August 1, 2001

by Michael Field

Coconut shells have never looked so good but their role in Polynesia’s sensual dance is raising questions.

Teenage and young adults are using them as a kind of fundamental bra in what seems to be an increasingly erotic dance which critics claim is geared more for tourists than culture.

As veteran Pacific travellers are noticing, the dance costumes are smaller and more sensual and in Eastern Polynesia -- French Polynesia, Hawaii and the Cook Islands -- the ubiquitous coconut shell is out front.

“In our days the girls weren’t even allowed to show their belly button,” bemoans culture expert Ota Joseph in a recent issue of the Cook Islands News.

Hollywood has worked over the “hula” so often that the original, stately and utterly spine tingling, is unrecognisable to the modern tourist.

Joseph, the Cook’s Ministry of Cultural Developments’ senior cultural development officer, joins a long queue of mostly men given to moralising over Eastern Polynesian dance.

One of the first critics was 18th Century Yorkshire explorer Captain James Cook who aboard the bark Endeavour mapped Polynesia. He was austere and beyond the lure of Polynesia’s women -- an entrapment artist Paul Gauguin and novelist Herman Melville happily fell into. Most of Endeavour’s crew, trapped aboard a ship with only unwashed men and salt pork for months, did not share their captain’s reservations.

Cook complained that Tahitian dance consisted of “motions and gestures beyond imagination wanton, in the practice of which they are brought up from their earliest childhood, accompanied by words, which, if it were possible, would more explicitly convey the same idea.”

In the Marquesas (now part of French Polynesia) Cook complained women and girls “swing their hips and walk in a provocative way, and ... assume postural attitudes which were highly charged with sex.”

The Cooks is a nation of scattered high islands and atolls, breathtaking in warmth and beauty, and largely beyond the tourist trail as only New Zealanders know about them. The 20,000 people who live there (along with another 60,000 Cook Islanders in New Zealand) are close kin of Tahitians, 1200 kilometres (750 miles) east of the Cook’s capital island, Rarotonga.

Although Cook’s dance is heavily influenced by Tahiti, and the growing tourist trade, its clear the locals are particularly passionate about it. Put a group of Rarotongans together, without a single tourist on hand, and they will still dance in a swaggering, hip-swing way.

In New Zealand the annual Polynesian Festival in Auckland always produces lavish and wildly romantic dance -- which, oddly enough, is usually watched by just other Cook Islanders.

Ota Joseph told the Cook Islands News he finds the way dance has changed a disappointment.

Described only as a member of the older generation, he said he was dancing as a boy on his island of Aitutaki, a magical atoll north of Rarotonga that in the days of flying boats was an international airport.

“The dancers back then were the married couples or those aged 16 years and over, but I was dancing when I was just 12 years old.”

When he first moved to Rarotonga there was not much dance -- the island then did not even have an airport -- but in 1965 it became self-governing and Albert Henry, the then premier and a controversial rogue who eventually got stripped of his knighthood, wanted to restore dance. Air New Zealand, which had in another guise flown flying boats to the Cooks, sponsored a dancing competition which continues to this day.

Joseph got to head the cultural division and remembers taking a dance group to the opening in 1973 of the Sydney Opera House.

“Back then there would only be about 10 Cook Islanders in Australia, but today....”

He reckons the Cook Islands dancing has become more westernised.

“Even the costumes,” he told the Cook Islands News. “Today they wear those short skirts.”

He does not like Tahiti’s influence.

“The outer islands are still retaining their culture but Rarotonga and Aitutaki are changing. Why? It’s because they are made up of dance troupes who perform for tourists. They dance for them.”

Nowadays he is working to restore the dance the way it was.

“It’s important because our culture is who we are...that’s how we are identified. We need to hold on to it ... or else.”

He need not worry too much. After Hollywood wrecked the hula, behind the scenes the original Hawaiian dance is still there, for locals. Places as diverse as Tonga, Samoa and Fiji belligerently make no compromises -- and while New Zealand’s All Blacks do a kind of western war dance, the real haka is in no danger of being overwhelmed either.

Copyright: Michael Field