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(Pictures show Kava - An Exhibition By Sione Francis) PlaNet is participating in the ABC-Online and Radio Australia initiative whereby net connected organisations are working with Pacific communities to participate in a Pacific-wide public access network for the duration of the 8th Festival of Pacific Arts (Noumea, October 23 - November 3). PlaNet will be hosting local art (we welcome your contribution, please click here to email a description of your art works available) at the CitiNet Internet Cafe in downtown Queen St during the period of Pacific Arts Festival, Oct 23 ---> Nov 3. arTok is an ABC-Online/Radio Australia initiative providing comprehensive web coverage of the Festival, bringing this event closer to audiences around the region. ArTok went live last week and as you will find, is growing daily. Here's a sample of new articles published this week with many more to come as we near arTok's web coverage of the Festival of Pacific Arts. Visual art Red Wave Collective, the amazing work of artists from the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture at the USP in Fiji, exhibiting in Sydney and presented by director Epeli Hau'ofa. Kava Get into the slide show of an exhibition taking you through the three levels of kava drinking in Tonga, by Tongan/Australian Sione Francis. Craft 'Dance Machine' and Masks from the Torres Strait Islands. Music Review of Taaua, the world premiere of Gareth Farr's Te Wairua O Te Whenua at Sydney Opera House, a performance by Tainui Artists and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Dance We Ce Ca, get into the rhythm.... of the dance company based in Noumea. Issues So you want to go to art school? What are they, where are they? Read on. The difficulties of marketing Pacific art in Australia, and the importance of fine mats in Fa'a Samoa. Body art From head to Toe in Fiji: imposing hairstyle, tattoos and henna skin paintings. See, listen and read more on: arts.abc.net.au/artok ArTok Feature, Body Art of Papua New Guinea by Liz Thompson. A group of women wear what look like small nests on their head; they are in fact tiny fires. When they kneel on the ground friends stoop to light their cigarettes, occasionally adding a few more twigs and leaves." An old man gently unwraps the iridescent blue feathers of the Bird of Paradise and carefully fastens them to the front of his wife's headdress. A ring of bright green beetles and mottled brown cus cus fur decorate the base. Her skin is covered with oil, collected from a special tree near Lake Kutubu in the Highlands - its rareness providing the local community with a very valuable trading item. Cassowary feathers, cowry shells, yellowed, ivory coloured Kina shells the size of plates hang around her neck. Her face is covered with bright red paint and she applies the finishing touches, white circles around her eyes, as she checks out her appearance in a small fragment of broken mirror. She, like thousands of others, are converging on Goroka for the annual show. Initiated by the government to celebrate cultural richness and diversity, people travel hundreds of miles by boat, plane, car, some walk through the mountains for days just to participate. With immense pride they perform the Sing Sings unique to each clan group. The rugged physical terrain which separated communities from one a another and a variation in available materials such as the types of birds, clay and oils to be found in the region, ensured an extraordinary variety of body adornment. In a village context, sing sings might be performed at funerals, weddings and other traditional ceremonies. Many of them are based on the community's beliefs regarding their ancestral or 'bush' spirits. The body decoration and dance movements reflect the appearance of the spirit world. Men painted half-black and half-white represent the half man bush spirit. The villagers explain that this man lives in the bush but he, his children and his wife have only half a body. One hand has long bamboo pieces extending from the fingers. You can tell if the spirit has been busy, they say, because he leaves a trail of single footprints. Some of the most renowned faces are those of the Wig men who paint vibrant blue dots onto their almost luminous yellow faces. Deriving their name from headdresses they make from hair cut from the heads of young children and men, they build a vine framework on to which the hair is stuck. Decorated with powdered ochre and everlasting yellow daisies, these hats of hair are believed to provide a place for the spirits to reside and so enhance one's spirituality. As the groups start to dance to the sound of drums, flutes and hypnotic chanting, totemic-like headdresses made of wood and tapa cloth sway high above the sea of heads. A group of women wear what look like small nests on their head; they are in fact tiny fires. When they kneel on the ground friends stoop to light their cigarettes, occasionally adding a few more twigs and leaves. Mud men who imitate the dead wear enormous masks of clay; their skin is coated with flaking mud, representing the flaking skin of corpses. Their dance is slow and their bodies bent as they brush themselves with sticks, getting rid of imaginary flies, which would land on rotting flesh. Ceremony and body decoration continues in the villages and remains a part of traditional ceremonial life as well as being celebrated at enormous public events like the Goroka Show. Ocean of Time Ocean of Time was broadcast on ABC Radio and Radio New Zealand on January 1, 2000. The program, now beautifully archived online, explores the past 100 years of Oceania through the cultural and artistic record of the region. Ocean of Time is presented by ABC and Radio New Zealand. www.abc.net.au/arts/ocean/ . ..
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