YESTERDAY a group of Fijian performance artists travelled to Honiara, Solomon Islands, with a unique mission.
Their task is to train a local Solomon Islander choir and actors to perform in the Wansolwara Dance Movement Solomon Islands Tour. The performance includes song, dance and poetry to the theme: “The Rebirth – Our Mother’s Call to Renewal”.
The Wansolwara Dance Movement emerged out of a collaboration between the Pacific Conference of Churches, Civil Society and NGOs and performance and creative artists from Fiji and the Pacific region.
In 2014 the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG), Social Empowerment Education Program (Fiji) and the Bismarck Ramu Group (Papua New Guinea) collaborated to organise the Madang Wansolwara Dance … “One ocean, one people”.
Wansolwara means “one ocean, one people”. The gathering brought community-based organisations, activists, artists, academics and theologians together in order to reignite a movement of solidarity across the Pacific. In the Madang event in 2014, close to 200 participants from Hawai’i, Guam, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Fiji, Vanuatu, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Papua New Guinea (PNG) explored issues of grassroots sustainability and national self-determination in the face of the relentless assaults of extractive industries, militarisation, consumerism and colonialism.
A crucial dimension of the gathering was a commitment to putting artistic and creative practice at the centre of activism — the genres of art focused on were visual art, poetry, music, and dance.
The gathering was described as a dance rather than as a conference, because its structure and philosophy was not at all that of a conventional conference.
A more creative description of the Wansolwara Movement is as follows: “One people, one sea! Our Pacific ocean connects us as people of the Wansolwara.
“We are Wansolwara. We live our lives as narrative quests and it is this that defines us. We tell one story in our Wansolwara dance and we embrace the different artistic dance movements and harmonic singing voices within.
“We celebrate who we are even while we remember the pain, tears and abandoned promises in our narrative. We carry with us the hopes, tears and sufferings of our grandparents, and theirs through the generations. But we dance with pride and courage for justice, solidarity and freedom, and our dance will be in protest.
“It is the empire in its many faces and forms that is the alternative. What we had and which continues to define and exists with our people is not. The alternative is faceless yet seen in the sorrowful eyes and scars of struggles of our people for freedom, for honour and dignity, and for legitimacy; it smiles yet without warmth; it embraces yet without compassion; it sings yet without the harmony of voices. It suppresses, at times by brute force as had happened in the days of our grandparents and still today to some of us, but most times by softly killing our people through charming, enchanting and charismatic words and by its crafty and uncompromising logical and judicial frameworks.
“It uses our mother’s womb, our language, our symbols and traditions to give birth and reproduce itself. It forces us to redream our dreams in its way. It operates by being creative in recreating itself in different forms and contexts. It has an intoxicating idea about our world and us, and has very powerful institutions and friends in politics, businesses, civil society, religions, academia and the mass media, and loads of money to produce and reproduce its single idea — the idea that everyone everywhere ought to be the same and differences are obstacles to attaining the universal dream of a single truth, reality.
“This is the story of the alternative: the end of our human history is universalism, not the celebration of our particularities, our diversity, the concrete conditions and narratives where we learn to be human and learn who we are. So we are here celebrating our Wansolwara and rethinking our Pasifika!”
This year, under the auspices of the Pacific Conference of Churches, the Wansolwara Dance Movement has headed to the Solomon Islands with a call of renewal for our people to rethink the way we understand and do development, our perception and attitude towards the environment and to raise awareness and educate our Pacific on the need to rethink the way we live our lives in our diverse countries contexts are concerned.
This week, performance artists Ateca Ravuvu, Damiano Logaivau, Calvin Rore, Josaia Osborne and Kelera Sauliga will train their local performers dances, drama and songs specially prepared for this tour.
The performances will be free and open to the community and there will also be lectures and performances for civil society and church leaders as well as tertiary and school children.
The performance is based around a story of the consumption of the “Tree Lady” by the earth and will be told through the sub-themes which are development, climate change, culture/tradition/faith, and self-determination.
The performance will then move towards the call for rebirth with the song “Be the light”, not only for the West Papua but also a call for the “Tree Lady” to rise again from the earth.
The movement then is from death to life, from acquiescence to protest, from illusory comfort to uncomfortable solidarity, from uncertainty to self-determination, and from optimism to hope.
The message of “The Rebirth — Our Mother’s Call to Renewal” is for a shift towards life affirming communities; communities in partnership; communities of resistance and solidarity; and earning communities rooted in narratives.
Renewal and rethinking the way development is framed and implemented for centuries and decades in the region. Fundamentally, the message of renewal is about asking our Pacific people to return to the core of the Christian faith — love of God and love of neighbour, and that our way of stewardship is to be totally different from the way of “empire”.
“Simplicity, serenity, spontaneity.”
* Reverend James Bhagwan is an ordained minister of the Methodist Church in Fiji and a citizen journalist. The opinions expressed do not necessarily represent the views of this newspaper or the Methodist Church in Fiji. He can be contacted on padrejames@gmail.com.
