Cultural night - a great experience

Bogainville-Night. The DWU students from each of the Regions in PNG have to host an evening with demonstrations of dances, music and dresses. Bogainville is an Island in the Southeast of PNG. The Solomon Islands are also counted to that Region. I was attending the first time such an event and I am still impressed by what I have seen in these three hours. The fact that strikes me the most is that I am starting to realize from what a different cultural background the students come from and how they make the temporary transition to (almost) westerners here at the Uni. The performances they have shown are not a tourist program, it's what they have grown up with, the dances and the movements are so normal for them like for us a slow waltz or so. It is as if suddenly the people you know change their faces completely. I haven’t had a chance to talk about the students and their conducting yet. In University-life, both boys and girls and dressed modest, not very stylish, never sexy. Girls wear skirts to knee-level or shorts combined with not too tight tops or simply T-shirts. The Boys wear Shorts and T-shirts. Standard shoes are flip-flops, but around 20% here walk around bare feet. Make up is not used, jewelry limited primarily to amulettes typical for their respective Regions. The Highlanders have tatoos on face, arms and upper body from their traditional initiation rites in the village. The way they behave is very silent, almost hesitant. Smiles, eye contacts are short and body contact between the genders is limited to a handshake, which might be a bit longer for expression of interest or sympathy. Similar to African cultures, wantoks (Pidgin word for friend, coming from ‚one talk‘ = one language = from the same village) of the same gender hold hands when walking around. They speak with low voice, very soft – in the beginning I did hardly understand them. Especially in class the comments and questions are rarely more than a whisper. Especially for the girls it is inappropriate to speak out loud or to be the centre of attention. I think no one can imagine how difficult it is for them to hold a presentation in front of the class when they come fresh to university, often for the first time together with boys in a classroom. Like in every culture there are the super-girls and –boys, which are just more beautiful than the others, more liked etc. But for me as a European it is impossible to spot them, to find out who the stars of the class are. They are simply too subtle in all their behavior that I would find somebody sticking out.

And then I went to the show of Bougainville students at the Auditorium of the University. Tickets are sold beforehand and you can hear drum-beats and sing-sings the evenings before all around the Campus when they are practicing for the event.
The show opened with the bamboo-pipes band. They were playing by drumming with flip-flops on plastic tubes and it sounded fantastic. It is something typically Bougainville and the band crews are together since early youth. Later dance formations where singing and dancing to the music of them. Probably only the Bougainvillea band members can wear Baggy-pants, T-shirts and a grass-skirt over it and still look pretty cool…
Then local dresses and dances where shown, I was surprised how freely the girls moved around in grass skirts (of course with shorts below) and not more than a small bandeau top around their upper body. Most of them were painted with the typical white dot patterns in the face, wearing arm straps with leaves typical for their clan and flower-or sea-shell-bands in their hair. The dancing style is almost as if they had to dance with the handbrake activated. All subtly body conscious, but never openly or aggressively sexy. And small movements were noticed by the audience with great detail. For example when the girls during as dancing piece were pointing with the fingers in different directions around the boys in the audience began a very nervous laughter with whistles. And I often did not see any reasons for the other reactions of the crowd. The signs are simply to subtle and hidden for us European to spot them.
Even more fascinated I was by the performances of some boys doing tribal dances. Wearing grass skirts with some sea-shell straps around their upper body and having that deep-dark skin it was quite an image compared to the very same guys in western clothing. And even more different to their shy, soft conduct in class they were giving an impressive performance to bamboo-drum-beats, shouting, swinging knifes and spears.
At the end I was sitting amongst the other non-Bougainville students from my class and tried to understand when and why they were laughing. I think it is amazing that they all are living in these two so different worlds between tribal custom and western concepts, between grass skirts and facebook.
Absolutely fascinating!


P.S.: Apologies for the bad picture quality, as soon as I get some better ones will post them...