Nouvelle-Calédonie

Everyone knows New Caledonia but very few know the Kanak people, their culture, their origins and the artistic richness of their painting, sculpture, music or architecture that they have managed to preserve or develop throughout their history.

 

Geographically, New Caledonia is the “closest” archipelago to Australia in the heart of the Coral Sea. This territory is made up of Grande Terre, the capital of which is Nouméa, and a series of archipelagos located on its flanks, including the island of Lifou, which is part of the Loyalty Islands. This mountainous archipelago opens onto the Coral Sea through a large and superb area of shoals which form a coral reef. It is humid as a whole, which gives it a wealth of sometimes exuberant vegetation.

 

The history of New Caledonia begins with successive waves of settlements from the northeast, from 2,500 BC. Pottery and petroglyphs bear witness to the existence of the first inhabitants of the archipelago. Between the 12th and 17th centuries, Polynesian navigators from the east in canoes landed on the Loyalty Islands. It was in 1744 that it was discovered by the English navigator James COOK before it changed hands to become French in 1853.

 

From this history, there exists a Kanake identity that the “Boea Proviedanse” folkloric ensemble illustrates with a strong culture, which it expresses with a very lively talent. And this is the role of all small islands like Lifou, more than that of Grande Terre where New Caledonians are more numerous. The richness of this culture can be discovered with patience. It is rich in its myths, based on complex ceremonial exchanges. The Kanak people, scattered over a multitude of sometimes tiny islets, thus preserve their gods, their cosmogony, their organization of the ground and the sky, their knowledge which is transmitted from generation to generation, from elders or chiefs. Their language is complex. The vigor of customary tribes is based on the notion of village whose chiefdoms are living memories par excellence.

 

You will be surprised by the strangeness of this folkloric ensemble, its costumes, its symbolic weapons, its music, its songs and its dignity. He defends a culture with which he is totally imbued and which ancient or modern events have never succeeded in erasing. He is aware of playing an initiating and respectable role in view of the past. The nations of the South Pacific intend to remind the world that their ocean is populated by men who probably came from Asia in canoes, carrying a rich civilization and that they are basing their future on a return to custom.

 

Before our eyes, interested, surprised or passionate by this rebirth and this discovery of a shattered but not adrift universe, the show of the “Boea Proviedanse” folkloric ensemble from New Caledonia will constitute an authentic astonishment.