DANZ QUARTERLY No 5 September 2006

Banabans Dancing

By Jennifer Shennan

During 2005, I was privileged to make three separate field trips to Rabi Island in Fiji, home of the Banaban people,. The primary purpose of those visits was to collect stories from elders and youngsters alike, to be edited into a volume entitled One and a Half Pacific Islands - Stories the Banaban People Tell of Themselves.  Published
by Victoria University Press in December 2005, the book commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of the Banabans on Rabi in 1945, in a total population re-location from their ancestral homeland of Banaba - which had been mined for phosphate agricultural fertiliser for most of the 20th century, and left in a devastated, uninhabitable state.

There are 72 stories in the collection, including personal life accounts and memoirs. Dance-interested readers will note how often there is passing mention of dance, but also that several stories discuss in depth this all-important cultural practice.  My own story, in the final section contributed by outsiders, entitled Frigate Birds on the Wing is reproduced here in part, with permission of VUP.

A meeting in Armidale

It was my good fortune to meet Beth Dean and Victor Carell at the inspirational residential schools of Dance Studies, directed by Peggy van Praagh and Peter Brinson, at the University of New England in Armidale, NSW, in 1967 and again in 1969. (Algeranoff, Keith Bain, Garth Welch, Marilyn Jones, Karl Welander, Eric Westbrook, Graham Murphy and many luminaries were at these unforgettable gatherings).

It was clear that Beth Dean was a walking encyclopaedia of knowledge of many worlds of dance (in fact, The Many Worlds of Dance is the title of one of the numerous books she wrote), and her appreciation of all aspects of Pacific dance I found infectious.  Beth and Victor later invited me to join the volunteer "Carell Commando" of their friends who supported their projects, including the first of the quadrennial gatherings, the South Pacific Arts Festival held in Suva in 1972 of which they were directors. (I recall running to the Post Office with my postcard replying "Yes!").  I also worked with them on the Pacific arts programme at the opening of the Sydney Opera House in 1973.

It was at the festival in Suva that I first heard and saw the Banaban Dancing Group performing the ceremonial dance-ritual, Te Karanga, which had been almost lost from their repertoire. I puzzled that the same word in Maori means the clarion call of a woman, an instruction for visitors to draw near and enter the marae. Yet here was the cognate word being used to name a very different performance indeed. Something else, some other power, was being invoked.

Beth introduced me to the leader of the group who had masterminded the reconstruction of this karanga, Nei Makin Corrie Tekenimatang, and my life changed for the better.   It was always a joy to connect with Banabans at subsequent festivals and on a number of further field trips to Fiji over the years. It is a further and particular pleasure that Beth Dean, despite her advanced age, was able to contribute her appreciation of the aesthetics of Banaban dance to the current publication.

An afternoon on Rabi

On the visit to Rabi in August 2005, young members of the Banaban Primary School dance group perform in a classroom one afternoon shortly after school’s out. Senior members of the Rabi Dancing Group have been coaching these youngsters, and all now assemble to watch.  The beat comes up from under, the leader’s call goes out on top, expectation is the held breath of proud parents and teachers watching, and you ask yourself how did you get so lucky to be here on this afternoon?

The costumes are so striking - creamy shine of woven pandanus, black shine of smoked shredded fibres, white shine of young serious eyes, golden shine of taut skin glowing with fragrant coconut oil.  There’s flickering light from plaited arm bands, finger rings and head crowns, like birds taking flight.  Clean, sharp, strong arm gestures and sudden knee dips or side swerves evoke the movements of the high and mighty frigate bird on the wing,  the bird that was talisman to Banaban forefathers and is now painted on the school crest just at the door.  

There are perilous holes in several of the floorboards,­ these classrooms were built in 1950s but there has never been any maintenance budget to repair them. Stunningly, the young dancers use deft footwork to avoid those holes while performing,­ providing yet another danced allegory of how the Banaban people have managed to survive, nay thrive, into the 21st century.

The dances, both glad and sad, are carefully chosen to create a half hour programme of light and shade, hope and heartache, courage and care.  The composer, Abetai, has given all these themes an airing by turn.  In one dance there is unexpected slow motion sequence in silence.  It's as though a secret is being danced out, nobody breathes, everybody knows. Abetai is grandfather, perhaps great-grandfather, to some of these children. You are taken to the old man’s nearby house to meet him after the performance ­ and can only marvel at the fine mind at work, at his sense of how to compose and choreograph dances to carry messages to young people, in such a sophisticated way, despite the absence of any of the support and facilities that choreographers in most places in the world expect to work in.  His dancemaking evokes the work of Jacques d'Amboise, Royston Maldoom and Jose Limon in ways that I do not wish to elaborate here, but do want to mention.

The Banabans are reputed to be the poorest people in the Pacific, living in isolation, without electricity, in a subsistence economy with next to no infrastructure.  The situation is unjust, and an indictment on the wealth brought to New Zealand agriculture from the mining of these people's homeland. We should invite the Banaban Dancing Group to perform in New Zealand.

How can you know?

Traditional dances may be ages old, or new compositions may be fashioned after the old model, it matters not. The wisdom of accretion and the survival stories of traditional dance forms reflect a people’s history... as allegory maybe, but reflects it none-the-less. No words can substitute for that kinaesthetic reality. You don’t really watch a dance with your eyes, you see it and hear it and smell it, and feel it in your body. You absorb it into yourself through your senses, including the sixth one.  

A dance and its music begin in an individual composer’s inspiration, vision, and ideas. Movements are tried, shaped, rejected, replaced until eventually the piece is forged. Performers participate in the process and deliver their interpretation. An audience responds to the performance ­ and a dance is born. Yeats put it for us "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?"   Answer:  "We can’t."

Dance time is different from real time. Its subject matter may tell ten centuries of history yet fail to survive. Or its performance may last for only ten minutes yet seem timeless. A dance, so much in the present, suggests there is no present,­ only the past and the future. Witness Te Karanga.

Return to Contents page of DANZ QUARTERLY N0 5 September 2006