis Gallery, which organized a Moroccan carpet exhibition of its own in Chelsea last year, and exemplifies another persuasive selling point of the Tribal and Textile show: the chance it affords to see objects you are unlikely to find elsewhere.

A decade ago Axis broke ground by specializing in traditional and contemporary material from South Africa when no one was looking twice at this art. Now museums are paying attention. This year the gallery has, along with a spectacular South African carved-wood ax, a concentration of art from East Africa, including a haunting white-faced sickness mask from Malawi. No doubt in a few years similar things will be de rigueur for public collections. But you saw them first here.

You’ll also encounter some novelty items, like a Yoruba carving of George V of Britain looking rather papal, at Owen Hargreaves and Jasmine Dahl. And in the potency department it is hard to beat a warrior’s shield from Papua New Guinea emblazoned with an image of that comic-book avenger the Phantom. It’s at Cavin-Morris, which has just opened a show of traditional shields from the highlands of New Guinea at its Chelsea space.

Traditional is of course the fair’s bread and butter, and it’s easy to find. It’s there in a gem of a two-tone Pende mask at J. Visser; in a Fang reliquary figure at Alain Lecomte; in a sculptured Baule couple from Ivory Coast at Serge Schoffel; in a sparkling shelf-full of African headrests at Amyas Naegele Fine Art Bases; and at Hurst Gallery, in a substantial but sprightly painted bowl by the Hopi potter Paqua Naha (1890-1955), who went by the artist’s name of Frog Woman.

Not that everything is on such an exalted level. The “tribal art” category has a reputation for embracing some dubious retail, even when a fair is vetted by experts, as this one is. The night before the opening, one gallery packed up its booth and walked out when the vetting committee gave it a hard time in matters of authenticity.

A proceed-with-caution caveat is bound to cool acquisitive ardor. At the same time it can sharpen the eye, whet the appetite and establish standards for comparison. In the end, when something is hot at this art fair, the most beautiful one in New York, it’s superhot.

by:www.nytimes.com

Recyclers recruit Hanable the Can-able

A serial killer is an unlikely cheerleader for recycling ? even a fictional one.

But a character created by the New Zealand Steel Can Association shares its name with the flesh-eating monster made famous by Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs.

The association's can recyling group, Canzbac, is hoping Hanable the CAN-able will be just the thing to motivate kids to help save the planet.

He appears on a website featuring fun activities and things to do with cans.

Children can print off their own Hanable the CAN-able mask and make a more traditional tin-can tele-phone.

Canzbac chairman Keith Parker says the website aims to educate kids in a fun way and reduce the number of cans going to landfill.

"We also hope schools will use the resources available on our website when looking for imaginative ways to teach children," he says.

And he doesn't think children will draw any link to the original Hannibal the Cannibal, the killer with grizzly recycling habits of his own made famous by Hopkins in the 1988 film.

"Their mum and dad might, but I don't think kids would make the association between Hanable the CAN-able and Hannibal Lecter," Mr Parker says.

Hanable is made of different cans and aerosols, highlighting the range of products which can be recycled.

Less than half the steel cans used in New Zealand are recycled, Mr Parker says.

The 223 million cans which go to landfill each year could be used to make nearly half a million household fridges.

by:www.stuff.co.nz

Impressive collage

Masakini Theatre Company’s interpretation of The Tempest is bold and presents a visual treat, but it isn’t without flaws.

The nightmare of Urmi opens as a visual feast. A misty stage with mystical lighting dancing around human waves that roll, sway and leap, dragging down struggling sailors. A ship, depicted as a wayang (shadow) projection on a screen in the background, approaches closer. Suspense. When is the ship going to crash?

A cacophony of sounds accompanies the tempest. A live orchestra of traditional musical instruments, the chanting of a dalang (shadow puppet master) and special effects drown out the sailors’ desperate cries.

When the ship does crash, eventually, the audience is taken to a mystical island of beasts and spirits, of illusion, enchantment, magic and wonder.

Urmi, on stage at Istana Budaya in Kuala Lumpur until Sunday, is Masakini Theatre Company’s interpretation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest that is boldly set in Bali.

Director Sabera Shaik’s choice of setting lends strength of authenticity to Prospero’s Isle from The Tempest. Cultural observers such as Gill Marais and James Murdoch have commented how in magical Bali, as on Prospero’s Isle, the powers of dark and light, represented by Shakespeare’s Caliban and Ariel, live side-by-side. Synonymous to many as a land of exotic dreams, Bali also offers an authentic living culture.

The magnificent appearance of the mythical Garuda bird, Jentayu, as the magical isle’s monster is a highlight of the show. Created by the tight choreography of seven dancers moulding as one to form the bird in a cascade of fiery wings, Jentayu, which traditionally defended Sita from Rawana (in the classical Indian epic, Ramayana) was incandescent in its new role.

Like a dream, Jentayu burst on stage, awed and enthralled the audience, and disappeared. Refreshing, after the drawn-out scenes with jester Trinculo and drunken butler Stephano. Comic relief is a strength in both Shakespearean theatre and traditional Balinese dance and drama. Done well in quick bursts in between the main narrative, it is typically welcomed by the audience.

But, as wine can turn to vinegar, milking comic relief for more than its worth can cause it to turn sour.

Since its presentation before English royalty in 1611, The Tempest has continued to enthral through the many interpretations directors have given it, be they political, feminist or geographical. Urmi brings The Tempest to the East. (“Urmi” is Sanskrit for “wave”, by the way.)

Many interpretations have revolved around Prospero’s evocative control and surrender of power. Urmi is fascinating in that it blends this thread with the millennium-old story told in Indonesia of Calon Arang, a powerful medicine woman from Dirah in Java.

Prospero the Magi is given the same alter ego as the witch: Rangda. Both Prospero and Calon Arang forsake their power for the happiness of their daughter, who has fallen in love.

Where Shakespeare directed Prospero to break and bury his staff, and “drown” his book of magic, Made Djimat behind the mask of Rangda performed this closing scene as the momentous burning of the sacred Javanese text Lipyakara in a captivating dance, worthy of sacred temple performances in Bali.

The authenticity of the performance was supported by the body language of Samantha Schubert as Miranda, daughter of Prospero, and Aanantha, as Ferdinand, Miranda’s beau.

As a visual treat, Urmi is a great success. However, my experience of the performance on Monday night was troubled by indulgent music, lazy lighting and lingering scenes with cavorting spirits in rather loose choreography.

The sound, fraught with technical glitches, was jarring. The beautiful song Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies was ruined by bad sound engineering.

Sabera insists this is not an easy play to perform: “The Tempest fascinates and baffles. Although universal and timeless, its themes are not sufficiently developed and their resolution far from adequate,” she notes in the programme.

Perhaps this is why there seems to be a lack of focus in the performance, where lines are at times delivered without adequate motives.

Mano Maniam as Prospero, in resplendent High Priest garb, narrated well and exuded authority. As an almost-permanent fixture on stage, however, his presence as manipulator and commentator became somewhat wooden. Using wayang, as in the opening scene, could perhaps have presented him more effectively as an omnipotent shadow.

The synopsis at online arts portal kakiseni.com describes the play: “Prospero, a high priest, banished to an island for dabbling too much in the occult, waits for his chance to revenge his exile upon his brother Antonio and Alonso, the king of Naples.”

The play staged, however, had the aggrieved Duke of Amsterdam vying for revenge upon the King of Netherlands.

It becomes evident that the Masakini Theatre Company has not invested enough thought to give plausible credence to the characters’ back-story. The Dutch did once control Nusantara (the Malay Archipelago), but does that justify the half-hearted shift from Italy?

The 1,001-nights illusion, with belly dancers, dervishes and Indian martial arts was also out of place. The dreamy musical score and the Malay dancing conjured by Prospero to entertain his future son-in-law would have fitted better, had the entire setting been shifted decisively to Nusantara.

Bravo for using Alan Durband’s modern English translation of The Tempest (from the Shakespeare Made Easy series) to make it current and more easily understood. But why stop there in bringing this play to the East?

The director’s courage does not seem to match her spot-on conviction. Her pioneering vision stopped short of bringing Urmi closer to home. The performance was staged in the splendour of the East without any adaptation of the text. An astute localisation would have brought it a step further from local flavour to local identity. Prospero as a Sriwijayan-era ancestor of Sultan Iskandar Shah of Malacca, perhaps?

All said, Sabera has put together an impressive collage to bring the play along towards its end. As she succinctly put it: “I have from the very beginning wanted to make it into a spectacle – a dream nightmare.”

by:www.star-ecentral.com

Lula Washington Dance Theatre performs in Temecula

The highly regarded Lula Washington Dance Theatre will perform today and Saturday in Temecula.

The program will range from a work incorporating the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872- 1906) to jazz and hip-hop.

It should be a journey for the audience, said Washington by phone from her Los Angeles studio.

"I've always used spoken text in my work, to create an environment for the dance," she said.

Washington was inspired by Dunbar's poem "We Wear the Mask" when she created "We Wore the Mask," an animated depiction of blacks moving beyond the false faces they adopted to survive from slavery to segregation to discrimination.

The dance starts with a woman in a traditional Mali mask. It is elegant but is removed and the dancers are left to hide their feelings with facial expressions.

The piece is set to live music by Marcus Miller & the Freedom Jazz Movement.

The program includes a tribute to Katherine Dunham in the performance of "Rhumba Trio," which was one of the late choreographer's first works.

Washington will also dance a new work, "Remembering Miss Dunham." Dunham (1909-2006), who was an anthropologist specializing in culture and dance of the West Indies, was a pioneer in Africa-American dance, blending movement from Africa, the Caribbean and ballet.

"We've always wanted to have Miss Dunham's technique preserved," Washington said. "Out of the Dunham technique, out of that came the elements of jazz dance as it's known today."

Another piece, "Songs of the Disinherited," is by one of today's most prominent black choreographers, Donald McKayle.

"Mahal Dances" is a tribute to musician Taj Mahal.

"It's a very earthy, folksy piece," Washington said. "It ... focuses on growing up and playing games."

Washington's daughter, Tamica Washington-Miller, and Carvon Taz Futrell contribute "Together." The show will close with the high-energy improvisational "Spontaneous Combustion."

by:www.pe.com